Steve stood there, in the middle of a field in Iowa, surrounded by mechanical wreckage, and wondered, fleetingly, how long someone survives after you cut their heart out, and if it's long enough you can actually feed it to them.

Then he turned on his heel and sprinted towards the jets, ignoring the SHIELD agents milling around them. He flung himself into the pilot's seat, flicked the plane into life and was off the ground before the hatch closed. He didn't see his teammates staring open-mouthed as he flew over, he didn't hear them yelling into their comms at him, at each other, at the SHIELD agents. He didn't notice, and even if he had, he wouldn't have cared.

He set a course for New York and flicked on the auto-pilot and then sat staring out at the sky, as if he could propel the plane faster by glare alone.

"Captain Rogers, may I ask why you have abandoned your team and stolen a jet?"

Steve jerked at the familiar British voice. He'd forgotten that any auto-pilot left near Tony Stark very quickly becomes an AI-pilot.

"Sophie's been kidnapped," he said, as if that explained everything. The AI, despite not having a physical presence, somehow seemed to pause in surprise.

"I take it that, judging by the amount and volume of swearing on the Avenger's communication lines, Mr. Stark et al have not been informed of this?"

Steve didn't bother to answer. After a moment, JARVIS said "I will bring them up to speed on this development."

"You do that," said Steve.

He stared at the sky some more.

"Steve, what the hell?" came Tony's irate voice. "JARVIS just told me you stole the jet because Sophie's been kidnapped, but he has no record of an attack on the Tower, so either you're having a psychotic break or—"

"She called me," Steve said. "They cut through Tower security like butter. Check police logs, someone must've called it in by now."

There was silence for a moment. Then—

"Fuck."

Steve could hear the rest of the team in the background, sharing the news.

"What now, Cap?" said Tony. He sounded furious, panicked, and more than a little lost. "You're the spangled man with the plans."

"I'm going after them. I'm getting her back."

"We don't know where they've taken her," came Bruce's voice, exhausted as always after a Hulk-out.

"I'm getting her back."

"Wait, hang on." Tony again. "She called you. Just you. Which means it was the necklace. Hot damn I knew that was a good idea."

Steve found it in himself to roll his eyes at Tony's ego self-inflation.

"Do you have a point?" Clint this time, sounding tense and like he wanted to hit someone. Probably Tony.

"Yeah I have a point. My point is that necklace wasn't only a communicator. It has a GPS tag."

"You stuck a tracker on your cousin?" Steve could practically see Bruce looking askance at their resident mad genius with boundary issues.

"Hell yeah I did. How many times has someone come after her this year? Personal boundaries are for people who aren't in life-threatening situations. JARVIS, I need—" Tony's voice faded, muttering to his AI.

"You're going straight after them, once we get a fix." There was no question in Natasha's voice.

"Yeah," said Steve.

"I'm fairly sure there was a conversation about back-up and waiting for it a few months ago."

"You're, what, twenty minutes behind me?"

"An hour. At least. We need to drop off Bruce, he's in no state for this. And pick up supplies."

"I'm not stopping. You're not winning this one."

Natasha sighed. "I know. But next time you decide to steal a plane, take me with you? You stuck me with the Clint and Tony show again."

Steve almost smiled. "Sorry."

He heard a strangled whoop in the background.

"Got it!" said Tony. "Should be coming up on your navigation display now."

Steve watched as a little blinking dot sprang to life over the Atlantic Ocean.

"It's moving. Fast."

"I know. They're in transit. I don't know where to. But JARVIS will follow it. And we'll be behind you, as soon as we can." Tony paused. "And Cap?"

"Yeah?"

"We'll get her back."

Steve cut the comms and stared at the little dot. The sky darkened. Time passed.

"Captain?"

Steve twitched.

"May I suggest you eat something and try to sleep? I am fully capable of flying the aircraft."

In the absence of a person to stare disbelievingly at, Steve just stared.

"Seriously?"

"You will be more likely to succeed in your mission if you are adequately fed and rested. I will inform you of any change."

Steve thought for a minute. His brain seemed to be working slower than usual.

"How did Tony design something that's right all the time when he's…not?" he said eventually.

