Peggy was waiting just outside the interrogation room, watching and listening through a small, black and white television set. She stood up to greet Steve as he emerged, with a beaming smile on her face. "Steve, you are a miracle worker!" she said, delighted.
Steve did not smile back at her. "How much of this is news to you?" he asked.
"Quite a lot, actually," she said. "I've heard rumors about Zola. He had his fingers in just about every pie in SHIELD. I never trusted him, but the man was undeniably brilliant. He continued working right up to the day he died, and then there were all sorts of stories that he'd somehow substituted another body for his own and run off with all our secrets."
"Do you believe it?" asked Steve. He made a mental note – another thing she hadn't told him.
Peggy had to think about that for a lot longer than Steve expected. "I don't know," she admitted finally. "I don't want to. It doesn't seem possible. I was there for his autopsy and he seemed very dead indeed, absolutely riddled with cancer... and before you ask," she added, holding up a finger, "it was most definitely him. We matched up his dental x-rays and a number of previous surgeries. There's no way he could have found a stand-in so perfect. Not even a clone would have done."
The fact that she'd apparently considered that was worrying. "You still don't sound sure," Steve observed.
"Well, we're talking about time travel," Peggy reminded him. "That widens the possibilities somewhat."
She had a point. "We need to check this out," Steve said firmly.
"We do," she said. "Yanranay, though... I can't send a team into that area. That wouldn't go over well with the Soviet government. Not at all."
"We went into Dvenadstat," Steve said.
"That was a calculated risk. Our intelligence suggested that everybody else in the area was too busy getting out to worry about anybody coming in." Peggy shook her head. "And that was in the Ukraine, which is not nearly so secure. Siberia will be different. That's where their most top-secret projects go on and they monitor the airspace very carefully. A couple of years ago they actually shot down a passenger plane that went off-course over Sakhalin."
"They did what?" Steve asked, aghast. How had something like that happen without starting a war?
But Peggy didn't seem to consider it important enough to revisit. "If we go by air or sea, we'll be less likely to be seen than by land, but the logistics of getting there become far more challenging. Besides..." she frowned as she thought about it. "If what Fyodorova told us back in April is true, the Soviets have known about HYDRA's survival much longer than we have, and have been working against them. They'll want to know about this just as much as we do, if they aren't already looking at it."
"I thought you didn't trust Fyodorova," said Steve.
"I thought you did," said Peggy. "I'm going to talk to Vasily Lisitsyn."
"One of your spies?" Steve guessed.
"Not at all. He was the head of the KGB in the early 60's," Peggy explained. "The two of us had to keep the Cuban Missile Crisis from ending with a bang and that sort of thing does tend to forge a personal bond. He's still got a lot of pull within the Soviet government. If he drops the tip, they'll listen to him."
"You trust him, but not Fyodorova?" asked Steve.
"No," said Peggy. "I don't trust him, but if I have to choose between the two, Lisitsyn at least was brought up by parents who loved him. The Black Widows are raised by trainers who don't teach them anything but how to kill." She scowled. "Of course, he's going to want to know where we found out about this."
Steve was starting to feel as if she were deliberately toying with him. "What are you going to tell him?"
"The truth," she replied. "What he does with it after is his concern."
Meaning that if this Lisitsyn asked, Peggy would tell him about Fyodorova – and if he demanded the woman's return, she would comply. "Of course," said Steve, just a little bit bitter. "Good international relations are important. What about Natalia?"
Peggy hesitated again. "I don't know," she said, and glanced at the little television screen. Fyodorova had Natalia in her lap and was singing a song with her, but they must know they were being watched. God, Steve thought, it was so much easier just to take people at their word. How did Peggy stay sane, living in a world where she trusted nobody?
"Well, I do know," Steve said. He'd come to at least one firm decision – he'd promised Fyodorova that nothing was going to happen to Natalia, and that was a promise he intended to keep. He was not going to share Peggy's absurd paranoia about a toddler. Without saying anything more, he turned and went back into the interrogation room.
