"You're the most tenacious son of a bitch I've ever met Carter."
"Thank you sir."
"The way you are now? Could like to live forever."
"Possibly, sir."
"Not many folks could get shot, hanged and beaten with a baseball bat in the span of the day and then sit here grinning at me."
"I'd prefer it if I'd kept all my teeth."
Phillips grins and tilts her face so he can look at the big gap where one of her front teeth used to be. "It's not a whole body Carter! Medical can make you up a new one faster than you can peel all the potatoes in mess." Then he leans forward with twinkling eyes that catch the sun and make her want to look away. Only she can't. "But first you got to wake the hell up."
Water drips into her ear canals. Tickles.
Dum Dum is behind him and grinning. "You're not done yet Miss Union Jack."
The problem with being violently knocked unconscious is that the brain is confused when it comes back to itself. There's no way around it. No way to avoid it. The best and brightest are effected as easily as the dimmest and slowest. Neurotypical and a-typical alike suffer.
Everyone of ever color and creed, Super Soldier Serum or no, will get things confused. Such as dreams and reality.
Or the past and the present.
The water's still ticking her ears and she slaps at it. Rights herself so she's treading water.
Her eyes aren't quite ready to open yet so she has to deal with just the sun beating against closed eyelids, but she's starting to sort out the past, Phillips chastising her after her first major mission post…everything, and the present.
She's in a body of water.
And everything hurts.
"Come on girl," she hears him say.
Phillips is the only person alive or dead who could call her "girl" and not get punched for the trouble. From him it's always been affectionate.
There are acute pains beyond the throbbing mess that is her entire nervous system. One part of her neck feels like it's been slashed with a machete and her right knee feels like someone tried to kick it in with their heel.
Rocks are hitting water. A few at first. Than a whole glut of them.
Brackish water splashes into her mouth and she sputters and spits. Thrashes a moment before finally—thankfully—opening her eyes.
There's a car careening down the face of a cliff overhead.
And she's in a bloody lake.
She moves backwards with powerful strokes, just barely avoiding the whirlpool briefly formed when the car violently hits the water and begins to sink.
She watches the bright swirl of bubbles that breaks the surface. Thinks of other crashes into bodies of water. Maybe Steve didn't even feel it when he hit. The radio died so quickly. Just in mid-sentence. Maybe Steve was just as luck-
Angie.
She was in the car.
She was in that car.
They were driving and then they were attacked and Peggy fired back and then she was dazed and getting kicked off a cliff by a woman she'd spent the better part of a month and a half trying to woo and-
She sucks in a deep breath and dives.
She has to swim one handed, her neck is still weeping blood and she keeps the other hand over it, pressed into the tear. She kicks hard with her legs, ignoring the pain in her knee.
She has to get to Angie. Has to get her out. Has to save her life.
She's not gonna lose someone again.
Not like this.
This close to shore the water isn't too deep. It's all fallen rocks from the cliff face above, and the car is settled on its side. She can see the driver's hair, a golden brown, weightless in the water.
Her lungs start to burn nearly as bad as her leg and neck, but she makes it the last two meters to the car and grabs hold to anchor herself.
This deep down beams of sunlight barely warms the water and Peggy is as cold as her time in Russia in '43.
But not as cold as the woman who's held in the car by nothing more than a seatbelt.
She's dead. Her skin is dull like chalk and her open eyes are already fogged over.
Peggy ducks her head and wishes she could take a breath.
It isn't Angie. She's dressed like her and her hair, before it hit the water, may have even been styled like Angie's. It's even her shade of lipstick.
But she isn't Angie.
Peggy uses her grip on the car to push herself back up to the surface where she takes big gasps of air.
A woman's dead at the bottom of the lake and the woman that should be there is gone.
The fog's all gone. The confusion's cleared away.
There's only one right conclusion now.
Water spills into her mouth and she spits it out as she treads water.
Angie's been abducted and her death has been faked.
With no survivors it would have taken days for them to find the car and the body, and by then the woman down below would be so decomposed as to be unrecognizable.
People would mourn Oscar-winning actress Angela Carter and move on with their lives. If SHIELD investigated they'd likely assume Peggy was knocked free when the car hit the water. If the assassin's plot had gone according to plan they would have found her body floating towards shore and any evidence of being shot devoured by the lake's flora and fauna.
It's a clever story someone's built just to cover an abduction.
And Peggy plans to tear it all down to the ground.
####
When Peggy squelches in the front door of Angie's villa Yelena has the good graces to be surprised.
"Peggy?" She stands and comes closer, hands held warily in front of her. "Wh—what happened?"
"I need a patch up and then you and I get to go to war Yelena."
If she wasn't already so cold from being soaked to the bone and leaking blood across half the coast of Lake Como Peggy would be freezing from that horrifyingly excited grin Yelena "rewards" her with.
"We get to kill someone?"
She limps to the couch and flops down onto it, an Angie in her head wincing at what her wet clothes are doing to the upholstery. "More than one someone if you're lucky."
Yelena claps and dashes off to fetch needle, thread and iodine.
She does not ask about Angie.
