Steve climbed into the driver's seat of his car and did up his belt while Fyodorova put Natalia in the back. He wondered if it meant anything that she put the child in separately, rather than holding her in her lap. The latter was probably illegal in this more safety-conscious age, but Fyodorova was hardly the sort of person to let that stop her. If she were giving Steve the ability to drive away with Natalia but not her, she must trust him.
The idea that Steve was somebody a disgraced Soviet undercover agent felt she could trust was at once flattering and rather confusing.
With Fyodorova in the seat next to him, Steve started the car and headed back downtown. He wasn't going to question her about the incidents in Norway and Baffin Bay – he would let Peggy, or some trained interrogator, do that when they arrived at SHIELD. Since they were alone right now, though, there was something else he wanted to talk to her about.
"Tell me about Zima," he said.
Her eyes flicked to the side as she studied his expression without actually turning. "Aren't I supposed to be telling SHIELD, not you?"
"You're supposed to tell SHIELD what's going on in the arctic," Steve said. "The Winter Soldier is for me and Tony. Howard Stark was my friend and his father, and now I'm the next target, which is putting my friends in danger, Tony included. Peggy doesn't want me going after him myself, but I promised Tony I'd get this guy." He'd promised Eva, too.
Fyodorova smiled a little. "Yeah," she said. "The promises you make to a child are the important ones, aren't they?" This was not sarcasm. She meant every word.
"Yes, they are," Steve agreed. He wondered what it was she'd promised Natalia. Merely safety, or something more?
"The Winter Soldier was found as POW in a HYDRA base when the Soviet Army was cleaning up after World War II," Fyodorova explained. "The operatives who'd worked there had fled or committed suicide, so he was the only one alive in the place. The military wanted to question him, but it turned out there wasn't enough of him left. He'd been tortured and experimented on until he couldn't even remember his own name. So they had some of their own captured HYDRA scientists help them turn him into a killing machine."
"Of course they did," said Steve darkly. In this world he'd awakened in, that was apparently just the sort of thing people did.
"They keep him in cryo between missions, so he won't age or deteriorate without exercise," Fyodorova went on, "and fry his brain after each kill so he doesn't start to recover. He doesn't know anything outside of his orders. I don't think he's really the one you want to go after, Captain. He's not the one who ordered Stark killed, and he didn't have any choice about carrying it out. It'd be like breaking the gun but ignoring the man who pulled the trigger."
What she was describing – a man broken down into nothing but a vessel for orders, a sort of robot made of flesh – was horrible, and yet Steve couldn't shake the cold rage he felt at this faceless being. This empty vessel had murdered Tony's father, taken one of Steve's few remaining friends from him, and hit Eva with the bullet meant for Steve himself. "Break the gun and it can never be fired again," he said.
"The killer can find another weapon," Fyodorova rejoined. "I can tell you where they keep him, but I have to warn you that killing him there isn't something the Soviet government will be able to ignore. You're not a free agent, you know. You're Captain America. What you do is what America does, whether you like it or not. The face of America destroying the USSR's secret weapon will be considered an act of war."
"Why did you offer to tell me how to get to him in the first place, if you were just gonna try to talk me out of it?" Steve asked.
"To get your attention," said Fyodorova.
That figured, and he couldn't deny it had worked. "I'm not planning to go to Russia right now," Steve said, "but if this guy comes looking for me , I'll have to do something about him." Between the crimes the man had already committed and his apparent semi-machine status, Steve couldn't imagine feeling a bit sorry about it, either. He'd regretted many of the deaths he'd caused during the war, when he'd found things like a corpse clutching a ring on a chain, or a photograph of a family taped up inside a tank. He'd regretted everything that reminded him how even HYDRA mooks were human beings. He would not regret this.
"That's fair," said Fyodorova. "That's self-defense. It's you hunting down the base that would be trouble."
"Where is it?" Steve asked, mostly to see if she'd tell him.
"Krasnoyarsk, north of the Yenesei River," she replied. "There's some sort of natural radioactive source in the area that they use for power. I can point it out for you on a map. It's not an easy place to get to, and I'm not going to help you."
"Then why are you telling me?" Steve repeated.
"Because I said I would."
Steve pulled into SHIELD's parking garage and went inside. Fyodorova followed, carrying Natalia – the girl had not said a word since telling the police officer to be silent. Ordinarily Steve would have gone straight to Peggy's office, but today he went instead to the front security desk. "I need to speak to Madame Director," he said to the man working there. "Is she in the building?"