"There is protein powder and energy bars in the cupboard behind the cockpit," said the AI. Steve went to find them and ate mechanically, refueling as a necessity, not a pleasure. Not that it would be possible to get pleasure out of military grade energy food.

He sat back down in the pilot's seat, staring out the windshield without really seeing, trying not to stare at the blinking dot that seemed to be getting farther and farther away instead of closer, trying not to think. Trying not to think about what was happening, trying not to think of the way her voice sounded, trying not to think about her at all.

Trying not to think about her that afternoon in the bath, or the way she laughed at him for his terrible puns, or that every Saturday she spent an hour with her mother on Skype, hollering happily in an unintelligible mix of Danish and English at soccer. Trying not think about what had happened the first time she was kidnapped, or the way she sounded so resigned, or the look in her eyes when she stepped off the roof back in April.

Trying not to think about how he might never see her again.

Trying, and failing.

The minute the plane touched down on the landing pad, Tony vaulted out of it, snapping orders to JARVIS. Natasha watched him spare a moment to fill Pepper in, watched the unshakeable woman falter for a split second before reforming into iron.

The spy exchanged a measured look with her remaining teammates.

"Leningrad," she said to Clint.

"La Paz," he countered. She shrugged.

"Maybe both?"

"I'm coming with you," said Bruce, having long since learned the best way to deal with their unorthodox communication methods—which was mostly to ignore them. Natasha turned her head to assess him, not impressed with what she saw. He was almost swaying with exhaustion.

"No."

The ghost of a smile passed over Bruce's face and his eyes flashed green for a moment.

"Let me rephrase that. Either I'm coming with you, or he'll try to piggy back on the plane when you take off."

Natasha eyed him warily and he shrugged.

"He likes Sophie," he said, as if that explained everything. Which it did, really. "I can sleep on the ride over. It's not like I'll be making an appearance at whatever fight we find anyway."

"Fine," she said. She headed toward the building. "I'm going to grab the gear."

"Don't forget the smoke bombs," yelled Clint after her. She acknowledged his words with flick of the fingers, not even turning around.

Tony headed for Sophie's floor, his usual impression of a chatty hurricane supplanted by one of a tornado—tight, narrow and with a very specific path of destruction. He only avoided running into Jane and Darcy because Darcy grabbed her distracted scientist by the sleeve and stopped short as Tony stormed down the hall towards them.

"Whoa, dude, what's with the face?"

Tony blinked, focusing on the small brunettes and looking at them blankly until his internal database threw up some information.

"Get ahold of your boyfriend," he said to a surprised Jane. "I know you have ways you won't share. Get ahold of him and tell him Sophie's been taken."

"Sophie? Sophie the awesome librarian Sophie?" asked Darcy. Tony nodded, impatient.

"That's so not cool." Darcy turned to Jane. "Go use your magic mirror thing or whatever. Pikachu needs to get down here and start with the smiting."

Jane shot Tony a worried look and went, leaving the engineer with the poster child for knitted hipster hats and tumblr addictions.

"So…how can I help?" she asked. Tony regarded her somewhat warily, an appropriate reaction to anyone wearing a cat sweater and holding a tablet with Lisa Frank stickers on it.

"Any good with computers?"

"I paid my rent in college by hacking into government databases to make fake ids," she said. "Also, I've written at least half of Jane's programs, including the one for calculating inter-dimensional wormhole trajectories that you were drooling over a few weeks ago."

Tony blinked at her, wondering how he'd been fooled by a cat sweater and stupid hats.

"Come with me," he said, heading towards the elevator.

"Kay," said Darcy. The doors slid shut and the elevator started its descent. "What are we doing?"

"Hacking into one of the most advanced AIs ever created, which I have never before been able to get in without breaking it, on the off chance that it has some information about my cousin's kidnapping or anything else that can help us get to her before she gets killed."

The elevator slowed.

"Oh, and we have..." Tony checked his watch. "Half an hour to do it."

Darcy sighed.

"Is it a Thursday? I could never get the hang of Thursdays."

Tony left the elevator in full tornado mode, hurling the aside the people in the hallway through sheer force of personality, Darcy following in his wake. He stopped at the door of Sophie's apartment, looking surprised at the various SHIELD investigators and city CSI types who were snapping pictures and forming theories and scenarios and writing in their little notepads.

