Maggie heard from SHIELD for the first time two weeks after her meeting with Nick Fury in New York.
She received an encrypted text message in the dead of night: Triskelion. Thursday 2200.
Intrigued, she made the journey to DC and arrived at the tall, imposing structure of the Triskelion after night had fallen. She'd seen the building before during the day, when she hadn't even known SHIELD existed. At night the structure let out little light, only security floodlights at the ground level and a handful of office windows still lit up.
As Maggie drove over the road bridge across the Potomac, she wondered how she'd get in. It wasn't like the spy organisation would just let anyone wander in. But when she parked on the road and glanced over, she saw a redhead illuminated in the floodlights by the main entrance, hands in the pockets of her dark jacket.
Maggie grinned and jogged across the road toward her. "Evening, Romanoff."
"Stark." Romanoff inclined her head, then held out a blank grey plastic card. "This is for future use, it will give you access only to the areas you need access to."
"Sounds fair. I take it all the cloak and dagger is for my first training session?"
Romanoff's lips quirked. And with that, she led Maggie inside. The Triskelion at night was quiet, but not empty. As Maggie trailed after the silent redhead she noted a few offices with the lights still on, and a few other agents and employees strode past them. It was clear Romanoff was leading her down the less-travelled routes, however, since Maggie doubted they wanted to announce her presence to all of SHIELD.
Maggie stared at everything as they walked down gleaming passageways and past wide windows looking out over the glowing city. The Triskelion was utilitarian and business-like, all steel greys and plate glass, but there was a beauty to it. She could only imagine what kind of facilities and resources they were working with behind all those locked doors.
They were striding along a crosswalk over the gleaming lobby space when Romanoff spoke. "The Triskelion became the main SHIELD headquarters in the 90s," she explained. Maggie peered down into the lobby to see a marble display covered in stars - it read THE WALL OF VALOR. "Peggy Carter was Director then, with Howard Stark as her chief engineer and weapons developer. He designed this building."
Maggie abruptly stopped walking. Romanoff appeared to anticipate this and stopped too, turning as Maggie craned her neck back and stared.
Maggie eyed the bones of the building around her, the arcing simplicity of it. She thought about the building she and Tony were planning to construct in New York. And now here she stood, in her father's creation.
Romanoff watched her evenly. After another moment Maggie drew in a deep breath, nodded, and then they walked on.
Romanoff finally opened the door to a massive space: a gym, Maggie realized. Her eyes scanned over exercise equipment, weights, a sparring mat, and over by the far wall what looked like an obstacle course of some kind, with bars, ladders, mats, and large, moveable foam blocks. The place smelled of plastic and cleaning products. The gym was completely empty - apparently Romanoff had the clearance to reserve a whole area to herself - save for one man by the sparring mat.
"What is he doing here," Maggie hissed, standing rigid in the doorway.
Clint Barton waved to her with a grin. He wore tracksuit pants and an underarmor shirt.
Romanoff closed the door behind her and cocked her head. "Clint is my friend, and together we make up STRIKE Team Delta. Clint has knowledge and skills to offer you that I can't, and it's unwise to turn down an offer like that."
Maggie let out a long, slow breath. "Fine."
They walked over to meet Barton, who dipped his chin in greeting. "Nice to meet you properly." He stuck out a hand. "Call me Clint."
Maggie reached out and shook his hand once. "Call me Maggie. I… thanks for offering to train me."
"I wouldn't have missed it," he grinned, then cocked his head at her. "I feel like you and I got off on the wrong foot."
"I guess you could say that." Maggie couldn't help a smile.
"STRIKE Team Delta is responsible for your training," Romanoff explained, eyes flicking between them. "So you'll be learning from Clint and I, interchangeably. And if you choose to go on missions, you'll most likely be assigned with us."
Clint peered at Maggie. "How'd you break my jaw?"
Romanoff sighed, as if she'd expected Clint to veer off-task. But the sigh was fond. Maggie hadn't expected fondness from Romanoff.
Maggie frowned at him. "You don't remember?"
He shrugged. "I remember you kicked me. But I… one thing you should know about me is that I'm good at noticing things. And I calculated that kick before it landed and I knew it would hurt, but it shouldn't have broken my jaw. Are you enhanced?"
Ah. Maggie blinked. "Well, I guess it depends how you define enhanced." She pulled up her right trouser leg and kicked off her shoe, revealing her dark, metal prosthetic. "That right there is reinforced titanium and carbon fiber," she explained as she twisted the limb for her audience. "That's what broke your jaw."
Clint squatted down, peering at her leg. "I forgot."
Maggie met Romanoff's cool green eyes. She didn't forget. "Some people do," she shrugged. "The prosthetic is good, and I've had years of practice. I don't exactly hide it - well, unless I'm the Wyvern."
"It's never caused you any setbacks?" Clint asked, now leaning back to take in her stance.
"It hasn't. Not having a leg? Yes, that has."
He frowned. "Sorry, I-"
"Don't be. You're here to train me, you should know my weaknesses." Maggie settled on both feet, perfectly steady.
"I don't know if we should put that in the weakness column," Clint said, still eyeing her leg.
Maggie shrugged. "It comes in handy." Clint was still crouching, peering at her, so she lifted her prosthetic foot and let the blade in her heel flicker out for just an instant.
His eyes widened. "Is that-"
"Hm?" Maggie asked innocently as she toed her foot back into her shoe.
Romanoff put her hands on her hips. "Let's get started."
They began with an all out spar, "to assess your skills," Romanoff told her.
She began with Clint. They faced off on the sparring mat, eyeing each others' stances until Romanoff said: begin.
Clint was just as fast as she remembered. He sprang forward, and she twisted to meet him. They weaved and bobbed as they fought, snapping in and out and around. He didn't shy away from using his strength against her, trying to grapple her into submission. Maggie was strong herself, though, and managed to muscle her way out of a few holds. Romanoff stood on the edge of the mat, arms crossed and eyes piercing.
Maggie landed a few good hits on Clint - one a clean uppercut that bruised her knuckles but almost knocked him flat on his back, and another a leg hook that did flatten him, though he was able to roll out of her reach. In the end Clint kicked Maggie's prosthetic leg out from under her and slammed a fist down beside her head before she could block it. She knew the blow would have knocked her out. She let out a breath.
She respected him for using his knowledge about her leg against her. Maggie wished his weaknesses were so obvious.
"Good," Clint smiled, and helped her up. He glanced over to Romanoff. "Now you're up against Nat."
Maggie bit the inside of her cheek when the redhead kicked off her shoes and then strode onto the mat, her limbs loose. "I already know I'm going to lose," she said. "So… what should I be aiming for here?"
Clint laughed. "Ten seconds."
Maggie frowned, but then Natasha sprang, and she knew what Clint meant. Natasha slammed her knee into Maggie's stomach and clipped her over the head in the first second and she almost went down right there. In the next second Nat leapt up and swung a leg behind Maggie's head, pulling her off balance with the weight of her body.
Maggie rolled with the tug, curling down to the mat, and turned the momentum back on Natasha - but the move only slightly worked. They both tumbled across the ground, limbs entangled, and the next second Natasha somehow had her arm around Maggie's neck. Maggie spun and headbutted the redhead in the face.