The security guard, a Latin fellow with a bristly mustache, looked puzzled. "I think she's in her office," he replied. "You can go up any time, Captain Rogers." Steve was allowed to knock on Peggy's door any time he liked, and everybody who worked in the building knew that.
"I'd like you to call her down here," Steve said. He wanted to introduce Peggy and Fyodorova in a place where there were plenty of witnesses. That would hopefully make Fyodorova feel safer. She trusted Steve but did not trust Peggy – and Steve wasn't sure he trusted either of them. Meeting in public would force both women to be civil.
"Uh, sure, Captain," said the security guard, even more confused. He picked up the phone and placed the call.
"Tell her I've found our source," said Steve. Peggy would know what he meant.
The guard nodded and passed on the message.
The response was immediate and shocking – the guard was still on the phone when an alarm went off and at least two dozen armed men and women rushed into the room, shouting for everybody to get down on the floor. Agents, staff members, and even the security guards obeyed, while Steve just stood there stunned as people in black SHIELD fatigues swarmed forward. Soon he, Fyodorova, and Natalia were surrounded by a circle of guns.
Steve looked at Fyodorova. She shook her head slightly and rolled her eyes in a non-verbal but crystal-clear I told you so, and then put Natalia on the floor. "Lie down," she told the child, and then got down beside her with her hands over the back of her neck.
Steve didn't move. All this wasn't meant for him. He was going to stand his ground and make sure Peggy listened to Fyodorova before throwing her on a boat back to Russia.
But Peggy didn't appear. Instead, one of the gunmen raised his arm, and people moved in to pull Fyodorova and Natalia out of their layers of winter clothes, followed by quite a bit of what they were wearing underneath as well. They found three guns and two knives secreted on Fyodorova's person, and Natalia had stuffed the gun she'd taken from the cop into her own jacket, despite it being far too big for her to practically used. The agents took the weapons away, and then began to snap handcuffs on both woman and child.
"Hey!" Steve protested. "What are you doing?"
"Director's orders, Captain," the leader said. His followers forced Fyodorova and Natalia to their feet, both of them still in their underwear, and began to lead them away in different directions.
It was now, when Natalia realized she was going to be separated from Fyodorova, that she began to struggle. "Nyet!" she shrieked, kicking her legs and wriggling. "Nyet! Nyet! Nyet! Konyshka! Konyshka!"
"Keep us together," said Fyodorova. She did not struggle, and her voice was firm rather than panicked. "Keep us together, please, I'm the only person she knows. She barely speaks English."
Steve wondered why Fyodorova didn't fight. Surely she could take these guys down as easily as she had the cops... but there were far more of the agents, and unlike Przybylski and Lopez, they knew what to expect of her. She couldn't do anything without getting shot.
That meant it was up to Steve. He hurried to free the little girl first. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded. "She's two."
"I told you, Director's orders," the man snarled back, stepping between Steve and the kicking and screaming child. One of Natalia's flailing feet caught him in the back of the knee, and he swore and turned around, raising his gun to hit her with the butt end of it.
Steve wasn't going to let him do that, though. He ripped the weapon out of the man's hands and fit it to his own shoulder, aiming it at the agent's face. "Let her go," he ordered.
Somebody else pressed a stun gun into Steve's neck. The current that coursed through him would have knocked out a normal person, but Steve was not a normal person – and that was almost worse, since he was wide awake to feel the pain as his muscles spasmed and his teeth clenched, and a nasty metallic taste filled his mouth. When he stopped seeing spots he was on his knees, the gun was on the floor ten feet away, and the men were leaving the room with the screaming toddler.
Fyodorova, too, was gone.
The alarm stopped, and people in the room started getting up and going back to whatever they'd been doing, talking in hushed, awkward voices as they tried to pretend that nothing untoward had just happened. Steve shook his twitching limbs and pulled his coat off, furious. He was not going to pretend that everything was back to normal. He was going to find where they'd taken the Russians and...
"Steve."
He spun around, and found that Peggy had appeared behind the security desk. Suddenly, Steve's rage had a target. He'd been mad at her earlier for not telling him things he should have known. Now he was well beyond mad. It not for the desk in the way, he could have thrown her across the room.
A moment later he realized what he was thinking and felt cold. The very fact that Captain America was thinking about striking a seventy-year-old woman, a seventy-year-old woman who was Peggy, was one of the most utterly horrifying things that had ever entered his head. It was enough in itself to push him back down to a much more acceptable level of sanity, yet the anger remaining bubbling hot under his breastbone... what the hell had she just done?
"What was that?" he demanded.