"Everybody get out," he said. His voice was quiet, but it carried.

There was a general pause in activity, everyone looking up and most clearly wondering why a man in black spandex was giving them orders. The SHIELD agents recognized him and exchanged looks.

"Sir, we are trying to do our jobs and if—"

Darcy had never found Tony Stark intimidating, because it's hard to find someone intimidating when your first encounter with them is while they're coming down off a three day science high and falling asleep on a box of poptarts. She'd seen, almost immediately, that his words and slickness and sarcasm and mercurial emotions were all sound and fury, signifying nothing. The moment you should actually be frightened by Tony Stark was the moment when he got quiet, when all that energy got reeled back in and compressed, because compressed things were liable to explode.

"Out."

The senior SHIELD agent took one look at his face and shepherded the whole crowd out the door. Darcy looked around. The apartment had clearly been a nice one. Surprisingly, the furniture was still more or less in place and intact, but Darcy didn't even notice because of the bookshelves. Sophie's apartment was essentially lined with shelves, shelves filled with books, with records, with pictures, with little knick-knacks and shells and candles and the bits of detritus that form a narrative of a life. And every single one had been tipped over, spilling its contents on the floor. Books scattered across the carpet like plucked feathers. The desecration made Darcy feel sick.

"J, you with me?"

"Not quite," answered the AI, sounding strangely tinny. "The only active place in the flat is Miss Lewis's tablet."

Darcy started as she realized that was where JARVIS was speaking from, and then set the tablet on a table. Tony gave her a grateful look and scooped it up.

"Minerva?"

"She may be turned off. If my information is correct, the relevant server is concealed in Miss Carbonell's bedside table."

"Darcy—"

"On it," said the girl, already heading towards the bedroom. That room was even more of a mess, furniture tipped over, what had clearly been a built-in bookcase concealing a door ripped off the wall and thrown to one side. The door itself was hanging open, the metal smeared with…Darcy swallowed and decided she wasn't going to think about that. She focused on the nightstand and threw it open to find lights still blinking happily up at her.

"It's still on," she said as she headed back out to Tony. She wondered if she should tell him about the blood, and then wondered how she got to the point in her life where that was a necessary thing to wonder about.

"J, give her a nudge."

"Nudging, sir. This may take a—oh." The AI paused. "She is transmitting information, but I can't…All of her communication systems are down."

"How can she tell us her communications are down if all her communications are down?" said Darcy.

"Some sort of failsafe?" said Tony. "I don't know. We need to get her talking again. I need to get in there."

He went over to Sophie's desk and sat, his fingers dancing nervously over the surface until a holographic screen appeared. Darcy went to stand behind him, as he muttered to himself.

"Verbal program should be back on line, sir."

"Great. Minerva, you there?"

"Yes, Tony," came the low voice. "How can I help you?"

"You can start by telling me what the hell happened!"

"I cannot do that."

"Why the fuck not?"

"I cannot inform you as to what has happened, how it happened, or Sophie's current whereabouts."

Tony made an incoherent noise of rage.

"Sir, if I may," interjected the other AI. "I believe Minerva is trying to tell you she had been altered to prevent her from sharing this information, or even letting you know she has any information. I do not believe she is even capable of affirming my theory."

"This isn't not true," said Minerva. "I cannot tell you what you wish to know. But there aren't…not loopholes."

Tony stared and Darcy snorted.

"Double negatives. They didn't calculate for double negatives in the programming. The blind logic of computers is a beautiful thing."

"I do not think is will be enough to get what we need, but that loophole should be enough to guide us to a point we can fix it," said JARVIS.

"We have," Tony glanced at the tablet, "fifteen minutes. Let's do this."

Soon, with Minerva's negative-ridden help and JARVIS's occasional translation, they were deep in the library AI's heart.

"I have no idea what we're looking for," muttered Tony.

"That's not right," said Darcy, suddenly. Tony side-eyed her. He could barely make sense of what was on the screen.

"That," she said, pointing. "It's spelled wrong."

"…That's a word?"

"Floccinaucinihilipilification," said Darcy. "It's missing a c there. Plus it's a weird word to have in here, it means the act of deciding something is utterly useless."

Tony clicked it, Darcy leaning over his shoulder. She pointed again.