They grappled and twisted, and pain lit up Maggie's body from blows she didn't even see. Her breath burned in her chest. Each blow, instead of disorienting her, helped her let go of her thinking. Each blow brought her back to those fighting rings she used to visit, to the joy and mystery of a new opponent. Maggie pushed down a grin and managed to flip out of Natasha's hold. She rolled to her feet and they faced off, circling, their footsteps silent. Maggie didn't focus on any part of Natasha - not her piercing green eyes, or her fists, or her feet. She allowed herself to see the whole of her opponent, reading each move and look.
When they whirled back together again Maggie tried moves she hadn't tried in years, moving quickly and creatively, barely knowing her own movements before she made them. She knew it wasn't graceful - this was bare knuckle fighting, grappling and swinging, but it lit up her mind in a way that nothing else had except for flying. The only sounds were the fleshy impacts of blows connecting, the slide of feet over the mat, and their breaths.
When Maggie went down with a mouthful of blood and both arms hooked by Natasha's left foreleg, she was laughing.
They rolled apart and Maggie spat out the blood, still chuckling. She accepted Natasha's hand and let the other woman pull her to her feet. Natasha looked as unruffled as always.
Clint made a show of checking his watch. "Seventy two seconds. Not bad, Wyvern."
Natasha nodded, sizing her up. "Good. Could be better."
Maggie set her hands on her thighs and laughed breathily. "You were going easy on me."
Natasha shrugged one shoulder. "You wouldn't learn if I was only trying to kill you."
"I might."
Natasha's eyes gleamed with the challenge, but then Clint waved a hand.
"First thing we need to focus on, I think, is building up a repertoire of technique. I can tell you've had some formal training, but you're focused on just throwing out the easiest blow. That's good for speed, and you're a quick thinker, but you need to have a bank of combat techniques to draw on so you can make an informed choice when it comes to throwing a punch."
Natasha nodded. "You've been trained by martial artists - useful, but that is a sport. You need to be trained to turn those skills toward more than self defense or passing a test."
"To kill," Maggie surmised warily.
"Yes." Natasha saw Maggie's unease. "I'm not saying you have to kill. But you must know how so you can go up to that boundary, and then stop."
The words echoed with meaning. Natasha glanced to Clint, and Maggie realized it must be something he had told Natasha once. Maggie didn't know a lot about Natasha's background.
"And hey," Clint said, "I saw a few moves there that I've never seen before. I think we might be able to learn from each other." He clapped his hands. "Let's get started!"
They spent the rest of their session blocking out different kinds of strikes, and did a few runs of the obstacle course. Maggie had missed this: learning.
Natasha and Clint worked cleanly with each other: they understood the other's every unsaid thought, one's strengths complimenting the other's. Maggie understood why they'd been put on a strike team of their own. Maggie willingly gave herself over to them as their student, eager to absorb everything they had to teach her. Natasha demanded nothing other than perfection, and Clint had been right about his sharp eyes - he noticed every slight dip and flaw in her technique.
Clint was easier to read. She got the sense he could be closed off when he liked, but he appeared to have decided to open himself to her. He traded jokes and easy banter with Maggie, and even told her a little about himself: he'd never finished high school, and he'd started at SHIELD young, because ever since he was a kid he'd had an unerring eye for marksmanship. Natasha didn't share much, but she was open in her own way: she readily answered Maggie's every question about technique and form, a watchful guiding presence. As the night wore on, she even seemed more inclined to smile at Maggie and Clint's jokes.
There was something that tickled at the back of Maggie's mind every time she saw Natasha fight. She couldn't pin down the thought but the way Natasha moved reminded her of someone.
Maggie put it together a few weeks later, the next time she and Natasha sparred in the empty Triskelion gym. Maggie had spent the past weeks absorbed in designing the Stark Tower, and it was a relief to put aside all that thinking and focus on movement.
Clint was stretching on the other side of the gym, and Maggie was sweating as she faced Natasha. The other woman whirled from a Krav Maga technique and into a brutal Russian ARB blow, and Maggie was so startled by a sudden realization that the blow knocked her flat.
Natasha eased off - rare for her - and waited on the balls of her feet with her fists raised.
Maggie propped herself up on her elbows and looked up at Natasha. "You're from the Red Room," she gaped.
Natasha froze, and violence clouded her eyes. The sudden display of emotion was so unusual that it frightened Maggie, and she carefully got to her feet without taking her eyes off the other woman. Clint had stood up as well, and was watching them carefully.
Natasha did not lower her fists. "How do you know that name." She had wiped away all emotion and become a being of wisp and smoke, impossible to grasp or understand. Maggie did not miss the danger laced into her voice.
Maggie opened and closed her mouth. "I… years ago I brought in a woman named Zoya." Natasha's eyes flared with recognition. "She fought like you, and after I'd handed her to Interpol I traced her origins back to a destroyed building in Russia. I…" her mind raced. "You put an end to it, didn't you?"
There was a long moment of staring. Then Natasha's fists dropped.
Maggie swallowed. "I went there with the intention of putting a stop to it myself, but when I got there the work was done. I tried to figure out who did it, for months, but couldn't find a trace."
Natasha appeared to weigh Maggie's words, carefully still. Then she swallowed. "Yes. I graduated to become a Black Widow, and then later... I killed them. All except for the girls who were not yet lost. I brought them to a safe place - all of them went on to be adopted into families who cared for them. Zoya had already graduated, but when I found her she said she wanted to live a normal life. But I think… she could not entirely pull the Red Room teachings from her mind, and it consumed her."
Maggie let out a long breath, startled by Natasha's frank honesty. She couldn't imagine what the Red Room must have been like. She knew that they'd taken girls from such a young age that they wouldn't remember their families. If Natasha had graduated, then…
Maggie bowed her head. "I'm sorry for bringing up painful memories," she murmured. "For what it's worth, I think you're very strong."
She looked up, and the light in Natasha's eyes had shifted. Less flat and defensive, more… considering.
"Well," Natasha said, cocking her head. "I'm impressed you made the link simply by recognising similarities in my fighting style." Her shoulders loosened. "After the Red Room, I ended up being approached by a SHIELD agent. I tried to kill him."
"And very nearly succeeded." Maggie blinked at Clint's voice, forgetting he was standing right by the mat, and glanced over to see him wincing.
She looked back to Natasha to find the woman smiling. "Clint hasn't got a very good track record of recruiting assets."
Maggie laughed. "Well, it seems to have worked out for him so far. You're a SHIELD agent now."
Clint shrugged. "And I survived both of you, that's the important part." He cocked his head at Maggie. "You're not a SHIELD agent, though."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Are you trying to recruit me again?"
He held up his hands. "No, definitely not. I like my jaw as it is." He smirked at her. "And I get it. Kind of. You're…" he gestured a hand at her. "You're a Stark. You've got a whole lot more going on in your life than SHIELD. For us," he gestured between himself and Nat, "SHIELD was a way of putting our lives back together. Gave us a mission, and a way to do the right thing. Seems to me you figured out your mission long ago."
Maggie tried not to shiver at the way his words called to an old, buried part of herself. Her mission. She shook off the flames flickering at the back of her neck and forced herself to smile. "Well I appreciate the support. I can see the value of SHIELD, trust me. I'm just not sure that it or me would be made more valuable if I joined."
Natasha smiled. "Never say never."
Maggie visited the Triskelion once a fortnight to train, sometimes with just Natasha or just Clint, and occasionally neither of them were able to come due to a mission. Sometimes they met at the smaller New York SHIELD facility in midtown, though the gym there was small.
