"On the floor," Lucie grunted as Steve led her up the grated ramp and into the quinjet.
There was no need for Steve to have Lucie tucked tightly against his side, Batroc and his men were securely in custody and the hostages were being taken care of by STRIKE. With each step, her left boot stuck ever so slightly to the metal as if she had stepped in gum but she didn't care enough to inspect the bottom of her shoes.
"She needs a medic," Steve said as he helped gently lower her to the deck, his hands ghosting over the slick sheen that had soaked through her body armour before he quickly allowed Natasha to take over.
If Lucie was annoyed by being talked over then she didn't let on, choosing instead to wipe the drying blood from her nose with the back of her hand. She was used to coming back from missions a little worse for wear but usually, she would just pop a couple of ibuprofen and call it a day; but the sticky heat that was starting to make her tank top cling to her ribcage told her that it wasn't one of those days. She reached for the zip on the front of her ballistic vest and tugged it to her groin to give Natasha better manoeuvrability, already trying to construct a plan of action.
"She is the medic," Natasha negated, planting herself behind Lucie so that she could use her thighs to keep her in place while she worked.
Steve went to argue, to point out yet another lie and detail that had been kept from him but Natasha just shook her head in warning, reminding him that it wasn't the time. Taking her silent advice, he took his seat nearby where he could keep the pair in sight.
Natasha swung a black backpack about the size of a cereal box and marked with a red cross into Lucie's lap that was stuffed with bandages and gauze. As she dug through it, she tossed the useless items out of the way and handing over a pair of surgical sheers over her uninjured shoulder along with sterile gauze and alcohol wipes. She didn't flinch as Natasha cut the strap of her tank top to get better access, even as the cool outer edge of the steel blade kissed her skin.
"Thanks."
"Don't worry about it," Natasha replied, tearing open the first of the alcohol wipes and going straight for the blood-caked wound across the bottom of her shoulder blade forcing Lucie to wince forward away from the sting.
Without meaning to, Steve jolted forward, his hand automatically taking hold of hers.
"Christ, your bedside manner is shit!" Lucie hissed, scrunching her eyes shut and breathing away the remnants of the disinfectant while it's the scent of it tingled in her nose.
She didn't let go of his hand but she didn't acknowledge it either despite being grateful that it was there. Every movement stung, even the rising and falling of her diaphragm forcing air in and out of her lungs was starting to burn and agitate the puncture in her arm as the entry brushed against blood sodden cotton.
"Quit being such a baby," Natasha scolded as if she was speaking to an overdramatic child over a scraped knee rather than someone with a potentially serious injury.
"How's bad does it look?"
"The knife chipped your shoulder blade and bounced off but you've got a nasty gash in your arm. It's deep. Turn muscle, maybe something."
"What's the bleeding like?" Lucie asked, forcing herself to ask questions to direct her own medical treatment despite knowing that her partner was more than qualified. The distraction helped for a few moments, allowing her to almost believe that she was the one in charge of delivering care to her patient.
"You've lost maybe a pint and it doesn't look like it's slowing down."
Suddenly the warm feeling in her arm made sense, until then she had put it down to fading adrenaline or the dull burn of a well-worked muscle, instead when she looked at her hand she saw her pulse making its way down the inside of her bicep, pooling at her elbow and soaking into the leather of her fingerless leather gloves, staining Steve's hand in the process. When she followed the trail she saw just how much of her own blood she was sat in and for a moment, despite her training, she almost faltered.
"Probably caught the brachial artery," she murmured without realising, allowing herself half a second to think through and decide on a plan before pulling a tourniquet and sliding it up her arm just above her elbow.
"Here, tighten the band and then twist the windlass," Lucie ordered, holding out her arm so that Steve would take hold of it.
He didn't argue, watching her pained expression carefully to see if he had tightened it enough. When he had been on the frontlines a tourniquet had been a strip of cloth or a strap tied in a tight knot. It was simple but it bought soldiers some valuable time. Following her orders, he carefully watched to make sure the pool he had knelt in hadn't grown any and a quick nod from Natasha told him that the bleeding had stopped.
"It's stopped," Natasha said for Lucie's benefit.
Lucie took a deep breath, as relieved as if she had been the one stemming a patients blood loss. "Good. You can stop worrying now Cap." She tried her best to ignore the almost unbearably tight vice around her arm.
He met her eyes and before he could reassure her that she was going to be fine, she interrupted with a squeeze of her hand against his wrist. Just like that, any concern he had been convinced that he had seen in her eyes was gone, the jovial agent was back with a laugh in her throat and a glint in her eye as if nothing had happened at all.
"Couple of bandaid's and I'll be right as rain. Right, Nat?"