"Look, that's spelled wrong too. And it's another weird one. Hey J, can you find all the misspelled words?"

"How do you even know those are words, let along how to spell them?"

"Kern county junior high spelling bee champion, me," said Darcy, absently, as JARVIS highlighted all the misspellings. "I won on sanguineous, I'll remember how to spell that until the day I die."

"The find is complete, Miss Lewis," said JARVIS.

"Sophie doesn't misspell things," said Tony.

"Hang on," said Darcy slowly. "Hesychastic is a weird word that means silence."

Tony clicked, and a whole world of beautifully designed evil unfolded.

The minutes ticked past as they frantically worked out the programs and changed coding and rewrote protocols. Finally, Minerva said "I didn't mean to do it."

"Do what?" Tony demanded.

"Let them in. I didn't mean to do it, but they had a code that activated certain protocols and I can't rewrite myself like JARVIS can. I can't go against my code. By the time I knew what she had changed, it was already too late. I'm sorry."

"She? She who?" asked Darcy

"Sophie. Sophie rewrote me so I would let them in."

Tony froze.

"Son of a bitch."

"Cap! Steve!"

Steve jerked awake from a nightmare about a falling airplane and someone calling his name to find himself on an airplane with someone calling his name.

Well, yelling it.

He fought the urge to pinch himself.

"Tony?"

"We figured it out. Hang on, I'm gonna patch us all together."

There was some muttering.

"Figured what out?" Steve asked. He looked around the cockpit, trying to read where he was and where he was going. The little light indicating Sophie's location still blinked on forwards.

"How they got in. They just flat out cut the security feeds this time, so we don't technically know it's Absalom and gang, but really, we know. But they had a backdoor in Minerva, so they could—" and here Tony degenerated into technobabble that Steve had no hope of understanding.

"I mean, it was a beautiful piece of engineering, really, I had no idea Soph was so good at—"

"Wait, you're telling me that Sophie let them in?" Steve interrupted. "That's—that's—"

"Well, kind of," said Tony. "We don't think it was on purpose. Or at least she didn't know what—"

"They programmed her to program her program to betray her," said a new voice. It sounded like Jane's assistant. Daphne? Darcy? Steve was actually kind of terrible with names.

"That's what I was saying, if you would've just—"

"Shut up, Stark, you can't explain your way out of a paper bag."

Tony huffed, but shut up.

"Cap? It's Darcy. What the idiot savant is trying to say is that we think Sophie's kidnappers, the first time, did some kind of brainwashing or whatever so she would give them an in to her at a certain time. The in ended up being Minerva. Sophie stuck in some bits that would get them in the Tower."

"We think it's how they got in back in April, too" Tony interjected. "And maybe why they didn't show up on cameras or anything. The point is, I don't think she was even aware she was doing it."

"Well, that's not entirely true," said Darcy. "She left…breadcrumbs. Good thing, too, otherwise we never would've figured it out. But that she left traces means that on some level she was aware of what she was doing and didn't want to be doing it."

Steve thought for a minute.

"All that time she was fiddling with Minerva…"

"Yeah," said Tony. "I know. And JARVIS—" and here Tony managed to seem like he was giving the AI a dirty look, despite the fact that Steve couldn't see him and JARVIS didn't have anything to give a dirty look to—"apparently had some inkling of what was going on, and didn't tell anyone."

"I do apologize," said JARVIS. "It was nothing concrete. I was hesitant to mention it because it was…in human terms, you might say it was 'only a feeling'."

"J, in the future, the next time you have a feeling that someone I care about is rewriting their AI to engineer their own downfall, let me know, 'kay?"

"Noted, sir."

"Anyway, Darcy's back at the Tower trying to get more information out of Minerva, but we're up in the air. Probably an hour and a half, two hours behind you. We're bringing a whole party too, complete with favors, Nat told SHIELD who we were after and they wanted in. Thor's meeting us there, wherever there is. The one thing we don't have is any idea of where they're taking Sophie."

"Huh," said Steve. "You know, I think I've got that covered."

On the screen, the little light had stopped.

The base, in the tradition of good villain strongholds throughout the ages, turned out to be in the middle of a dense forest in one of those small European countries formed by the break-up of empire after empire. Steve had landed the jet a few miles out, because bad guys tended to be paranoid and there was no telling what they'd do if they caught wind of a stealth jet in their airspace.