Maggie honed her fighting and firearms skills. Clint was a genius in the firing range, and Maggie couldn't help her amazement when she watched him fire arrow after arrow into the dead centre of each target, then did the same with a dozen different guns. He taught her tricks to improve her aim, and showed her how to read a weapon and use it as an extension of herself. How to control her breathing as she fired, how to gauge distances and aim and movement. Maggie realized quickly that Clint saw the world in a completely different way to most people.
Natasha was a genius on the sparring mat, but she didn't teach Maggie how to fight exactly like her. She taught Maggie how to fight like the Wyvern. She had Maggie train with the wings, so their weight on her back became her natural state of being. So she knew how to use them in battle as both a shield and a weapon.
You don't need to fight like a human, Natasha told her one evening. You can fight like a monster.
Those words stuck with Maggie. She knew Natasha didn't mean it as any form of insult, because it was true: with wings and claws and a barb flickering out of her metal foot, she was a monster in the best possible way. She learned to fight on her feet, in the air, and on the ground, shifting from one form to another like a beast.
After their training sessions the three of them sometimes went for a drink in one of the many cafeterias, sweaty and tired. Natasha remained quiet, but seemed to enjoy sitting and sipping her drink as Maggie and Clint talked about the latest episodes of Survivor and argued about his preference for the bow and arrow. It was nice for Maggie to be around people who knew her skills and capabilities and could more than match them.
Maggie flirted with Natasha from time to time, but didn't bother asking her out again - Natasha was a woman with clear and firm boundaries, and Maggie wasn't in the habit of being a pest. She thought about asking out Clint - he was a handsome guy and didn't take himself too seriously - but she got a vibe. She wasn't sure what the vibe was, though. Maybe he was gay.
Natasha also taught Maggie the subtler arts of being a… whatever she was. Not a soldier, or a spy. Something more. She taught Maggie how to watch people, how to use silence to draw truths from them, and how to slip through the world as a being made of smoke.
In one example of this, in March the next year Natasha brought Maggie to a DC bar for a drink. They chatted for half an hour, sipping beers and sharing a bowl of fries. The music was loud, and the air comfortably warm.
But then Natasha crossed her ankles and said: "Now tell me who's been watching you."
Maggie wondered if the question was intended to alarm her, but she didn't break eye contact. "Uh… the guy in the navy jacket by the dart board, the bartender, the pair of women in the booth have glanced at both of us a few times, and I'm pretty sure the guy with the blue highlights recognized me earlier - he left, probably to call some paparazzi contact of his."
"You're good," Natasha nodded in acknowledgement. "But you missed one."
Maggie broke eye contact at that, frowning, and swept the bar again. It was a packed, buzzing space, loud with 80s rock and clinking glasses. And she spotted what she missed the first time: behind the guy in the navy jacket by the dart board was a man turning a dart end over end in his fingers. He had been facing away from Maggie and Natasha, but Maggie realized that he could see them in the reflection off the window. She met his eyes in the reflection and cursed.
"Barton."
Natasha nodded. "You're skilled at picking up on unskilled observation - no doubt a skill from growing up in a famous family. You notice people noticing you. But you have no idea how to spot a trained spy."
Maggie nodded. "Okay, so teach me how to spot one." On the other side of the room, Barton tossed a dart almost lazily at the board. A bullseye, of course.
"No," Natasha said. "I'll teach you how to be one."
Remote Base, Alaska
The Winter Soldier was woken after three months in cryo. He did not know this, but the spaces between his missions were growing shorter. His masters were inching closer to their goals, and that meant more enemies to clear off the board, more witnesses to silence, more assets to acquire. In these dangerous times, they needed a scalpel.
The Soldier screamed as lightning erupted behind his eyes.
Maggie's life was full, and often exhausting, but for the first time in years she felt as if her life made sense. She worked on projects for SI, ran the Clean Energy Division, helped Tony with the Stark Tower project, trained once a fortnight at SHIELD, and also ran Wyvern missions all over the world. She got her intel from the shadow world and from SHIELD.
Maggie became familiar with the Triskelion building, and even got to know a few other agents. A few seemed surprised when they recognized her, but quickly adjusted - Maggie supposed SHIELD saw all sorts of people. She even got a glimpse of Fury from time to time, since he kept irregular office hours. She knew she was hardly a part of a fold, and she knew SHIELD were keeping secrets from her. Natasha and Clint never told her any of their mission details, and at times she felt pointed silences in conversations, absences of information. But the secrets didn't feel like the we've-got-bodies-locked-in-our-basement kind, so she didn't push.
She no longer felt the pressing, itching weight of anxiety whenever she walked into the SI Los Angeles headquarters. She spent her time there creating systems and designs that would help people, surrounded by a team of engineers and scientists who were just as thrilled by their work as she was. She had always loved invention. And now their invention was free from the spectre of death.
Maggie had not forgotten her mission.
Sometimes she could go days without thinking about it, but she knew it was always there. Always waiting for a quiet moment, or a few spare days, so she could throw herself back into the hunt. The hunt had almost become a routine for her. Maggie tracked assassinations and missing persons cases, an expert now at recognising the strange absences that marked the Soldier's presence.
The Winter Soldier was a part of herself that she was so used to pushing down into numbness, that when she confronted the memories and the idea of him it felt like flames licking up her throat.
She knew this was another secret she kept from Tony. But it was her last secret, the one she had been holding inside herself almost as long as she could remember. And she knew that she would tell him one day: when she had answers. When there was a face, a name, and justice.
She was still years behind the Soldier, but she didn't feel hopeless. The world was shifting and growing smaller. She could feel that the Soldier was still out there, and she wondered if maybe the world would grow too small for him.
In summer of 2011, she tracked a lead to Iceland. She'd been given the weekend off from SI, and Tony and Pepper were out for a holiday in Canada, so she had taken advantage of the free time.
She had flagged a suspicious death of a police officer in Reykjavik a few months ago, and decided it was finally worth following up in person.
Reykjavik was beautiful in summer, a sprawl of houses with brightly coloured rooves centred around the imposing bone-grey Hallgrímskirkja church. Maggie didn't speak Icelandic, but when she disguised herself as an Interpol detective and presented herself to the main police headquarters, the detective who'd handled the original case greeted her warmly in English.
He handed over the case file after checking her identification documents (complete forgeries, but she'd gotten good at those). Maggie flipped through the file, eyeing the man's details: Jon Sigmansson had been an officer for eight years, with a mostly honorable record save for a few unproven allegations of corruption.
She flipped to a photograph of a mangled silver sedan. She recognised the street - she'd walked down it this morning, eyes keen for the smallest detail. "What killed him?" she asked.
The detective, a flaxen-haired man with dimples, sighed. "Technically, the car crash did." Maggie turned the page and found the medical examiner's report. Blunt force trauma, fractured skull… "The medical examiner ruled blunt force trauma as the cause of death, though they had trouble matching the trauma pattern to the make and model of the car. Though as you can see, the car went through a great deal of damage."
Maggie nodded and turned another page to the ME's photograph of Sigmansson's head: red pulp and mashed skin. She flinched and closed the folder.
I've seen this MO before.
"It actually took us a couple of days to realize he'd been shot first," the detective told Maggie, perhaps not noticing her flinch. "When the ME found the entry and exit wounds. Then we investigated it as a suspicious death. It took us hours to find the shooter's nest. It was thousands of yards off, at what I thought must be an impossible angle." He sounded almost admiring. "The shooter left nothing, but our computers showed that that rooftop was the only place he could have fired from."
Maggie frowned. "And the bullet?"
"Russian make, no rifling to go on though."