The two Russians looked up. Natalia put her arms around her surrogate mother's neck, afraid of being taken away again.
"Well?" asked Fyodorova.
Steve passed on what Peggy had said. "She's going to talk to Lisitsyn and let him get somebody on it. I don't know if she expects him to share what he learns, but I guess she figures we can work together against HYDRA."
"We managed it before," said Fyodorova. "Sort of."
"But if he wants to know who told her, she's going to say it was you," Steve warned.
"He'll say he's never heard of me," Fyodorova replied.
"Then he can't demand that we send you back to Russia," Steve said. That was a relief – he'd really thought Peggy might deport her just for spite's sake. "Just in case, though, let me take Natalia home. I promise you, she'll be safe with me. Scout's honour," he added with a mock-salute, trying to lighten the mood.
"You were too sick to join the boy scouts," Fyodorova said, but she did smile a little. Then she sobered again as she looked at Natalia in her lap. "I'd rather give her to you than to Carter," she decided, and moved her neck slightly, indicating he should come closer. "Come here."
Steve leaned in to listen, and Natalia grabbed his collar and pulled him right down so his head was immediately beside Fyodorova's. He had to grab the edge of the table to keep from falling on top of them. Maybe Peggy was right about this kid – she might be tiny, but she had an iron grip.
"If you hurt her," Fyodorova whispered in his ear, "or lock her up, I will find you, and I will kill you. There is nowhere in the world you can hide from me if I'm angry with you, and you will not live to regret it. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Ma'am," said Steve. He believed her.
Fyodorova nodded curtly. "Otpusti yego, Solnyshka," she ordered, and Natalia released him.
Steve walked out of the room again a moment later, with Natalia in his arms. A couple of agents moved as if to take her from him, but he widened his stance and glared at them, and they stopped. They looked at Peggy for guidance.
She pursed her lips. "Are you sure this is a good idea, Steve?" she asked.
"No," he said. "But it's the best idea I've got right now."
"All right," Peggy sighed. "At least I know you won't go running off to Siberia alone if you've got a toddler in tow." She paused and looked him over, as if not entirely sure she believed that. "But please continue to stay at SHIELD. The Winter Soldier is probably still looking for you," she reminded him. "If you go back to your place, you'll be in danger, and so will the child."
This was a game, Steve thought. She was trying to force him to agree with her through emotional blackmail. He wanted to rebel, to tell her to shove her hospitality back where it came from and return to his apartment... but he couldn't, because she was right. "Don't worry," he said. "My stuff's already here, anyway. Is Tony back yet?"
"I didn't know we were expecting him," said Peggy. "Let me check."
A call to the front security desk confirmed that Tony had not been to SHIELD that afternoon. It was only about five, but it was already dark out. If the kid were still at the library, Steve didn't want him leaving alone. "I'm gonna go to the university and pick him up," he decided.
"No." Peggy reached for his arm. "Let me send somebody else."
But Steve still wanted to push back at her, and this was an opportunity. "Tony's worried about Stane tracking him down again," he said. "He probably won't go with anybody but me. I'll go and find him, and then I'll come back here and stay." He would take Natalia with him, too – he didn't trust Peggy not to lock her up again the moment his back was turned.
Peggy gave in. "All right," she said, "but take a SHIELD car. I'll assign you some bodyguards."
Steve stiffened.
"Please," she said.
She just wanted him to be safe, he reminded himself. "Fine, but I drive," he said.
"Deal." She offered a hand. She wanted to shake on it. Steve rearranged his hold on the little girl, and shook.
The drive uptown to the university campus took about twenty-five minutes. Natalia sat very quietly in the passenger's seat beside Steve, while the bodyguards loomed behind them. The two men looked uncomfortable with the situation, as if unsure if they were guards or just passengers. Steve pointedly ignored them.
