Catherine's headache only increased as she started in on the paperwork from last night. Some people thought that medicine was just a diagnosis and a couple shots. That was a cute idea. It was much worse than that.
Everything had to be documented for her own future reference and the household on-call surgeon, Stephanie.
Thankfully she already had the medical forms from Peter's school and yearly doctor visits. She wasn't surprised when those checkups stopped two years ago. That must have been when he got bit or stung or whatever. The new medical folder looked odd on her screen. It was tucked in between the twins and Natasha. The Avengers, well what was left of them, hadn't grown for a while.
"Knock knock Catherine." The door opened and she could see the reflection of Andy settling against the door frame.
She snapped the screen shut. "Can't you read signs?"
He leaned back and popped off the sticky note. "Oh yeah, look at that. Do Not Disturb. Oops."
He had chosen to wear his I am Iron Man shirt and looked absolutely bored out of his mind. He should be grown enough to figure out how to amuse himself. He settled back against the frame and studied the room. It was still the same, bare except for the typical office supplies and her own fridge.
"I know that you've got superhero clearance but you don't have to rub it in." He played with the pincushion on his wrist. There must be no suits to work on. Well, he had been doing something, she corrected herself. Muscles flexed on his arms again. She hadn't seen that for a long time.
"I was out late with a new patient. I've got to work on the file."
"Spider-Man?" His eyebrows raised.
"Yes."
There was no harm in admitting that. The facts were easy to put together. Usually something exploded and she was called onto the scene and then came into work with her "grumpy face" as he liked to call it. Stark's eyes on his shirt stared back at her with a look that should have been stoic but appeared constipated with the wrinkling.
Her cell phone rung on the desk, the default sound that sounded more hollow than substantial.
The caller ID stated Unknown. It wouldn't be Nick Fury. He had the office number. Andy was right in front of her although she'd never gotten around to deleting his number in her contacts.
"I thought you swore off your phone after your purge of Instagram and hopes of fame." He walked over and leaned towards the screen. She paused and waved a hand at him.
"Did you ever get a following?"
The glare she gave him would have killed him had it been just a little stronger. The phone slid into her fingers as she took the call on speaker.
"Catherine? Are you there?" They stilled. The voice was familiar to her. The voice was familiar to him. "We're in the area and I need to call in a favor."
"Okay." She felt herself sliding back into the coldness that she took with her to a medical situation. They looked at each other. Someone groaned in the background. "What do you need?"
"A full kit, anything you've got for a concussion and Andy for the suits. I'll text you our location. Hurry."
Black Window hung up the phone and Catherine sucked in her breath. The paperwork was going to have to wait.
Part of her should be worried about being caught she mused as she guided one of the work cars down into the guts of Brooklyn. Technically, she was aiding the wrong side now that the whole "civil war" thing went down. Her thumb tapped against the wheel as they neared the building.
"I'm hoping for bullet holes," Andy said. A taxi hissed by them. "Those are easy."
She shook her head. "I'm hoping our friends haven't been shot."
"You know what I mean." Annoyance was in that tone."We really shouldn't be doing this."
"I know." Her thumb tapped quicker against the steering wheel.
"It's exciting." He leaned over towards her.
"In your own seat please." She yanked the car into a parking spot a little harder than she needed to and he popped back into a healthy distance between them.
The building didn't look like much. It was an apartment complex, brick front with pity porches that were barely more than a four foot by three foot space. A couple housed dead plants. Natasha had give her the front door code and she punched it in. The keypad chirped in response and the lock yanked itself open.
A mom and her daughter were looking at them across the street. Two strangers walking into a building with large duffel bags. Her bag could probably fit that five year old in it without any trouble. She tried to smile at the mom but she didn't take the bait. Catherine held the door open for Andy. The lady was still standing. She probably thought that they were a couple.
Unfortunately, maturity level wasn't a physical trait.
The inside of the apartment wasn't promising. Two floors up she decided the stairway hadn't been cleaned since construction. The dead leaves, mud and scraps of trash had built up. She knocked twice on 5A.
Andy tapped his foot on the ground. It was still true. It built a knot in her throat. They shouldn't be here. Go ahead Stark, she threw it at the ceiling, find us and tell us to stop.