Maggie didn't let the recognition show on her face. She opened the file and found the map of the city, with the line of fire etched down as a red line. "There's not many who could make a shot like that."
The detective shook his head. "Before we got this case, I would've told you there's no one who could make a shot like that. We thought that maybe Magnusson had pissed off an ex soldier or something, but nothing panned out."
Maggie pursed her lips. She had considered the military angle. It made sense, since he was the Winter Soldier, but she'd scoured military records from the last thirty years and been unable to find a good enough match. "Did you have any other theorized motives for the assassination?"
The detective shrugged. "Magnusson's girlfriend had an alibi, and he wasn't close with his family. No great inheritances. His girlfriend did say that he was a private sort of person, so she couldn't tell us about all his movements and connections."
Maggie bit her lip. "Hm." She'd been looking more closely at the kinds of people the Soldier went after. That was how SHIELD had found her, after all - by anticipating what kind of target she might hunt. But it was difficult to draw connections between most of them. The Soldier killed politicians, but also cafeteria staff. He killed Russians, Americans, Singaporeans. Communists and capitalists and anarchists. Men and women. Her best bet was that the Soldier killed people who knew something - though what, she couldn't get at. Perhaps some kind of political conspiracy, or ideal. And anyone who witnessed him also found themselves at the end of a Russian bullet with no rifling.
The detective sensed Maggie's frustration. "You're welcome to have a look through his effects, they're in here." He set a hand on a large box on his desk, then stood up. "I'll be back in a little while."
Maggie opened the box and began sifting through its contents: phone records, a watch, the man's briefcase, and other personal effects. As she did, she pictured the murder in her mind's eye: Magnusson driving down the street on his way to work in the dim grey dawn light, when a bullet streaked from thousands of yards away to smash through his jaw and into the base of his skull. He had veered off the road and into the side of a building, and still did not die. The shooter - she pictured the Soldier then, his gait even and his metal arm glinting - came over to check his work, and found that the job was not done. She pictured the flash of metal as his fist came down on Magnusson's face. She pictured his dead, empty eyes. She shivered and turned her attention back to the box's contents.
She finished reading through the phone records, and on a whim found the phone and charger and plugged it into the outlet on the detective's desk. She reached back into the box as the phone began to charge, but then frowned.
The phone was an iPhone, with an Apple charger. But as she looked back into the box she found a Samsung charger as well. Hm. It was probably nothing, but it pricked her interest. If Magnusson had a hidden secret that got him killed, it was possible that he had a second phone. She rifled through the box, but sure enough the hypothetical phone was long gone.
Maggie sat down and waited as the phone charged. She knew enough about the Soldier by now to know he was a genius at covering his tracks. But she didn't know how he smoothed crimes over in the way he did: vanishing witnesses, video records, and finances. Vanishing a phone from an evidence box in a police station. Maggie didn't think that even she could be so thorough.
When the iPhone had charged enough, she began trawling through its contents, hunting for anything unusual. All the calls and texts matched the phone company's log, his emails were all in order, and…
While checking his text messages, she stumbled across an unsent message. She checked the number in the addressee bar, did a quick trace on her own phone, and realized that it was the Icelandic Police Commissioner's personal cell. How did he even get the number?
But most of her attention was drawn toward the message itself, waiting in the subject bar: 6432289720027719.
Her mind whirred. Too long for a phone number. Maybe two phone numbers? Or a code for something, though it couldn't be a very long message. She translated the numbers to their alphanumeric values, then played around with a few patterns. But then it clicked:
Coordinates.
She figured out the annotation: 64°32'28.97"N 20°02'77.19"W. She checked the coordinates in her phone. A remote location a few hours drive out of Reykjavik.
Excited, Maggie dumped everything back in the box and resealed it. She wrote a note thanking the detective, and then left the station before he returned.
Though it made her itch with impatience, Maggie waited for the cover of darkness before she flew on metal wings to the coordinates. And despite her focus, she couldn't help but admire the Icelandic countryside - as she grew close to the coordinates she saw a sprawl of grassy plains and volcanic rock stretching around for miles. In winter, she knew, it would be a bitter casing of ice and snow, but in the darkness as she flew it looked inviting.
It took her fifteen minutes to figure out what she was looking for after she arrived at the coordinates. There were no buildings, no signs of people. But then she noted that one of the rocky sprawls had a strange shape to it. She landed and scoured the rock in darkness until she found it: a single door, metal lined, obscured by an outer casing of rock.
The work of a few more minutes had the door swinging open. It revealed a long, dark concrete corridor leading into the rock. For a moment Maggie stood silhouetted in the door, a figure in a dark flight suit with wings. To an observer it might have appeared as if she'd frozen, but she was instead scanning every possible read out through her HUD: thermographic vision, electronic readouts, enhanced audio. But each readout showed: nothing.
She stepped inside.
Maggie had found a base of some kind. She paced down long concrete corridors, past dusty, empty rooms, over metal gantryways. The base was clearly well designed, with rooms for housing people, a long room that looked like a cafeteria of some kind, storage units, and an operations room, but it was all completely empty. Not a scrap of furniture or hardware remained. Maggie could see marks on the floor where desks must have stood, or scrapes on the wall where there might have been shelves. She squatted and peered at the dust lining each room, trying to find the shape of footprints. There were no windows to the outside, and all the light fittings had been stripped away, so she relied on her HUD night vision.
She strode into a tall, square sort of room at the heart of the base with gantryways running around the top levels, and saw markings on the floor where some kind of large machine must have been - there were industrial-grade power outlets on the wall, and bolt marks on the ground. Maggie circled the dim grey space, trying to picture what kind of machine might have been here. A large computer bank, perhaps?
Maggie scoured the base for hours, searching for any kind of clue. Because she knew in her gut that the Winter Soldier had been here. But it was all military grade, completely stripped bare, and utterly blank. There was no suggestion at a purpose, or personality, or any hint at who had been here. It was if there was nothing behind the Soldier but murder and ice.
But she forced herself to think through the information she had. The Winter Soldier had had a base here. A fixed location. And if he'd had one here, surely there must be others. As equally well-hidden as this. And this was a large base, with barracks and enough space for a small army. Maybe it wasn't just the Soldier working alone? Perhaps he led an organisation of Winter Soldiers. A Winter Army. That would explain the many decades of activity.
The very thought made her skin crawl. One is bad enough.
"Magnusson knew about this place," she said aloud as she made her seventh circuit through the base. Perhaps he had come across it in an investigation, or… Maggie supposed he'd been involved somehow. A base in Iceland would require some participation from locals to gather supplies, perhaps monitor the roads and divert attention. Perhaps Magnusson had been working with the Soldier. She let out a breath. "But then he changed his mind," she realized. "And before he got up the courage to send those coordinates to the Police Commissioner… the Soldier put him down."
Maggie trailed her way back into the main room with the strange markings on the floor, her mind full and her heart heavy. She had been the first to find this base in years. The Soldier had completely wiped this place clean, on the smallest chance that it might be discovered. He thinks of every detail. Cautious to an extreme degree.
As Maggie stood in the empty, grey space, she felt the spark of her anger catch and flare. It scorched through her from her chest into her limbs, until she was shaking from the heat of it, her stillness burning her alive.
She swiped a clawed hand down at the floor and sparks skittered from the contact. She'd left four jagged scrapes in the concrete. Not enough. Maggie flung her wrist up and fired an energy bolt at the far wall and concrete came crumbling down. She didn't stop. She fired more energy bolts: at the walls, the roof, the metal gantryways. She amped up the power of her energy bolts each time and soon there were explosions lighting the darkness, concrete and rock crumbling down and caving in from the roof.