"How old are you?" he asked the little girl.
She looked up at him, but didn't answer.
"Skol'ko tebe let?" he tried in Russian, hoping it was right.
Natalia solemnly held up three fingers.
"You're three," said Steve. "I'm... I'm sixty-eight," he said. It was still a weird thing to think about. He'd been sleeping in the ice almost twice as long as he'd been awake and alive. That was a bit of perspective he could have done without.
Winter break was fast approaching, and the university had decorated for the holidays. The trees down both sides of University Walk were covered in fairy lights, and the lawns and sundial bore a carpet of snow. A sign in front of the library's main doors, with a plastic holly wreak fastened to it with packing tape, proclaimed that the building was open twenty-four hours until the end of the exam period. Steve parked outside the gates and took Natalia with him when he went inside to find Tony. They hadn't arranged a place to meet, but Steve knew what Tony had been there to find.
"Scientific journals?" he asked the woman at the front desk. "Specifically physics?"
She nodded. "Any particular publication?"
"No. I'm looking for a friend who's doing some research," Steve explained.
She gave him directions to the third floor, and he headed up. In a little reading room full of bound volumes of journals, students were sitting with their styrofoam cups of coffee and studying with an air of semi-desperation. They took no notice of Steve as he passed – many of them were so intent upon their material that they were probably not even aware of him. Other were actually asleep, face-down in their textbooks.
The only person in the room who looked relaxed was Tony. He was sitting in a corner, leaning on a heater as he stared out the window across the campus grounds.
"Tony?" Steve asked softly.
Tony looked up with a start, but sat back again when he said Steve. "Oh, hi," he said. He had a stack of notes and photocopies sitting on the heater next to him, but he wasn't using them. Possibly this was because the black dinosaur bird was curled on top of the pile with its head under one wing, asleep.
"You've definitely made a friend," Steve observed.
"Her name is Crusoe," Tony said.
"Crusoe?" asked Steve.
"She's a castaway," Tony explained. "You found the spies, huh?" He was now looking at Natalia, who was standing on her toes to watch, fascinated, as the bird's little chest rose and fell with each breath.
"Yes, I did," Steve said. "You two are gonna stay at SHIELD with me. Peggy's promised to keep us all safe – from everybody who is currently looking for us, including Stane. He told the police I kidnapped you."
Tony rolled his eyes. "He would," he said, and began picking up his things. He lifted the stack of papers in both hands, careful not to let the bird slide off. Crusoe. Steve could vaguely remember his mother reading Robinson Crusoe to him when he was little, a little bit of a chapter every night for nearly a year. He didn't recall any specifics of the story, only the broad outlines, but he supposed this small dinosaur was about as much of a castaway as it was possible to be.
"Did you find what you needed?" Steve asked.
"I hope so," Tony said, and Steve supposed that under the circumstances, that was all either of them could say.
Upon arriving back a the car, they realized Tony was going to have to ride in back, in between the bodyguards. He didn't like the idea very much, and neither did Crusoe, who woke up and burrowed under Tony's jacket to hide from them. Steve hoped she didn't have fleas.
With everybody buckled in, they headed back downtown under a cloud of uncomfortable quiet. Steve had planned to use this time to ask Tony about his findings and maybe talk over a few other things, but that wasn't going to work very well with the two hulking SHIELD bodyguards there to listen to the whole thing. Steve wasn't good at awkward silences, though, so after a few awful, dragging minutes, he decided to just pretend they weren't there.
"Have you ever been to Coney Island?" he asked.
There was no reply at first, and then the agent on the left ventured, "who? Me?"
"No, not you!" said Steve. "Tony. Have you ever been to Coney Island?"
Tony rolled his eyes. "Of course I've been to Coney Island," he said. "I took Rhodey and the gang when they visited here a couple of summers ago."