"Something like that," the spy answered.
Rather than look her in the eye, he made sure to keep one eye on the pool of blood nearby and to count each beat of Lucie's heart, the rhythm help alleviate some of the stress of the mission and destroying most of his anger towards the woman in the process.
"Your heart rate is going up."
"I'm probably going into shock. Better hurry up Romanoff."
"Ten seconds," Natasha cautioned, giving her a reassuring squeeze on her uninjured shoulder just before she started to stuff gauze into the deceptively small puncture in Lucie's arm. "Distract her," she added to Steve.
"I'm not ten years old," Lucie spat, squeezing her fingertips into the palms of her hands to alleviate some of the discomfort.
"Don't look at me like that," she begged when she caught the look in Steve's eyes, all wild concern and pity that left an uncomfortable pit in her stomach.
"Like what?"
She didn't offer an answer, instead staring at him as if the answer should already be obvious. Without meaning to, he handled her like a smoke-filled glass in which one wrong move would allow the smoke to escape and shatter the glass into sand. He kept her at arm's length while simultaneously keeping a trained eye on every movement. She knew fine well that he was watching her, she would be a fairly shitty spy if she didn't since he wasn't exactly being covert. A lecture had been expected, she had banked on him berating her to have been more careful when securing the prisoner and to be lectured with possible scenarios of how it could have been so much worse than a severed basilic vein and a bloody nose. The lecture never came.
"You haven't been yourself. Let me help you."
Instead of the lecture, he held his free hand out for hers, an olive branch he wished that he had extended sooner and prayed that she would still take. It didn't take much convincing for her to slap her hand into his, gripping it tightly but unable to meet his eyes again, instead focusing her attention completely on the white star in the centre of his chest, the emblem of Captain America. Tiny beads of sweat began to form on her temple and her eyelids became heavier until she eventually sagged forward into Steve's arms.
"Sorry to step on the moment. She's fine, just a sedative," Natasha hushed when she saw panic start to take over. She pulled Lucie back against her and gently manoeuvred her into the recovery position for the remainder of the flight. "This way she won't fight treatment when we land," she reasoned and Steve didn't argue, both knowing that Lucie would be furious when she woke up.
"Is she that bad a patient?"
Natasha smiled.
"You can still hold her hand."
With Lucie out of danger, Steve looked around at the rest of the team from the mission. STRIKE had managed to complete the mission with minimal damage, just a few cuts and bruises. Steve made a note that Rumlow didn't check on his team once. There was no friendly banter, no nicknames being thrown around, just an unnerving and practised silence. The difference between them and the two women within arms reach was as obvious as night and day. STRIKE was held together by necessity, an artificially constructed group created purely to get the job done. It had been like that when he was in the army, each man knowing his place and his role. He thought that he craved that kind of life again, to be part of something bigger than himself. Instead, he watched with envious eyes as Natasha and Lucie bickered over medical treatment with regret-filled apologies and merciful acts. Their devotion to each other was blinding. He didn't want to follow orders anymore, he wanted to make a difference and he wanted the kind of connection that Natasha and Lucie had nurtured. He wanted someone to look out for.
When the jet landed, the medical team was waiting to get a still sedated Lucie onto a gurney and up to the medical bay as fast as possible. Natasha went with her, following closely behind and leaving Steve behind staring at her bloodied leather gloves on the deck. He wanted to follow them, to make sure that Lucie was alright but instead, he rode the elevator in the opposite direction bound for Fury's office.
He didn't stop to change before making his way up to the Director's office, choosing to ignore Lucie's blood that had dried into the stitching of his uniform and the worn leather of his gloves. The woman stationed outside of Fury's office made a polite attempt to stop him, claiming that he was on a call or in a meeting, some excuse that Steve ignored completely, storming through the door in such a way that would have had him court marshalled back in the war. It wasn't just Lucie and Natasha, it went deeper. The two women were perfect examples of just how much of SHIELD was held together by secrets and lies, territory that he wasn't fully comfortable working within,
"You just can't stop yourself from lying can you?"
Unbothered by his entrance, Fury sat behind his chrome edged desk with a file in hand and a stack of papers beside him. There was no personality to the space, no photographs of family or friends, no momentos from missions gone by, no medals on display as you would expect from someone of Fury's rank. Instead, there were a handful of designer black leather sofas arranged around the room and a couple of minimalist floor lamps against the concrete walls. It was a space designed for aesthetic rather than practicality and was a far cry from the office Rosetta shared at the New York HQ where posters and weapons hung on every wall and there was actual evidence of life.
"I didn't lie. Agent Romanoff just had a different mission than yours."