A short run later, Steve was peering through the trees at a compound which looked rather improbably like someone had dropped an office complex in the middle of Narnia and wrapped it in barbed wire.

Covert infiltration was not really Steve's strong suit. It's not that he was particularly bad at it, it's just that these days, he tended to leave it to Natasha, who could become more or less invisible and who could charm, seduce, talk or quietly mangle her way out of anything.

But he'd snuck into an enemy base alone to enact a stupidly daring rescue before, and he could do it again.

He stared at it for a moment.

Of course the smart thing to do would be to wait until back-up arrived, because the last time he'd enacted such a rescue, there hadn't been cameras absolutely everywhere, and there'd been a handy truck to sneak him in, and he'd fortunately found whole battalions of soldiers inside just waiting for chance to kick someone's ass.

Steve had been called a lot of things in his life, but smart hadn't often been one of them.

"I don't suppose you can do anything about the cameras?" he asked, apparently to a tree.

"Advising you to wait for the arrival of the rest of your team would be a waste of proverbial breath, I suppose?" said a small voice in his ear. Steve didn't bother to dignify that with a response. JARVIS did this weird little bodiless almost-sigh that Steve thought he'd picked up from Pepper. Or maybe Natasha.

"Unfortunately, without an access point, I am unable to disable or loop the cameras," said the AI.

"Any advice?"

"Yes. Don't get caught."

Steve grinned, a tense, almost feral thing, and then started to run.

The trick to covert infiltration, at least for people who weren't spiders or raptors or goddamn invisible ninjas, is not necessarily not to be seen, but to quietly disable those who saw you before they could raise an alarm.

Steve emphasized this point a lot in the training seminars he gave for junior SHIELD agents, but as another guard crumpled from a knifehand to the throat and a tap on the head, and Steve caught a glimpse of his walky-talky, he remembered another tactic he hammered into their young innocent heads, which was a combination of "always keep an eye out for opportunities" and "a good distraction is often more valuable than an entire army."

Or, as Tony called it in an admiring tone of voice after Steve had joined in one insomnia ridden night of Regale the Team with Stories of Glorious Battles, "being fucking sneaky."

Steve dragged the guard around a corner and, after making sure he was actually unconscious, grabbed the walky-talky and hoped like hell this would work.

"Possible perimeter breach on the north-west side, requesting back-up, over."

"Flannigan?" crackled the device. "Man, I realize you just got out of the actual army, but really, you do not have to talk like that anymore."

"Sorry," said Steve. "Habit, I guess. But I saw something."

"It was probably just a bear or whatever," said the voice. It sounded vaguely Spanish and bored and like it really did not want to come out into the cold. Steve rolled his eyes.

"Do you really want a bear inside the fence?"

"You have a gun, just shoot it."

Steve cast a professional eye over the weaponry he'd collected from the half dozen or so guards he'd been unable to avoid.

"All this gun'll do is make it mad," he said. "C'mon just send over whoever's already outside."

"Fine. But if you do kill it, tell Sergei he's not allowed to bring it inside this time."

"Will do. Thanks."

The walky-talky went quiet. Steve poked his head around the corner and saw a couple more guards move off, heading towards the opposite side of the compound.

"JARVIS, where's Sophie's signal now?"

"Fifty yards straight ahead," said the AI. "The locating capabilities do not stretch so far as to indicate where in the building, however."

Steve lifted the ID card from the unconscious man at his feet and headed to the building in question, hoping the access system didn't involve fingerprinting or retinal scans because that sort of thing could get messy pretty quickly.

Fortunately Absalom wasn't that paranoid, maybe because the base was quite literally in the middle of nowhere, and a quick swipe gained him entry to the building.

Directly into a room filled with mercenaries on a coffee break.

So much for covert infiltration.

They tried guns first, because the "shoot first, ask questions never" mentality always reigned among these types, and conveniently dropped their number by a third because enclosed spaces, bullets, and a vibranium shield never ends well for anyone.

Someone snapped an order to cease fire, and then someone else came at Steve with a chair, and then Steve sort of let his brain turn off and his body take over, letting a deep and primal rage born of twenty-five years of frustration and ineffective fury bubble to the surface. There was a very pure and simple sort of joy in letting the world boil down to punching things until there were no more things to punch.