That would have made Tony about fourteen. Steve had to wonder if that were the first time he'd ever been to the amusement park. Howard and Maria didn't come across as the type of parents who took their son places. "Bucky and I had a bet on," he said. "The first time he ever made me ride the Cyclone, before I had the super-soldier serum, I got sick. We were gonna go ride it again when the war was over to see if it still happened."
"So you want me to take you to Coney Island to see if you throw up on me?" asked Tony.
"I'll try not to throw up on you," Steve replied with a grin. "Bucky wasn't so fortunate. I think you and Bucky would have liked each other," he added. "He would have thought going into space was a great time, too."
Tony had been snickering a moment ago – now his smile evaporated. "Is that why you hang out with me?" he asked, sounding as if it were at once a revelation and a disappointment. "Because I remind you of your friend?"
"No!" said Steve. "That's not what I meant at all!" What was he supposed to say that wouldn't make this even worse? "Do you always suspect people of having ulterior motives for being your friends?"
"Mostly," Tony said, and Steve realized: Tony was the scion of one of the richest self-made men in the country. He'd probably never had friends who didn't at least start off with an eye on getting something from him. No wonder he figured he was only welcome for his brain. How could Steve explain to him, without sounding corny, that all he actually wanted was companionship from the one person he was sure was not a spy?
"If you two are gonna talk about your feelings," one of the bodyguards asked plaintively, "can you do it when we're not here?"
"Yeah, this is kind of awkward," the other agreed.
"We didn't ask you to come," Steve told them.
"Well, we didn't volunteer, either," the first one said.
"No problem," Tony said. "We'll shut up."
"Yeah," grumbled Steve. "Wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable."
The silence for the rest of the trip was even worse.
Back at the SHIELD building, Steve led the two young people into the quarters assigned to him. Tony didn't even really look at the place. He put his stuff down on the desk, fished Crusoe out of his jacket before tossing it onto the sofa, and sat down to get back to work. Natalia, however, hung back in the doorway.
"Bol'shoy!" she said, eyes wide.
"Yeah, it is big, isn't it?" asked Steve with a smile. He scooped her up to carry her inside.
"It's not big," Tony said. "It's barely the size of your apartment!"
"That's big enough for me," said Steve – and if Natalia and Fyodorova had been living in that empty apartment for two weeks, this place must look like a palace to the girl. He wondered if he should be surprised that Natalia hadn't screamed or struggled yet, or asked where her Konyshka was. Maybe she thought she'd be thrown back in a cell if she did. Or maybe it was because Fyodorova herself had assured Natalia that Steve was okay. That must have been a big risk, when Fyodorova clearly didn't fully trust Steve anymore, herself. She must have felt she had no choice, and the thought just made Steve determined, all over again, that he would not give her any reason to regret it.
"Are you hungry?" he asked Tony. "There's a room service menu here somewhere." He shuffled through the things on the coffee table – under a couple of magazines and today's Bugle was the laminated card. "Here we go. What do you want to eat?"
"Have they got pizza?" asked Tony.
Steve looked. "No," he said. Probably a good thing. Pizza was what Tony had requested last time, and Steve suspected he ate far too much of it.
"How about a tuna melt?" Tony tried.
Tuna melts were available – Steve ordered one for Tony, meat loaf and mashed potatoes for himself, and a little dish of pirogi for Natalia, as he figured she would appreciate something that reminded her of home. She did seem to enjoy them when they arrived. Steve cut each one in half for her, and she stabbed them awkwardly with her fork and then stuffed the entire piece in her mouth at once. It was as if she were afraid somebody would come and take them away again.
"Did you make any progress on the idea of a time tesseract?" asked Steve.
"A little," Tony said with a shrug. He would have eaten at the desk with his notes in front of him, but Steve had insisted he join them at the table. Crusoe was perched on the back of the empty fourth chair, and Tony held out a bit of tuna on his finger for her. "Time is different from space, though, and the two don't correspond exactly. If something like that exists I'd need to see it and play with it, like Dad did with the tesseract cells from HYDRA, before I knew what it might be capable of. There's values I'd need to measure. You can't derive them from first principles."