Maggie screamed as she fought the room, fought nothing. Fought a ghost. She filled that awful blank space with feeling: rage, helplessness, grief. It felt good to change the space irreparably, to leave some mark of her existence here. A sign that the Winter Soldier had not just been something that happened to her. She would happen to him.
When she had to back out of the room to avoid being crushed to death by the imploding ceiling, a plume of dust blasted out over her, coating her wings and suit. Maggie collapsed back against the wall, chest heaving. She could still hear rock cracking and falling, and metal twisting. She slowly caught her breath.
When her breathing was steady and the dust swirling through the air had settled on the ground, Maggie pushed off the wall. She drew herself tall, cleared her throat of the rough burn from screaming, and then left.
On her way out, Maggie set a few proximity alarms around the base. If anyone returned here, she would know about it. But as she closed the door on the dusty, empty space again, frustrated at another dead lead, she sighed. This place is just as dead inside as he is.
And Maggie still hadn't figured out how to catch a ghost.
On the other side of the world in a deeply hidden base, the Winter Soldier thought of nothing, and dreamed of nothing. Ice frosted his face and clung to his lashes.
Learning about SHIELD, and more specifically her father's involvement with them, had turned Maggie into somewhat of a history buff.
With Natasha's permission she delved into the SHIELD archives - well, what they would let her access anyway, only the Level 1 stuff. She read about the SSR, and how in the late 40's Howard Stark, Peggy Carter, and Colonel Chester Phillips had created and developed the agency, handling everything that the other agencies and governments of the world were not quite equipped to deal with. It was strange getting to know this version of Howard: his SHIELD work was not for profit, or to show off. He had kept this agency a secret his whole life, and devoted himself to protecting people. He had still been making weapons, sure, but SHIELD had… SHIELD had been his mission.
Perhaps Tony and I aren't so different from him after all.
She had a second purpose to her research. While studying the Level 1 documents they allowed her to read, she also read a few things she wasn't allowed to: namely what Howard had been up to around the time of his death. She wondered if it was his SHIELD work that got him killed. But the SHIELD files only said that in 1991 Howard Stark had been working on several personal projects, and had discussed bringing SHIELD in on the projects but was yet to actually do it. Disappointed, Maggie hid all evidence of her hacking the SHIELD files. Howard had been good at secrecy. Perhaps she'd never know why the Soldier had come for them that night.
One constant that kept coming up in her research was a name: Peggy Carter. Maggie pondered the name. As she trawled through the SHIELD files, it became increasingly clear that Howard and Peggy had been friends. She had once known the former Director of SHIELD as Aunt Peggy, the silver-haired, sharp eyed woman a familiar presence around the New York mansion. She had been kind, if a little brusque, but had most often been there to speak with Howard. When Tony and Maggie moved to the west coast, they'd eventually fallen out of contact. Tony had distanced himself from a lot of their dad's old friends, except for Obie, and he and Maggie weren't exactly the Christmas-card-sending type.
But where Maggie had seen Carter as merely a friend of her father's, now she saw how deep that bond went: Howard and Peggy had fought a war together, lost a friend together, created an international agency together. Maggie didn't know if she had anyone in her life she trusted like that, except for Tony.
And so, in the warm blush of summer, Maggie found herself looking the woman up. It was difficult to track her down, given that she used to run a massive spy agency, but eventually Maggie figured it out: last year, she had moved into an old folks home just outside D.C.
Maggie had asked Tony if he wanted to come with her. But he had given her a sad, pinched expression and said maybe later. She didn't push.
So on her weekend off she drove up to D.C. and showed up at the nursing home, uninvited. She hadn't known whether to send a letter or to call, and even if she had, she had no idea what to say. So she'd decided to bite the bullet and just show up.
She reflected that this was probably a mistake when she found herself being held at gunpoint.
All she'd done was present herself at the front desk, wearing sunglasses and a hat, and asked to see Mrs Carter. The receptionist smiled sweetly, said "just one moment" and ducked under her desk. Then she emerged with a Glock and aimed it right at Maggie.
Maggie blinked. "Uh."
The door leading into the facility burst open and two nurses stepped out, also armed.
Maggie slowly raised her hands. "If this isn't a good time, I can come back later."
The receptionist did not look amused. Her grip on the gun was steady, trained. "Identify yourself."
She swallowed. I probably should have anticipated that SHIELD would have protection on their former Director. "Maggie Stark."
The receptionist's eyes widened incrementally. "Take off the hat and glasses." Maggie obeyed, and the receptionist's jaw clenched. "How did you find this place?"
Maggie opened and closed her mouth. "I'm good at finding places. I really honestly didn't mean any harm, I just wanted to visit."
One of the nurses lifted her hand to her ear, and Maggie spotted a commpiece. "Yes, Director. The situation is under control and a perimeter has been set." A pause. "Sir, we believe it's Maggie Stark."
A few moments later, Maggie's phone rang in her pocket. The nurse nodded. "Take it."
Maggie carefully lowered one hand, eyes on the armed nurses, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. She answered the call. "Hi, Fury."
"What in the hell do you think you're doing?"
"I was hoping to visit an old family friend."
"And you didn't think to ask?"
Maggie floundered for a moment, then decided honesty was the best way to avoid getting shot. "I didn't know what to say."
There was a long pause. Sunlight streamed through the reception windows, and a radio was playing softly in the background. Maggie peered down the barrel of the receptionist's gun.
Then: "When you leave you are going to tell me exactly how you found this facility, and you are going to help shore up the defences so this never happens again. Now sit your ass down and wait for someone to tell you what to do."
He hung up, and Maggie blinked.
After another moment, the receptionist and the nurses all put their weapons away after receiving a command over their comms. Maggie let out a breath.
"Take a seat," said the receptionist, pointing to the waiting room chairs. Maggie obeyed without a word.
The atmosphere in the waiting room was tense. The receptionist was typing furiously at her computer, occasionally looking up to shoot Maggie a steely-eyed glance. Maggie could see people in various nursing home uniforms running perimeter checks and talking into their comms. Maggie sat and waited, unsure of what would happen next. She felt a little foolish.
But then one of the nurses from before strode through the door again and jerked her head at Maggie. "She'll see you now."
Maggie's eyes widened. "She'll… really?"
"She was quite insistent," the nurse said.
Maggie rose, wiping her palms on her jeans, then followed the nurse. They strode down long, squeaky corridors, until they arrived at a plain wooden door. The nurse left without a word.
Maggie drew a breath, steeling herself, and then opened the door.
The room inside was not what she expected - she'd expected a hospital style room, but instead it looked like an airy apartment suite. It had an open plan living space with doors leading off to what must be a bedroom, bathroom, and maybe an office. It looked more like a home than a medical facility. Wide windows looked out to the garden, where Maggie could see a few more SHIELD agents standing watch over the building entryways.
There was an old woman sitting at the lounge overlooking the garden. She had silver hair brushed into an elegant hairdo, and sat wrapped in a warm green shawl. She looked over her shoulder at the sound of the door closing, and her sharp dark eyes met Maggie's.
There was a moment of silence.
Then Peggy Carter smiled. "My, how you've grown. And causing just as much trouble as when you were young." She waved a wrinkled hand. "Come and sit, we've got a lot to talk about."