Not until she's sitting very, very close and carefully stitching up the tear on Peggy's neck.
"I'm surprised this started to seal up so quickly," she says, "you heal awfully fast."
"Always have." It's only a partial truth.
Yelena hums. "Is that why 3C isn't around? Got scared of what you can do?"
"She was taken."
The needle piecing her flesh together stalls. "Taken?"
"They thought they killed me, and then they faked her death and took her."
Yelena is very good at what she does. If she harbors any secrets they're hidden behind those cold, cold eyes. "Peggy, I'm so sorry."
It's a real enough condolence, but Peggy still finds herself studying Yelena warily as she patches her back together. Watching the muscle in her cheek twitch and the way she modulates her breathing when she sits so close.
She's very good at what she does.
Yelena bites her lip. Speaks softly. "You want to get her back." It isn't a question.
"I do."
"Do you know," her bright eyes flicker up to Peggy's, "do you know who it was?"
Peggy grimaces. "You think it might be Leviathan."
She hedges, "You took one of their's…"
"Angie isn't one of our's."
"Maybe before you moved into her bedroom. Now she's fair game, Peggy."
And unlike Daniel Angie's ill-equipped for spycraft.
No. Not ill-equipped.
Untrained.
Angie had once begged her—begged her—to train her and she'd refused. She'd run away.
What on earth did she think was going to happen if she tried to come back? Why did she have to go and forget her own very good reasons? What was the point? All because…because Angie was there on the television and Peggy was lonely and bored and missing—
"Hey," Yelena has stopped sewing and cups her cheek. Her hands are cool and soothing. "If you want her back, we'll get her back."
"You'll help?" Peggy's…surprised.
Dottie smiles and her hand drops to Peggy's knee, her fingers cold on the hot swollen joint. "Us Griffin girls have to stick together Peg."
It's the friendliness that raises her hackles. She doesn't let it show. She feigns exhaustion (it isn't difficult) and tilts her head away.
Yelena's so earnest in her desire to help. Peggy just wishes she could believe her.
####
Kicking down a reinforced door is not easy. Shattering wood and breaking locks with nothing but one's foot requires concentrated force and super muscle control.
Doing it with a mucked up knee is even more difficult. In addition to the application of force and use of control it also requires a chair, grit, and no small amount of pain relievers.
But when the door rattles open and the two men inside the room surge forward that chair comes in tremendously handy. It shatters against the cheek of one of the men, and the piece that remains intact in Peggy's hand is good to block two wide swings from the other before she cracks it against his temple and watches him collapse like those sacks of potatoes Phillips always insisted she peel when she disobeyed orders.
Technically…technically the men unconscious on the ground are her employees. They're employees of SHIELD's Italian office and are loyal to SHIELD and everything it stands for.
Unfortunately if they were trained correctly they should be loyal enough to ignore direct orders from the Director of SHIELD if those orders involve her selfishly demanding the release of a child spy so she can use her to retrieve her girlfriend.
If Howard or Phillips knew about the mission there would be quite a lot of frowning. Maybe a suspense
But in Peggy's defense the unconscious men were punching a child.
A child who is nonplussed by a masked woman with a limp storming into the interrogation room with half a chair and a drawn gun.
The girl spits a glob of phlegm and blood onto the tile. "Took you long enough," she drawls.
"I'm not one of yours," Peggy fires back. She trains the gun on the girl. It's a rotten thing to do to a child and if bits of her conscience weren't dead somewhere in the Atlantic or abducted by spies they'd be telling her as much.
Natalie goes paler than she normally is. Swallows. Her nostrils are rimmed with red and a streak of blood's dried on her chin.
Peggy will be having a conversation with the Italian office if she survives all this.
As spies go, the girl opposite her is very, very good. Given time she'll outclass all the rest of them. Right now she is still a child though. And when she realizes she might be shot by a stranger while still tied to a chair she's scared.
Then she tugs on her bindings and cocks her head. "Do it," she challenges.
Peggy sighs. "A tip Natalie, when someone has a gun pointed at your head don't challenge them to shoot. Not unless you're ready to die."
She's still naively defiant, "I am."
Peggy holsters her gun and whips off her mask, "You aren't, so let's neither of us pretend you are."
That gets a more reasonable reaction. Confusion. "Peggy?"
"Angie's been taken."
Natalie's surprised. Not expectant. Which is a shame. Peggy was hoping it was her people doing the abduction. "By who," she asks.
Peggy limps over. She'll need to tape her knee again once they're outside. "I don't know, but I need your help to find her."
"Isn't that why you have you agency?"
She draws a knife from her kit and slips it under the ropes holding the girl in place. "They're spies and soldiers. Good ones, but," she gives a tug and the ropes are cut away, "you're something more aren't you Natalie?"
Natalie won't admit it, but one side of her mouth quirks up.
"And if for whatever reason I can't," Peggy has to swallow. Has to not think about shoulds and coulds. That's not how leaders lead. It's how they fail. She hands the knife over so the girl can cut away the rest of her bonds. "If something happens I need someone capable. Someone smart. Someone to avenge her."