"I've had a welcome party on standby for her ever since you told me she was in town," said Peggy. "She's dangerous, Steve. The most dangerous adversaries I ever faced were women just like her. I'd rather take on Schmidt than a black widow."
"You never took on Schmidt!" said Steve. "You don't know what he's capable of! Where are you taking them?"
"To maximum security lockup, in separate parts of the building, under twenty-four hour guard," said Peggy, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world. "We can question them there."
"That little girl is two or three years old!" Steve protested.
"They start young," Peggy said. "Tim was stabbed once by one who couldn't have been more than seven."
"I promised her Natalia would be safe!" Steve thumped on the granite countertop. "That's the only reason she came with me – because I promised her you wouldn't hurt a child! And then you just dragged the kid away like she's a criminal!"
Peggy's eyes narrowed. "Not all creatures who look like children actually are," she informed him. "It's not the 1940's anymore, Steve. We cannot afford to be nice to these people!"
"Damn it, Peggy, she's all that little girl has!" said Steve, and brought his fist down on the counter again. It was only meant to be another thump, to emphasize how angry he was, but there was a bang like a gunshot, and the slab of stone – an inch thick – cracked into three pieces. The smallest one slid off the counter and landed on the floor, breaking several of the tiles. People turned their heads to stare, and once again Steve had to force himself to calm down and remember that this was Peggy he was talking to. It didn't seem to help. "At least keep them together," he said.
"If I keep them together they may help one another!" Peggy snapped. "Fyodorova escaped before, I am not letting her escape again."
"She has nowhere to go if she does escape," Steve reminded her. "If she goes back to the Soviet Union she'll be killed."
"That's what she told you," Peggy reminded him, still talking as if what she was saying were perfectly ordinary, instead of paranoid and cruel. "I've been inquiring about Fyodorova since she vanished, and the people who ought to be her superiors are still denying she exists. That's not something you do with a wanted criminal."
Steve took a deep breath, but he didn't even know what he wanted to say with it. "Peggy..."
"She's using you, Steve," said Peggy firmly. "We have to use her without being used back, and that's all we can do with people like that. The Black Widows are trained from childhood – from as young as that little red-haired girl. They're engineered psychopaths. I've thought I could control them before, and I was always wrong. You can't treat her like a human being, because she will only use that to her advantage."
The way she described Fyodorova sounded an awful lot like the way Fyodorova herself had described the Winter Soldier. "Then we can't punish her for following orders," Steve said coldly. "You don't blame a gun for shooting somebody, you blame whoever pulled the trigger."
"Or if you can't get to the shooter, you lock the gun away so it can never be fired again," said Peggy.
"So the shooter will get a new weapon," said Steve.
"Let's get some coffee and then we'll talk to her," Peggy said. "I want you present. She believes she can trust you, and we'll be able to use that."
That made Steve wanted to turn around and storm out, just to be sure that Peggy would get nothing from Fyodorova at all. What made him stay was the knowledge that she probably wouldn't anyway – there was no way Fyodorova would still believe she could trust him now. He wanted to be there the moment Peggy realized that.
When Steve next saw Fyodorova, a little more than an hour later, she was alone in a tiny, bare interrogation room. There were foam pyramids on all the walls, to keep any sound from getting in or out, and cameras in the corner. The only furniture was two chairs. Fyodorova was shackled to one of these, but was sitting up straight, fierce-faced and defiant, when Steve came in and sat down in the other.
"This wasn't my idea," he said.
"Is that why you took so damned long to find me?" asked Fyodorova. "Because you were waiting for her orders?"
"No!" said Steve. "I just assumed you'd come back to me if it was urgent! I've had a lot on my mind," he added defensively. There were Tony's family problems, the thing with the Achilles, his non-starter of a relationship with Eva... he felt he could be forgiven for missing something that was really not at all obvious. "Peggy just wanted to ship you back to the USSR. I told her we needed to talk to you..."
"So it was your idea," said Fyodorova.
Steve sat up a little straighter. "Would you let me explain myself?" he asked. "I just wanted us to talk to you. You said your had information about something weird going on in the arctic, and that's exactly what we're dealing with! I had no idea Peggy was going to pull out the big guns the moment you stepped in the door, and I definitely didn't know she would treat Natalia the same way." The fact that she'd been willing to seize a child like that, as if this tiny girl were already a criminal, was chilling. That she'd given the job to a man who apparently thought nothing of hitting children in the face with a rifle made Steve want to break things.
Fyodorova met his eyes for a moment without blinking, and then slowly shook her head. "I don't believe you."