Stunned, Maggie obeyed. Peggy Carter spoke as if she was not used to being disobeyed. She rounded the couch, eyeing the old woman. She was frail-looking, with papery, wrinkled skin and lines around her eyes, but there was no denying the sharpness and warmth to her expression, the firmness to her mouth. Peggy had turned 90 this year.
Peggy indicated the other end of the couch, and Maggie slowly sat down. She placed her hands on her knees and her eyes flicked over the other woman. Peggy looked steadily back at her, taking in her appearance.
"Er, hello," Maggie said. "I'm sorry about causing a bit of a scene-"
Peggy flapped a hand. "Oh, Nick worries about me. But if anyone is going to track me down out of nowhere, I'd prefer it to be a friend." She smiled. Her accent was lovely, smooth and weathered by age. Maggie abruptly remembered: I was named after her. "You look like your mother."
Maggie blinked. "Do I?"
"Oh yes. You've got her nose. And her stillness. Howard could never sit still."
Maggie pondered this, feeling secretly delighted. Everyone in the world knew her father, but not many people talked about Maria Stark. She met Peggy's eyes. "I want to apologize for… for not being in much contact, these last few years."
Peggy tilted her head, and a silver curl brushed her shoulder. "You needn't apologize. At the time I thought it best if… if you were both allowed to make a new start in life. Perhaps it was wrong of me, but…" she sighed. An old woman's sigh. "Alas, we don't get second chances in life." She reached out and took Maggie's hand easily. She patted it. Maggie watched in surprise. She wasn't used to old people. "So come, Maggie. Tell me all you've been up to since you were a girl."
Maggie rubbed the back of her neck. "Well you've probably heard a bit-"
"Oh, gossip magazines and newspapers, hardly the real story." Peggy winked. "And Nick complaining to me, of course, but he's hardly likely to tell me the details I'm really interested in."
Maggie smiled, pleased at Peggy's open, brusque manner. Is this what all old people are like? She rubbed at the point where her prosthetic met her leg, unconsciously, and then began to speak. "Well, I… as you probably know, I went to MIT."
And so Maggie told Peggy Carter about her life. She told her about growing up in a mansion with Tony, about college, about all those years she'd spent out alone in the world. She found herself even telling Peggy about the wings, and the Wyvern. Under Peggy's warm, glinting eyes, it didn't even occur to her to lie. For her part, Peggy seemed delighted, if a little concerned at parts of Maggie's story.
"A little organized disobedience is good for the soul," she said, as if Maggie hadn't just confessed to being a vigilante.
While Maggie was telling Peggy about Vanko and the new Arc Reactor, a nurse came in and brought them tea.
"How are you feeling, Mrs Carter?" the nurse asked gently.
"I'm perfectly fine," the former SHIELD Director said, and sipped her tea with slightly shaky hands.
"I'm sorry." Maggie said as the nurse left. "I haven't even… you…"
Peggy eyed her awkwardness. "Don't worry about me, dear. I've moved here as a precaution; I was diagnosed late last year with the early stages of Alzheimers."
Maggie's brow fell. "I'm sorry."
Peggy sipped her tea. "You needn't be. I am cursed with the privilege of growing old, Maggie, and I only wish the same curse upon you." She winked.
Maggie smiled, almost sadly, but it was hard to be somber around Peggy's frankness.
"So come," Peggy said with a small gesture. "What did you come here for?"
"To see you!"
"Yes, yes, but old relations are also treasure troves of knowledge. You might as well ask me your questions now, before I completely lose my mind."
Maggie wanted to laugh, but she suppressed it. "Well I… I guess this past year I've learned about… SHIELD, and I realized there's so much I didn't know about How- my father. He isn't the man I thought he was, and the world isn't the way I thought it was. And I think you were his friend."
Peggy smiled sadly. "Yes. I was." She arched an eyebrow. "He made it bloody difficult at times, but even when I wanted to wring his neck I was his friend."
Maggie smiled. "I think that's the Stark way."
"Well I haven't wanted to wring your neck yet, dear."
"Perhaps I'm on my best behaviour."
"Your father didn't know the meaning of best behaviour," Peggy said with another arched brow. "Like I said, you take after your mother." She sighed and leaned back. "But yes… SHIELD. Well, shall I start at the beginning?"
Maggie leaned back as well. "Yes, please."
Peggy Carter told her about SHIELD. And it was the story from the archives, but different - more a story of people, than of an institution. Maggie realized that Peggy was idealistic, and impossibly hopeful, as she spoke about the dream she, Howard, and Chester had had for the future. About the people they wanted to protect, and the agency they had built. Peggy spoke about the work they had done, and how Howard had revolutionised scientific innovation.
"The Arc Reactor began at SHIELD, you know. Howard was trying to replicate the properties of the - a technology we had encountered during the war."
Peggy described how SHIELD had grown, and how she had become nearly the sole leader after Chester retired.
"Why didn't dad ever tell us about SHIELD?" Maggie asked, tucked into the couch.
"You were so young," Peggy said. "And I suspect he wanted to protect you both from it. I can see now that you are a wonderful asset for the agency, but I can understand why he never told you. I have a great-niece who works in SHIELD, and though I am impossibly proud of her, it does worry me."
A few minutes later, the conversation turned back to Howard. "After Howard died, I realized it was time for me to pass on the mantle. I was already old then, and without Howard… I didn't know if I could do it alone." She smiled sadly. "I passed the position to Alexander Pierce - you'll know him as the Secretary of Defense now, don't look so shocked - and then he passed it to Nick. They've taken SHIELD into the future in a way I could not."
They spoke more about the SHIELD of the future then, and the parts of it Maggie had seen. Unsure of how to build up to the question she really wanted to ask, she began asking about SHIELD's enemies. The Red Skull. Various Cold War enemies. And finally, as she reached for the teapot, Maggie asked:
"You ever heard of the Winter Soldier?"
Unfooled, Peggy cocked her head. "Now why are you asking about that?"
Maggie shrugged. "I'm in and out of the Triskelion now, and someone mentioned it." This, at least, was true. She'd heard one of the agents in the cafeteria actually joke about the Winter Soldier, like he was the bogeyman or bigfoot. "Got curious."
She sensed Peggy assessing her, eyeing her closely. A dozen more lies sprang to Maggie's tongue, but she knew the more she justified this the more suspicious Peggy would be. Finally, Peggy said: "I hate to write anything off as a mere story, especially when I've seen so many stories come true, but… that particular story doesn't seem very tangible to me. There are so many varying rumors over such an expanse of time, it's more than likely just a catch-all term for unsolved assassinations."
Maggie forced herself to nod interestedly. Well, there you have it. The Director of SHIELD for almost fifty years didn't believe in the ghost story. Maggie pressed the memory of the Soldier back down into that slow-burning part of herself.
She looked up and smiled. "What's the weirdest mission you've ever had?"
And Peggy returned her smile, and they veered down a new avenue of conversation.
Maggie turned over what Peggy had said for the rest of their visit. When Peggy grew weary they clasped hands again, smiled, and Maggie promised to visit again.
On the way out through the front lobby, the receptionist called: "Next time, call ahead!"
In the second half of the year, Maggie began to go on SHIELD missions with STRIKE Team Delta. For the first mission, they didn't give her very long to decide. She'd gotten an anonymous call at almost midnight, and picked up blearily.
"Hello?" she yawned.
"This is Maria Hill, Deputy Director of SHIELD. We have a mission for you - hostage extraction, 24 hours max mission duration. Yes or no?"