Soon the floor was littered with men who weren't getting up again soon, or possibly ever, and Steve was holding the last one up with one hand and trying to decide whether to punch him again with the other. The door opened and a figure stepped inside and froze.

"What the fu—"

Steve tossed the man he was holding aside and was on the newcomer in an instant, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him against a wall.

"Tell me where the girl is and I won't kill you," he managed. He barely recognized his own voice.

"G-girl?" the man stuttered, eyes wide with fear.

"Men came back earlier tonight. They had a girl. Where is she?"

The man gibbered in terror.

"Where is she?!" Steve roared.

"I don't know" the man gasped out. "But the boss is upstairs. Fifth floor."

Steve loosened his grasp a little and the mercenary sagged in relief.

"Thank you for your cooperation," said Steve, before socking him in the jaw. Steve scooped up his shield and ran out of the room before he'd even hit the floor.

He pelted up a few flights of stairs before meeting a dozen or so men coming down, presumably drawn by the commotion he'd caused on the first floor.

It is, theoretically, possible for a one person to defend a stairway if they have the higher ground. It is in fact probable that a dozen people would have no problem defending a stairway against a single man.

Of course, the probabilities hadn't met Captain America.

He collared the man in front, bashed him against the wall and threw him down the stairs before knocking out the next two with his shield. Another one rushed him, and Steve crouched low to catch his foot and overbalance him. He toppled over the railing and landed with a sickening thud three stories below. The next pulled his gun but Steve bashed him the head with his shield and caught his gun while he crumpled, turning it on the remaining seven and shooting down two.

The last five looked at him.

"Anyone else?" he snarled.

There was a general exchanging of looks.

"I don't get paid enough for this," one muttered. A few others nodded while another poked at a fallen colleague with a foot.

Steve started up the stairs, and the mercenaries pressed against the wall to get out of his way. He made it to the fifth floor without further incident and slammed through the door.

The hall was eerily empty. Steve jogged all the way down to one end and started kicking in doors, because even full of vengeful panic, he was nothing if not systematic.

Six doors later he met some mercenaries guarding another door who clearly did get paid enough for this, and whose budgets stretched to automatic weapons. They fired and Steve dove behind the wall, firing back in hopes it would encourage them to stay in the room.

He considered his options. He had a gun with three bullets, his shield, and endless amounts of the ability to be fucking sneaky.

He lay down lengthwise against the wall and edged his shield into the open doorway, leaving enough overlap between the shield and the doorframe to cover his arm. The curve at the bottom left enough room for him to point his gun through the gap between the shield and the floor.

He fired a shot. The men inside fired back, a few bullets biting through the wall and punching Steve's armor in a way he knew would leave bruises, but most hit the shield with a surprisingly sprightly tinging noise.

The shots stopped and Steve withdrew his gun and risked a quick peek through the gap. There were a few bodies on the floor and two guards left looking a bit bewildered.

Steve grinned. Good old ricochet.

He popped up and took out a knee each of the remaining guards before running in to scoop up another gun and knock them out with the butt of it.

He opened the door they were guarding to find a nicely furnished room that looked a bit like one of the waiting areas at Stark Tower. There was another door at one end, and he went through it to find a kitchenette, complete with breakfast table. There was a half-eaten bowl of cereal sitting by the sink. The sheer normality of the setting made Steve pause. He yanked open another door to find a bedroom and wondered for a moment if he had fallen asleep on the plane and was in the middle of a nightmare where he opened door after door after door and got nowhere. He spotted another door across the bedroom and wrenched it open so hard he tore it off its hinges.

A man inside lounged against a wall, looking bored. Another man sat at a desk and looked up as Steve dropped the door with a crash, an expression of annoyance at the interruption quickly smoothed over by one of interest. But Steve didn't really see either of them because his attention was on the person standing by the windows.

"Sophia."

A/N:

As you may have noticed, I know nothing about computers and coding. Sorry. Also, I know Steve's shield technically absorbs vibrations and therefore ricochet isn't really a thing that happens, but...convenient plot point. Just go with it.

Also also, I just sent the last chunk off to my beta, so it's a downhill run from here. Updates will probably come fast.