The door opened. The shock of blonde almost made her think that she had gotten the wrong apartment. No, under that new hair was Natasha. The gun in her hand fell and she stepped back into the apartment.
"Thanks for coming." She was hoarse and they walked inside the cool apartment. It was dark but she could see the beginnings of a home base for them. A computer was wired to the wall in a corner and the couch had be dragged next to a table to make a substitute chair for their dining room table.
Catherine focused. She had a job to do now. Natasha didn't look to be in the best shape. She was pale, her lips were cracked and part of her hair was matted in the back. That's probably where the request of concussion medicine was coming from.
What worried her was the lack of her friend, Steve Rogers.
Andy had gone silent and brushed past them. He probably had spotted the rumbled suits on the table.
Natasha combed back the strange new hair and turned towards one of the doors. "Steve's in here. We were tracking down a target. Things went south. He took a drop from a building onto a closed dumpster. I think there was a couch or something inside. His shoulder is dislocated bad enough that we can't get it back in ourselves."
"Right." The bedroom wasn't as dark as the living room but it was still barely a bedroom. Captain America was sprawled across the bed and already she could see why they couldn't get it in. With the strong muscles that ripped across his chest, the bone and joint were pulled tight against the rest of his body.
"Hey Doc…" Steve's face was shiny with sweat but he still managed a half smile as he lifted his head. It wasn't the wide grin that she had seen time and time again in his glamor shots.
Catherine put the bag at the side of the bed and sat down next to him. The shifting of the mattress caused a spasm and he clutched the bad shoulder.
"I'm still not a doctor and you," she said and tapped his forehead, "need to start looking before you jump."
That got a thin laugh out of him. Her fingers hovered over the undershirt. It would probably take both of them to get it to snap back in. He took a deep breath and released his shoulder. She brushed over the oddness of the joint. It was bad but not impossible with a little motivation.
"Hey, I patched up a fan of yours yesterday. He wanted a Captain American bandaid."
"Oh yeah?" He asked weakly but all the interest was gone. Not a good sign, he must be in a lot of pain.
He was dehydrated. This wasn't a problem for them. They were always healthy to the envy of all the plebeians of the world. They were being driven or doing the driving.
She wanted to ask so many questions about these two people that she knew. Where they had been since prison, since everything else, but Natasha hovered nearby. Her eyes kept darting between them. Her hand was still near her gun. Part of Catherine wanted to snap at her. For years she had taken care of them.
"Okay. Here is what we are going to do," Catherine was matter-a-fact. "We're going to treat that shoulder, then I want to get blood from both of you to check that physically you are alright otherwise. After that, you'll both need to either promise me that you are going to drink more fluids or I'll be setting you up on an IV for a couple hours. Deal?"
"How are you going to run the tests?" Something was hard in her voice.
"At the lab."
"Stark's?"
She shrugged. "It's the only one I've got. He doesn't babysit my department and just because you got in a hissy fight, I was never directly told to stop helping you."
It was a stretch. Stark's frustration had worked down the ranks like wildfire. She'd had "the talk" with him several times since about drinking.
Natasha's finger tapped her gun and her eyes went to the window. Catherine sat back on the bed.
"Unlike the man in the tin suit, I don't abandon people so before you give me some bullshit about trust and loyalty, think about Steve. The less time we argue, the less time he has to be in pain. It's up to you but you asked me and Andy here."
Steve smiled quietly from the mattress. They often thought alike. Her time in the ER and his in the army seemed to make their viewpoint match. Get the work done. Do the best you can. Get eight hours of sleep. Well, maybe not for him with the deep pockets under his eyes.
She looked back at Natasha. Nothing had changed. How many times had she helped her? Over the years, there had been times when Catherine had spotted the problem before the assassin had. Surely that meant something.
"Fine."
"Let's get this joint back in place Cap." She refocused. "Natasha, I'll need your help."
They worked for twenty minutes in silence as they forced the humerus back in place. She ended up numbing the joint to make it easier on the poor soldier. These things felt simple to her. She knew how to fix this: say the right words, apply pressure in the right area, and then allow the years of experience to take over. Super soldier or not, the body worked the same.