"I hope you don't think you're gonna lecture us about trust," said Steve. "Not when you were an undercover agent here for... how many years?" Yet she'd been willing to put Natalia into his car.
"I'm not going to lecture anybody, Captain Rogers," Fyodorova replied. "I just wonder what I missed. What I read about you made you seem like a soldier, not a secret-keeper."
Steve glanced up at one of the cameras. He knew Peggy was watching – she would be waiting for him to bring up the subject of the arctic – and he hoped he'd gotten his point across. Fyodorova didn't trust him. The only thing he could do was deny her accusations, and since that was exactly what he would have done if they'd been true, that would get them nowhere.
Peggy had denied that she'd known the Achilles incident was related to the tesseract. Was it true after all? He couldn't tell anymore.
"I told her we needed to ask you about the arctic," said Steve.
"I want Natalia freed," Fyodorova replied.
"Freed?" he echoed.
"Yes. I want her to have parents who love her. I want her to go to school. I want her to grow up to be whatever she wants to be. Do you understand?" asked Fyodorova.
"You thought she was a princess," Steve reminded her.
"I still do, but she's not safe as a princess. She's a child. She was the only one I managed to get out." Fyodorova lifted her chin slightly. She was trained to show false emotions, Peggy had said, but right now her face was the marble mask of a Greek statue, completely neutral. That in itself spoke volumes, Steve thought. She'd probably risked her life to rescue this girl from something... and she would probably rather die than break whatever promise she'd made to her.
Steve got to his feet. "I'll talk to Peggy," he said.
Peggy did not prove to be a particularly receptive ear. When Steve emerged from the interrogation room, he found her already shaking her head, her gray-streaked curls bouncing on her shoulders. "No, Steve," she said.
"Christ's sake, Peggy," he said.
"I know you mean well," she told him, "but that child is dangerous. We don't even know for sure she's a child! They've done extensive research into anti-aging techniques..."
"You really think a toddler is going to overpower anybody?" asked Steve.
"It's not what she's physically capable of that worries me," Peggy said.
"She's two," Steve repeated. "Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?"
"I am trying to protect this country!" Peggy insisted.
"Well, Fyodorova's not going to make that any easier until she's sure Natalia is safe," said Steve. "Why don't we just bring the girl in here and see if that helps?"
Peggy sighed. It was clear that she didn't even like the idea of the two Russians being in the same building, but the more she tried to make Steve see that they were dangerous, the more he felt sorry for them. Wasn't that exactly what Fyodorova wanted him to feel, though? Was she just manipulating him? Then again, wasn't Peggy trying to do exactly the same thing? Thinking about it made his head hurt. He wanted to go roll in the snow and see if that would clear it.
"Do you have a better idea how to get her to talk to us?" asked Steve. Peggy did, frequently, have better ideas.
This was not, however, one of those times. "No. I don't. All right," she said reluctantly. "I'll have the child brought in, and we'll see if that accomplishes anything."
When Natalia was marched into the room where Steve was waiting, her face was red and crusty from crying and there were marks on her wrists and ankles where she'd been shackled. It made Steve feel sick to look at her – how could anyone with children and grandchildren of their own treat a little girl this way? She saw Steve, and immediately moved to hide from him behind the legs of one of her captors. He got down on one knee, and held out a hand to her.
"Ya ne prichinyu tebe vreda," he said, hoping his memory served him and that really was Russian for I won't hurt you. "Do you want to see Konyshka?"
The little girl inched forward, nodding. Steve reached out a little further, but let her take his hand rather than him taking hers. "It's okay," he promised.
Her small fingers closed around two of his, and he straightened up and led her back into the room. Fyodorova was still cuffed to the chair, but she apparently forgot for a moment, as she tried to jump to her feet when she saw Natalia.
"Konyshka!" the girl let go of Steve and ran to scramble into Fyodorova's lap, throwing her arms around her caretaker's neck. Fyodorova couldn't hug back with her wrists cuffed to the chair, but she bent to kiss the girl's cheek and to murmur Russian in her ear. Steve felt his eyes prick as he watched – if they were pretending, they were very good at it.
"I'll find her a home," Steve decided. He wasn't sure how he'd doe it, but there had to be somewhere he could take this girl. Maybe the Wilsons would adopt her. She could be Sam's big sister. They didn't have a whole lot of money, but there was plenty of love in that family to go around, and Steve would be next door to watch out for her. "I promise," he added. "I don't know if you'll trust me on anything else, but I promise you that."