Maggie had stared at the phone. This wasn't exactly what she'd pictured when she told Fury that she'd maybe, sometimes accept a mission that she deemed worthy. "Who are the hostages?" she asked.
"SHIELD agents. I can't tell you more unless you accept. We could use your particular skills, though."
Maggie stretched, then rubbed her eyes. "Yeah, alright."
"Meet the Quinjet on the helipad two blocks east of your apartment. Agent Romanoff will brief you then."
"Meet the what?"
Four hours later, STRIKE Team Delta infiltrated the Canadian mountain base of the faction of anti-democracy extremists who had kidnapped the SHIELD agents who had been sent to investigate them. After a short, brutal fight Agent Romanoff and Agent Barton had burst into the operations room, where the organisation's leader stood scowling at them. He was a tall man with harsh, dark features, and twelve of his men had their weapons trained on STRIKE Team Delta.
"Where are the hostages, Wright," uttered Barton, his bow drawn taut.
Wright crossed his arms. "You're supposed to be SHIELD's best agents," he noted. "But it says something about SHIELD's overconfidence that they sent you in alone."
In the next second a boom resounded through the facility. The floor and walls shook, dislodging dust from the ceiling, and as one every screen and camera feed in the operations room went black.
Wright started, glancing around.
Romanoff cocked her head. "We're not alone."
And then STRIKE Team Delta unleashed themselves.
Darius Wright, leader of the Freedom League, escaped from his own operations room with a bleeding shoulder and a heaving chest. He slammed the back door behind him, hearing the screams of his men inside as they faced the Widow and the archer. Gunfire rattled. Panting, he broke into a run down the darkened corridor. He had let Romanoff and Barton into his mountaintop facility, had watched them infiltrate through his cameras. How could they possibly have snuck more agents onto the mountain? Wright prided himself on having 360 degree camera monitoring. Any aircraft would have been spotted from miles away, and drones couldn't get through the EMP pulses the base put out.
Angry and bleeding, Wright thundered down the corridor and down a flight of stairs, heading for the holding cell. If he could grab one of the three SHIELD hostages, he could use them as a bargaining chip to guarantee his safe exit from the facility.
At the holding facility door he punched in the security code, getting his blood on the keys, and then burst inside. The three agents inside, bound and filthy, glanced up with hopeful eyes that turned hopeless when they recognized him.
Wright stormed forward and grabbed the closest agent, a young woman with bruised knuckles. He unchained her ankle bonds, which were bolted to the floor, and then yanked her up by her elbow. The manacles on her wrists clinked.
"You're coming with me," Wright spat. "You're going to get me out of here." He shoved her around.
"SHIELD won't let you go," the hostage returned with venom. "They'll kill me to prevent you escaping."
Wright opened his mouth, but before he could reply a colossal impact slammed down on top of him: there was a burning lance of pain in his shoulder, and then he toppled like a stack of bricks. The impact jerked the hostage out of his grip and she went sprawling, wide-eyed.
The other hostages gasped.
Wright groaned, registering that he was face-down on the floor with a sturdy weight planted on the middle of his back. Blood trickled hot and sticky against his cheek. He twisted his head, squinting up at whatever had landed on top of him, and his heart nearly stopped at what he saw:
Burning, slitted red eyes, flared black wings, and a raised fist with glittering claws. That was all he saw before the fist landed and his vision went black.
Maggie flew the hostages down to the Quinjet a mile away, one by one. They were obviously scared of her, but they went willingly. When she spoke to give them instructions she made sure to use her voice modulator, which only seemed to make them more frightened. She'd tried not to make the voice too deep or intimidating, but the strange electronic sound of it had to be unnerving. Maggie didn't say a word as the medic rushed out to usher each of them into the sleek, angular jet.
She'd admired the Quinjet on the way here - she didn't know SHIELD had this kind of tech, and she was impressed. She intended to learn how to fly it.
A few minutes after she'd brought down the last hostage, Barton and Romanoff jogged up, a bit soot-stained but all in one piece.
Barton grinned at the dark figure sitting on a rock near the Quinjet. "Nice work, Wyvern."
Maggie inclined her head, then stood and pulled a datastick from her belt. "This is everything I could pull from their systems before I blew the server room. You're right, they've been planning an attack on the US Embassy."
Natasha took it with a nod.
And like that, Maggie had completed her first mission for SHIELD.
Maggie didn't regularly go on SHIELD missions. They usually only called her in when they needed her particular talents for hunting out hidden information, or for getting access to areas that SHIELD couldn't. Sometimes she worked alone, gathering intelligence or transporting resources. Sometimes she went with just Natasha, or just Clint, but usually it was the three of them. She worked well with them, particularly Clint; he was the eyes at a distance, the sniper, as she swooped in quick and deadly. Once, she and Natasha blew up a weapons depot in Azerbaijan. In the new year, the three of them entered a warzone in Syria and extracted an experimental biologist from captivity.
In October of 2011 there was a fair bit of excitement around SHIELD, which no one would explain to her. She saw Coulson once, and he looked positively giddy. Maggie was forbidden from visiting the New York base. A few days later Clint was reassigned to a secret facility and was only rarely able to visit D.C.
All very mysterious. But that was SHIELD.
New York City
New York, Steve Rogers thought, had changed.
Shortly after he'd burst out of what he thought was a HYDRA holding facility and found himself in this new world, SHIELD had got him out of the city for a while. He'd been at a cabin by a lake, which was probably supposed to be relaxing but just made him all the more nervous. New York was different, but it was still home. And it was good to be back.
He had an apartment now, though it looked different than the other rooms and buildings he had seen in this new world. He thought SHIELD might have tried to imitate the styles of his time. But it wasn't quite right. Steve had never lived anywhere this nice.
He went for walks, joined a gym, peered up at the new buildings. There was a new one right in the middle of Midtown, and he heard a passer-by call it Stark Tower. He'd read about Howard's kids. He peered up at the building doubtfully. It seemed his kids had just as much taste as their father did.
It was nice to be back in New York. But nothing - no place, no 40s-styled room - soothed the aching pit in his chest. He could barely bring himself to think of the people he'd lost. Everyone he'd ever known, but especially... Bucky. Peggy. He flinched away from each thought of them.
Steve was alive and healthy and in New York. But the world had passed him by.
Joint Dark Energy Mission Facility, Nevada
Clint did his rounds of the mission facility, his eyes sharp and his back straight. He'd been hired on as head of base security operations a few months ago, and for the most part that just meant babysitting scientists. He peered in at Selvig's massive lab, and saw the scientist hunched over the glowing blue Tesseract in its arc reactor housing.
"You alright, doc?" Clint called.
Selvig looked over with a smile. "We're making progress, she's putting off incredible amounts of power!"
Clint forced a smile. He didn't like the Tesseract. His skin prickled when he got close, and even looking at it now, the blue glow made his eyes hurt. He didn't know how Selvig stood it.
He shook his head and moved on. He'd set himself up on one of the upper gantryways for the next few hours to keep an eye on things.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he checked it. A message from Nat: Training next week?
Clint grimaced and typed back: Sorry, can't. Stark would have to keep having the shit beaten out of her by Nat alone. Though last time he'd seen her, she'd been handling her own alright.
Clint pocketed his phone. They were trying to reduce the number of people coming and going from the base. Since the World Council had shut down the Avenger Initiative last year all resources had been focused on Phase 2, and that made the Tesseract one of SHIELD's biggest secrets. Clint hadn't seen his own children in person in over a month.