Steve nodded. "Well, we have an idea now that might not be what we're looking for anyway," he said. "You got any other ideas about time travel? Because we're starting to think HYDRA may have a few."
"Oh?" Tony's face lit up, and he leaned forward eagerly. "I do, actually! That's something I've been thinking about for years!"
"Really?" Steve asked, startled.
"Yeah, I read H. G. Wells' The Time Machine when I was five and tried to build my first time machine a couple of days later." Tony grinned. "It was just a bunch of parts I put together... I didn't think about what any of it was going to do. Dad got a bit annoyed about it," he remembered. "He said no kid of his could go around thinking you just made piles of junk and called it an invention. Mom told him to lay off because I was just playing." He took a bite of his sandwich. "But I figured, he was probably right..."
"Don't talk with your mouth full," said Steve. "You're setting a bad example for Natalia."
Tony rolled his eyes, but he chewed and swallowed. "So I started thinking about it seriously after that, but at the time I didn't know enough about... uh... well, time. I've fiddled with it on and off since then but I could never come up with anything that would work and I could actually build, and then there's the question of paradoxes and all that stuff."
"Well, somebody must have done it," Steve said. "What were you missing that would keep you from building it?"
"Mostly power," said Tony. "Going back in time basically means rearranging the entire universe, or at least a significant part of it, atom by atom. You'd need the entire output of the sun for a year."
Steve thought about that. "Howard believed the tesseract represented a source of unlimited power. We know HYDRA was extracting energy from it during the war. If they had some of that left, stashed somewhere, they could be using it now to power the equipment that's pulling more of it out of the past." He realized he had not yet told Tony what they'd heard from Fyodorova. "Apparently HYDRA's got a base up in the arctic somewhere that's using tesseract energy for something big. We think they might be getting it out of other times."
"Well, yeah," Tony said, completely unsurprised. "Time distortion in places we know the thing was, that's the obvious answer."
"The question is," Steve went on, "what are they storing it up for? What are they gonna try to do once they've got enough of it?"
"Maybe a bigger time travel project," Tony suggested. Crusoe chirped, and he pulled another bit of tuna out of his sandwich to offer her. "Maybe they want to get something bigger out of the past, or the future. Or send themselves back in time to try to change the outcome of the war or something."
Any of those were possibilities based on the information they had. "Maybe... maybe that's why the rumors that Zola's still alive," said Steve. "Maybe they got him out of the past to begin with. He could have invented this thing but died before it could be built, so they built it and then went back and got him. We won't know until we look."
"So what are we waiting for?" Tony asked. "Why are we sitting here eating sandwiches instead of on our way to Russia?"
"Because Peggy's worried about politics," said Steve. "She's got some guy in the KGB working on it."
"And... we're just supposed to wait and trust them to share the answers?" said Tony.
"Apparently," Steve said. The only thing he hated more than being baby-sat was being kept out of the action. Now here both were happening at once.
They were almost finished the meal when there was a buzz at the door. Steve told the kids to stay put and got up to look through the peephole. He was afraid he'd find Peggy there, but instead it was Nick Fury, with a case of beer in one hand. Steve opened the door, and Fury held the drinks up and smiled.
"Thought you could use some company," he said.
Steve glanced back over his shoulder, and Fury followed his gaze and saw Tony and Natalia. He lowered the box again.
"Looks like you've already got some," he said.
"Yeah, my company-having schedules is pretty full," Steve said. He stepped out into the hall and shut the door, so the two men could talk. "Did Peggy say anything to you about what happened today?"
"Yeah, actually," Fury said, and reached into his box of beer to pull out a brown paper envelope he'd hidden between the bottles. "She asked me to give you this, and to say she's sorry she can't tell you herself, but she's busy making arrangements to move the tesseract if it turns out she has to. She's still not sure."