Fyodorova raised her head and searched his face for a moment. She was probing for any tiny tic, any sign of dishonesty – but Steve meant what he'd said, and it must have showed, because she nodded. "After we got out of the base at Krasnoyarsk, I knew I couldn't go west," she said. "So we went east and north, hoping to cross the Bering Strait. We traveled for a while with the Yakut. They live on the tundra with the reindeer. Some of them trade with the fishermen further north, so one of those parties offered to take us to the ocean."
Steve nodded, and sat down in the other chair. Peggy would probably already be telling her to skip to the important part, but Steve decided to just let her talk. She was only telling him this because she still felt she needed his help – that meant she wouldn't tell him any more or any less than exactly what she thought he needed to know.
"The Yakut wouldn't travel by night," she went on. "Which seems sensible enough, since it's damned cold enough up there during the daytime. But when we were about to part ways, the one who spoke Russian told me that if I wanted to go anywhere at night, only do it when there was no blue aurora."
Steve leaned forward. "Blue aurora," he said.
"I asked for more details," said Fyodorova. "They've lived in that area for centuries and know everything there is to know about it. The man told me that the blue aurora was an omen of misfortune. It hypnotized people, who walked towards it and then never came back. And it was something new. It hadn't been there in his father's time, or his grandfather's."
Steve nodded.
"I didn't see it for myself until we got to Yanranay," Fyodorova continued. "We were well above the arctic circle and the sun was only up for a couple of hours each day, and I figured we'd stop in a town and warm up before we kept going. We arrived, however, to find the place completely deserted. Buildings still had furniture in them, everything was locked up, and there were signs up ordering an evacuation with a deadline over a year ago. We got some food out of the freezers, lit a fire, and found a place to sleep. My first theory was that there must have been some kind of nuclear accident, like Dvenadstat, but I didn't know of any nuclear plants or facilities near to there. Then Natalia woke me up in the middle of the night, and told me to come look at the blue aurora."
"What was it?" Steve asked.
"There was a normal aurora going on, with big curtains of pink and green," she said, "but on the horizon there was this brilliant blue shining up in beams, like spotlights aimed at the sky. I decided we'd go and investigate a little when there was more light, but just as the sun was rising we heard engine sounds. A convoy came through on trucks and snowmobiles, heading down towards where the harbour had been. The vehicles had a logo painted on the side." Her tone was grim, significant.
"Yes?" Steve prompted.
"It wasn't a hammer and sickle, if you know what I mean," said Fyodorova.
"More like a skull and an octopus," Steve guessed.
"Yeah, more like that," Fyodorova nodded.
"What did you do?" Steve wanted to know.
"Nothing," she said. "I climbed up to the top of the building and watched them loading supplies onto and icebreaker. Then they sailed away, so I went back downstairs, got Natalia, and got the hell out of there. I had a child with me. I wasn't going to take on HYDRA all alone. I decided when I reached the States I would go and find you, because you would understand that we have a common enemy."
Her voice was accusing now – I trusted you and you betrayed me.
"When you were up there, did you see anything strange?" Steve asked. "Like... things embedded in the walls that shouldn't have been? Or plants or animals that looked, I don't know, prehistoric?"
"It was empty. There wasn't a living thing for miles," said Fyodorova. "And I didn't explore much beyond the bare minimum to find food and shelter for myself and Natalia."
"Are you sure?" he insisted.
"Of course I'm sure!" she huffed. "What kind of risks do you think I'm going to take with a toddler in tow? Now, I'm not sure just how new this is," added. "The Yakut said it hadn't been around in his father's time – I couldn't get a better estimate than that, but I figure it's around ten or fifteen years. My superiors have suspected for at least that long that HYDRA has a major base of operations in Soviet territory, and a lot of them think Zola is still alive somewhere. His name keeps turning up in coded communications. The blue light..."
"Is a signature of the tesseract's energy," Steve interrupted. He'd met Arnim Zola only very briefly, but hadn't liked the man. "You think Zola is hiding out in the arctic?"
"It's only a theory," Fyodorova said. "He was the expert on the tesseract, though, even more than Stark. If anybody could find a way to duplicate that energy without the actual object, it's him."
Steve drew in a tight breath as things fell together. "He's not duplicating it," he said. "He's drawing it out of other times. That's what Tony thinks is happening here, is some kind of time travel – he's going back to moments when the tesseract actually was there, and he's drawing energy from it then!" He had no idea how such a thing might be possible, but it made as much sense as any other theory they'd come up with so far. "That's the blue aurora, and the time thing!"
He rose from his seat. "I have to talk to Peggy."
"Great," said Fyodorova, rattling her handcuffs. "I'll just wait right here."