Eventually they moved back out to the living room, leaving Steve to fall asleep with the IV dripping next to him. She didn't blame him for taking that option. She labeled the red tubes with the date and his last name before slipping them into a biohazard bag and into her kit. Natasha's were next to his.
Andy had been working at the table with his earbuds in. Somehow he had found a floor lamp to turn on making the space brighter. The suits looked bad but the man was talented. He was seaming in the new fabric carefully along the edges of the outfit. The bullet proof front of Captain America's suit was spread across the table. The little sewing machine was humming adamantly as it chewed through the thickened fabric. Stark's logo lit up blue from over his shoulder.
"If we were at a hospital, I would order a CAT scan for this bang." Catherine addressed the swollen skin on Natasha's head.
"Well, we aren't there." She twitched under her attention as Catherine gently touched the angry spot. There was certainly some swelling.
She hummed in response and then switched topics. "What happened to that little kitten of yours? It isn't here."
When things looked like they were going to be stable, a pipe dream now, Natasha had gotten a cute little brown, black and white thing. To her knowledge, it hadn't actually lived with her but with someone else. Those details were vague. Everything was vague when it came to Black Widow.
A flicker of a smile came across her face. "Artem is growing. I got a video of him yesterday."
"Can I see?" There was certainly trauma on her head but the skull underneath appeared undamaged. The headache must be incredible.
Natasha pulled out a battered phone. A cat jumped from one chair to another. The wrinkles and stress on Natasha's face melted. It was little things like this that told her that this was real. It wasn't another lie. Sometimes she did that, told her one thing when the scars on her body told another. Catherine never corrected her.
The video looped over and then she caught herself, locking the phone instantly. "Are you done here?"
The soldier was back.
"I'll give you some medicine for nausea." She pulled a small bag of pills. "Take them with food. I'd tell you to rest a couple days but I know that you'll be gone tomorrow."
She took the bag. "In eight hours if we are lucky."
"Which means six." Catherine adjusted some of the supplies in her bag. "Don't push Steve too much. Everybody needs rest, super soldier or not."
"We do what we need."
She crossed her arms with the bag tucked underneath one. Her gaze was challenging, a hard line in the sand. Catherine zipped the duffel and got up. Andy had finished a bit ago.
"Where were you this afternoon, Fernando?" Natasha's tone changed, casual, a safe topic. She had never used his nickname and Catherine was sure that Andy hated it. Only his family called him that and he'd been trying to convince them otherwise for years.
He looked up from packing the sewing machine. "No 'Thank you'? You blew a whole seam on the thigh of your suit. It took a miracle and spandex to get that back in shape."
The response he got was silence.
He waved a hand. "I was drinking margaritas with Catherine and blowing off work."
Catherine pulled the bag onto her shoulder. "We went out on a job. Andy needed some fabric and I needed a break. We stopped for Starbucks on the way back. It's that easy."
"Alright." Black Widow slouched against the couch. "I'll call you in a day or two about the blood results."
Her eyes were exhausted as they trained on her. There were beaches and resorts out there that nobody would fine them. Hell, a cabin in the woods would do the same job. The words caught up in Catherine's throat, knotting and curling against each other. Andy waited by the door. She forced them down. Natasha switched her focus to Andy.
"Hey, nice shirt by the way."
"Thanks."
Catherine shoved down a laugh. Andy had somehow had time to switch out his shirt. Captain America's face grinned clownishly back at her.
They were playing both sides. It was dangerous. Fear got her in bed sometimes but it was nothing compared to what she was accomplishing. They were able to help the world, as long as Stark didn't find out.
Thank you for such incredible feedback!
Before we go on, I've got to note a couple things:
I've had to tone down "super healing" a little for this story to work. They are still superheroes but something has to give.
I'm trying to work within the timeline as much as possible but things may get a little stretched here and there.
I have no background in medicine so forgive any mistakes.
I'm thankful that you all like the story so far. What do you think of this chapter? I've got to say, Andy has been growing on me personally. Drop me a review and let me know! - Quin