It was no wonder everybody seemed to be worried about ulterior motives, Steve thought – everybody around him seemed to have one. Did Fury actually want to hang out with Steve, or was he merely Peggy's messenger? Did he even like Steve, or was he pretending to, on orders? Steve did not dare ask.
When he opened the envelope, he found a typewritten transcript of a conversation between Peggy and her friend, if that were the appropriate word, in the USSR. Paging through it, Steve found that it began with Peggy delivering the news of Fyodorova's capture, as if she couldn't wait to get rid of her. Lisitsyn replied that he had never heard of Konstantina Fyodorova unless she meant the football player, but if Madame Director had a message for him, he was willing to listen.
Fury stood aside, assuming the contents of the message were not for his eyes, while Steve read the rest of it – but Steve doubted there was anything in there Fury didn't already know about. He certainly seemed to know more about all this than Steve did. "They're sending a submarine to go check out the area north of Yanranay," Steve said, folding the pages back up. "I have a hard time believing she trusts the Russians to look into this."
"She doesn't trust her own shadow," said Fury. "Don't worry, she'll make sure at least one of our people is on that sub. More likely two or three. Madame Director always covers her bases."
"Yeah. This way she gets answers and she keeps me here where she can keep an eye on me," said Steve. It was more than slightly bitter now.
"It's not that she doesn't trust you," said Fury. "She's just afraid you'll run off and do something nuts again – like stealing a space shuttle, for example." He squeezed Steve's shoulder. "You're starting to take all this pretty personally, Rogers, and she knows what you get like when you're taking things personally. It's not about trust."
"No, it's all about trust," said Steve, shrugging Fury's hand off. "This is the guy who killed Howard. He almost killed Eva. How am I not supposed to take that personally?"
"Because this isn't about the Winter soldier," said Fury. "You've got that on your mind, which means you're not thinking about what this is really about. This is about what's happening in Yanranay, remember?"
"Did she tell you to tell me that, too?" asked Steve.
"Maybe," Fury said. "Maybe I agree with her. That's why she's in charge – because she knows more about what's going on than any of us do."
"Yeah, and she keeps it that way," grumbled Steve. "Take your beers home. I gotta look out for these kids." For all he knew, Fury might be glad he wouldn't have to spend the evening putting up with Steve.
"You really want to keep them with you?" asked Fury. "You're the guy with a Soviet assassin looking for him."
"Oh, but this isn't about the Winter Soldier, is it?" Steve snapped. "I'll keep them. I have to protect them from the people who are supposed to be protecting them from me."
That evening Tony sat up working – again – while Natalia slept curled in the middle of the bed. The big mattress seemed all the larger around her tiny frame. There was plenty of room left for Steve, but he chose the sofa instead.
At around two in the morning, with Tony finally nodded off and snoring with Crusoe sleeping next to his head, Steve got up and went to the window. He opened the blinds and stood there for several minutes, staring up at the buildings all around them. His eyes scanned the jagged line where the tops of the towers met the overcast sky, lit dull orange from below by the city. Somewhere among those roofs, there might be the crouched shape of a sniper sitting in the snow.
If there were, he would easily be able to see Steve standing in the window, silhouetted by the light from Tony's desk lamp. He could line up his shot and fire, then slip away before anybody else saw him. Why didn't he?
Steve had been out and about for the past few days. He'd gone to Garden City, then to Washington, and then had come back. He'd dropped off Tony at the university, found Fyodorova, questioned her, and picked Tony up again. There must have been a dozen, a hundred opportunities for the Winter Soldier to take him down. This man wasn't afraid of shooting him down in Central Park with Eva Natter's entire staff and photo crew all around him, so why hadn't he turned up again? The kind of empty mind Fyodorova had described... what came between that and a target? Where was he, out there in the snow and the artificial glow?
There was no answer. No shot was taken that night, either, and eventually Steve had to close the blinds again and go back to bed.