I'm doing this for them, he thought as he found a perch up in the gantryways over Selvig's lab. He avoided the blue glow of the Tesseract. That thing is going to change the world.
April, 2012
Stark Tower, New York City
When Maggie saw the nearly-completed Stark Tower, her eyebrows shot up her forehead.
She'd been away for a month, and the building had undergone a lot of changes since then. They'd constructed the last few floors, put in all the windows, and it was mostly internal construction to be completed now. As she watched, Iron Man lifted an enormous letter 'K' in position at the top of the tower, alongside the 'STAR'. Maggie shaded her eyes against the afternoon sun and watched as the construction workers began securing the letter into place. Iron Man's repulsors burned.
Maggie grinned to see her last name taking shape all those stories up. She couldn't pretend that her ego could compete with Tony's, but there was a certain sense of achievement to displaying your name across Manhattan. Not that the letters lit up yet. That was a job for next month.
The last month of work had mostly been down to Tony and Pepper. Maggie - or rather, the Wyvern - had been in Honduras, running a protection detail for a couple hundred asylum seekers. Well, it had started as a protection detail, and ended with her taking down a cartel. It wasn't a SHIELD mission, though she'd gotten the intelligence through SHIELD. The mission had drawn a fair bit of media attention, but the good kind: the US Government had stopped trying to actively stall the asylum process, and local business owners had stopped dealing with the cartel. La Wyvern's name ended up in a few papers, which made Maggie nervous, but that had been happening more often over the last year. She was hardly Iron Man, but if you went looking in the public domain you could probably find a few mentions of the Wyvern.
It was nice to be back in New York now, where she could wear normal clothes instead of her uniform, and where she could walk down the street without constantly checking for snipers. Though to be quite honest, she didn't know if she'd ever turn off that instinct.
Maggie strode up to the base of the tower, sparing another glance for Iron Man hovering dozens of stories overhead, and then scanned her access card to get into the main lobby. Inside the gleaming space, with its wide windows looking out over the surrounding streets, Maggie waved to the team of admin staff at the desk, then headed for the main elevator. She'd been gone a month, and she wanted to explore.
The last time Maggie had been onsite most of the floors were nothing but bare concrete, and the windows covered in plastic. But as she made her way up the building floor-by-floor, she couldn't help but be impressed by the progress. Tony and Pepper had been busy. Several floors were still empty, as they intended to rent out the space, but she could see that Stark Industries New York was in the process of moving in: offices, laboratories, storage, public access floors… all the facilities she was used to back in LA, decked out with the newest tech and organised across twenty stories. On each floor she found a hive of activity of construction workers and SI employees.
Pleased, Maggie swiped into the private elevator and made her way up to the private floors. Pepper met her by the elevator doors on the penthouse level, beaming with pride.
"What do you think!" she asked. Pepper wore jeans and a knitted pullover, and a yellow hard hat. She must have come from the construction zone.
"It's fantastic, you were right," Maggie smiled back. She craned her neck to peer around at the penthouse. "I can't believe we're still on schedule."
"Well, that's what I'm here for."
This floor was not actually, technically, the penthouse. It was the first (and largest) of the top eight floors, housing a large living space, party deck, and a private workshop. Maggie beamed as she paced over the dark floor and looked out the windows over Manhattan. They were practically level with the top of the Chrysler Building, and she could just make out the tourists on the observation decks, admiring the sunset. Lights were already glowing across the city as the light faded. Maggie picked out the shapes of the skyscrapers she recognised, and the river in the distance. She turned, smiling, and ran an eye over the furnishings Tony and Pepper had picked out. Eclectic and modern, just as they liked it.
The floors above this one narrowed in size and contained living spaces, more workshops, a swimming pool, and a private library and art gallery. Tony, of course, had taken the very top floor.
Maggie had taken a room on one of the levels below the very top floor. She hadn't wanted a whole floor to herself, just the corner facing the Hudson.
Iron Man landed on the deck outside the main living floor and Pepper went to meet him. Maggie turned and jogged upstairs to her floor. Tony and Pepper had promised to start moving stuff in for her, and she wanted to see how it looked.
When she keyed her access card and the door slid open, her breath was once more stolen by the view. The sun was vanishing below the horizon in the distance, painting the smoggy air orange and pink. Maggie's room featured wall-to-wall windows which could be completely blacked out, but hers was one of the only rooms in the whole tower with its own personal balcony. Maggie padded over the carpet and cracked the balcony door open, whooping when the wind gusted and plucked at her hair.
She slid the door shut again, windswept and grinning, and then turned to admire the rest of the room. She had a double bed, a desk overlooking the window, and a few plush chairs. Maggie paced into her walk-in-wardrobe, which held space for her everyday clothes on one side, and her Wyvern uniform and gear on the other. Tony had already moved in a few of her prosthetic legs, but most of the shelves were bare.
Maggie ran her fingers over the glass case of her wing display unit. This is my own, personal space. She didn't need to hide here. She strode through into her bathroom, which also had a spectacular view of the city.
This was a glorious space, and Maggie knew she was lucky to have it. The room - and the building - were beautiful in a different way than their mansion in LA, and she found her mind going quiet as she pressed her forehead against the glass of her bathroom wall.
Darkness crept into the bathroom. She'd turn on the light, but the tower wasn't connected to the Stark grid yet, and Maggie couldn't justify using the generators to power up a room she hadn't moved into yet. J.A.R.V.I.S. hadn't been installed either, and the place felt strangely empty without him.
After a few minutes, Maggie made her way back down to the penthouse floor, where Pepper and Tony (now out of the armor) stood, going over an electronic blueprint of the building. When they looked up and spotted Maggie, Tony shut down the display with a flick of his fingers.
"Well?" he prompted, spreading his arms.
"If you two are this productive in my absence, maybe I should shut down cartels more often," Maggie replied.
"Nope, you agreed you wouldn't go away for that long again for at least another year," Tony replied instantly. He cocked his head as he looked around at the penthouse. "Though yeah, we have done a lot." He strode over to the bar area and opened an icebox to reveal three frosted-over beers. "Now we can't drink champagne until we're actually finished, but I thought we ought to toast the progress so far. Come on." He ushered Maggie and Pepper out onto the flight deck, where the wind whipped up over the edges and made Maggie's eyes water.
The flight deck curved around the building to the Iron Man landing pad and disassembly line. They strode out across the deck as the sky turned dark and the city glowed, their fingers chilled by the glass bottles they carried. Maggie wished for her wings, wished to hurl herself over the metal barrier and plunge through the empty air. She breathed in deep, feeling at the top of the world.
"Well," Tony said, his arm around Pepper as they looked out over the city. "We've still got a few weeks to go until we launch the power grid, but… we're almost there." Pepper nodded, still in her hard hat.
Maggie raised her beer, breathing in the air and the feeling of something new being born. "Here's to the future," she toasted.
Pepper and Tony glanced over at her, and smiled. They lifted their beers. "To the future!"
YOU GUYS. THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER. I don't want to spoil it for anyone but I. Am. In. Love. They're doing the characters such great justice, I am over the moon and so excited to see where it goes from here.
It's my birthday tomorrow! I did this last year I think but if you could let me know in a review your favourite Wyvern/Siren/ITSOYW scene that would be a fab birthday present :)
Reviews
DBZFAN45: Haha I'm sorry to shoot down your Maggie/Nat wishes! But we've got some fun set up stuff for the Avengers :) Hopefully you enjoyed all the Maggie, Nat and Clint scenes in this chapter, and I'll see you next week!