Fury had planned for the Captain's frustrations the same way he planned for everything else, not willing to be on the back foot or be unprepared. Still, he didn't seem perturbed about being called a liar.
"Which you didn't feel obligated to share."
"I'm not obliged to share anything," Fury countered, barely looking up from the file that seemingly held the majority of his attention.
"Those hostages could've died, Nick!"
While Steve tried to keep himself under control it was obvious that he was furious at being lied to and he wondered just how much Lucie had dealt with herself to protect him from the darker side of SHIELD.
"I sent the greatest soldier in history to make sure that happened."
"Soldiers trust each other, that's what makes it an army. Not a bunch of guys running around shooting guns."
"The last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye. Look, I didn't want you doing anything you weren't comfortable with. Agent Romanoff is comfortable with everything," Fury reasoned, knowing full well that there wasn't much that the former Russian wouldn't do so long as she was unaware of any contradictions in her personal code of conduct.
"Including getting her best friend stabbed? Luce was injured covering for Romanoff."
"I read the preliminary report. Is she alright?"
"Like you care," Steve spat.
"Of course I care." Fury got to his feet, the file disregarded as he closed the space between himself and the Captain. "SHIELD has invested tens of millions of dollars into Lucia Stark," he said, immediately crushing any sentimentality.
"So she's an investment?" The lack of compassion or even humanity disgusted him. How many years of service had she offered? How many bullets had she taken? How much blood had she spilt? How much of it had been her own?
"Everyone is an investment, even Agent Romanoff. It just happens to be that Agent Stark is a lucrative one. She understands the way that we do business and she knows that there are certain aspects that she is unaware of. It's called compartmentalisation. Nobody spills the secrets because nobody knows them."
"Except you."
"You're wrong about me, I do share. I'm nice like that."
Fury signalled for Steve to follow him to his private elevator, already lining up his next play to win the Captain back to his side for SHIELD's benefit. Once inside, Fury leaned against the bar with all of DC on the other side of the glass.
"Insight bay."
"Captain Rogers does not have clearance for Project Insight," came a disembodied voice through the speakers.
"Director override. Fury, Nicholas J."
"Confirmed."
"You know, they used to play music in these," Steve said, reminiscing about days gone by when his mother used to take him to the department stores around Christmas so that they could buy a gift for his father. It was the only time his mother ever ditched her frugality, determined to show her gratitude for her husband for working so hard to support them.
"Yeah. My grandfather operated one of these things for forty years."
"Yeah?"
"My granddad worked in a nice building for good tips. He'd walk home every night, a roll of ones stuffed in his lunch bag. He'd say 'hi', people would say hi back. Time went on, neighbourhood got a little rougher. He'd say 'hi' they'd say 'keep on steppin'. Granddad got gripping that lunch bag a little tighter."
"He ever get mugged?" Steve asked.
"Every week some punk would say 'what's in the bag"
"What did he do?"
"He'd show them. Bunch of crumpled ones and a loaded .22 Magnum. Granddad loved people. But he didn't trust them very much."
The elevator doors opened onto a catwalk and beneath them was a fully equipt flight deck including a trio of helecarriers that stretched as far as the eye could see. Steel and chrome and glass dwarfing the staff on the ground that worked to ready the helecarriers for duty. It was more than Steve ever could have imagined to the point of it being overwhelming.
"Yeah, I know. They're a little bigger than a .22. This is Project Insight. Three next-generation helecarriers synced to a network of targeting satellites."
"Launched from the Lemurian Star," Steve realised, understanding how the puzzle pieces were falling into place.
"Once they're in the air they never have to come down. Continuous suborbital flight courtesy of our new repulsor engines."
"Stark?"
"Well, he had a few suggestions once he got an up-close look at our old turbines. These new long-range precision guns can eliminate a thousand hostiles a minute. The satellites can read a terrorist's DNA before he steps out of his spider hole. We gonna neutralise a lot of threats before they even happen."
"I thought the punishment usually came after the crime."
"We can't afford to wait that long."
"Who's 'we'?"
Until then he hadn't considered that there was someone in charge of SHIELD, he couldn't imagine it being something that Peggy would have stood for, to be told how to run her own agency after building it up from the dust and dirt of Camp Lehigh.
"After New York, I convinced the World Security Council that we needed a quantum surge in threat analysis. For once we're way ahead of the curve."
Steve shook his head, barely able to believe what Fury was saying.
"By holding a gun at everyone on Earth and calling it protection?"
"You know, I read those SSR files. Greatest generation? You guys did some nasty stuff."
"Yeah, we compromised. Sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well. But we did it so people could be free. This isn't freedom, this is fear."
"SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. It's getting damn near past time that you get with that program, Cap."
"Don't hold your breath."