Winter Soldier, After SHIELD try to arrest Captain America

Steve ran, with all the forces of SHIELD on his heels he didn't have long. Fury's reminder to Trust no one was still ringing in his ears, as was the fact his neighbour had turned out to be a SHEILD agent. Was she really a nurse as well? She'd certainly known first aid but three large calibre slugs to the chest cause a lot of trauma and blood loss. It was a tribute her skill and Fury's toughness that he'd lasted long enough to get to the hospital, but in the end it wasn't enough.

No time for mourning, focus on the task in hand. Keep going, fight on through. Up ahead the road met the George Washington Memorial Parkway. SHIELD would have locked down all the roads, taken over all the cameras and be scrambling Quinjets as fast as they can. He needed to disappear first.

As soon as the bridge was over land he vaulted over the side, dropping onto the wooded parkway on the Mt Vermont Trail. Perfect cover, no cameras and harder for the jets to spot him. Keeping at a hard run he headed North, he'd run most of the routes round the river before settling on his morning run round the Memorials. Up ahead there was a car park for visitors, he could steal a car but the roads would still be locked down.

Instead he carried on, following the trails on the riverside. Overlook park was further up, he could cross the Parkway there and head into the suburbs without being spotted. First objective, find a vehicle. Then new clothes, he was too obvious in his uniform. Six minutes later he'd covered the three miles to the park, keeping off the paths and out of sight of the week day visitors. He took off his helmet as he walked through the parking lot, spotting a coat in the back of a car with a part open window he simply pushed the window down a little further and grabbed it. It was small for him, but holding it closed covered the shield and uniform.

Heading through the trees he heard the sound of angry traffic horns. The whole of the Memorial Parkway was stationary so he rapidly stumbled through the parked cars, head down and careful not to bump anything. Hopefully no one was on twitter or some other phone thing that could snap his picture.

Over the road he picked up speed, moving faster now. Out of the park into leafy suburbs, most driveways were empty or didn't have the sort of car he'd need. One road led down into blocks of expensive looking offices, ideal if he could steal a car that wouldn't be missed until the end of the day. He spotted something ideal, a big Chevrolet pickup. There was a security camera, of course, but a well thrown rock knocked it aside.

He took a SHEILD universal lock pick from his belt – his old WW2 kit had lock picks but modern locks were beyond him and his other option, a short metal bar he used to knock the cylinder out of a lock with the flat of his hand, would wreck the car door. The automatic pick detected the lock and reshaped itself when pushed into a lock, able to open any civilian door lock in under a second.

He slid it into the truck door and turned it, the door opening without a hitch. He climbed in and closed the door, quickly looking round the inside. There was a gym bag in the back, it looks like the owner was going to hit the gym after work. That was a lucky break.

The lockpick started the truck easily and he drove out of the parking lot, thinking of his next objective.

His apartment was going to be crawling with agents soon; as would every place they could think of to find him. But their manpower would be spread thin, he could slip though. But first, he had to get the drive back from the Hospital

Throwing on the hooded top from the bag he draped a towel round his shoulders. Facial recognition worked on mapping points, it should break up the outline of his jaw. Driving the big Chevrolet Silverado through the busy streets he felt increasingly paranoid with every helicopter or jet he saw overhead, it made him acutely aware how many intersections had traffic cameras. When they're out spying do the Widow and Hawkeye feel like this all the time? He winced.

Pulling into the hospital parking lot he parked and changed into the loose pants and sports shoes, keeping his Tshirt and hooded top. His uniform and shield he stowed in the back of the truck under the coat and bag. Now to just casually walk into the hospital and get the drive from the snack machine.

Except, when he got to the machine, the gum slot was empty and the drive was gone.

Natasha watched Steve walk through the Hospital corridors, in what she assumed was his version of a disguise. Not that he was a good head taller than everyone here, broad shouldered and well-muscled even in baggy exercise clothes.

She'd been watching the alerts unfold on her mobile, apparently he'd stolen SHIELD secrets and gone on the run from a city wide manhunt. Was putting the hood up his idea of hiding?

But to give him credit he had escaped a STRIKE team, evaded everything SHIELD could throw at him and got across town without being spotted in record time. He looked flustered, sweat on his face and tension in his jaw. Had he just RUN the whole way? No, his breathing looked normal, even he couldn't get this far without showing exertion. Just nerves then. He was good at the physical and mental sides of things, just not at the social side of spycraft.

Had he expected people not to notice him hide that drive?

Fury must have given him it before he was attacked, but Steve had chosen to hide it here not take it back to HQ. So He didn't trust someone in SHEILD, Fury must have told him something. This whole thing stank of power politics, one faction discrediting and displacing another. Who'd be going for Fury's job?

Careful not to startle him too much, she walked up behind him as he stared dumbfounded at the snack machine and popped her gum.

He turns and stares at her for a moment, then springs into action. He grabs her by the arm and pushes her back into an empty room, slamming her back against the wall as if she weighed nothing. His face is full of righteous anger as he snaps "Where is it?"

"Safe" she answers, torn between helping and taunting him to see where his anger will go

He forces her back, ordering "Do better!" but she chooses to ignore his commands and try and work out what's going on.

"Where did you get it?" She asks, watching his eyes. No evasions, just the anger

"Why would I tell you?"

So definitely direct from Fury. He didn't know what to do with it just keep it safe and away from someone in SHIELD, so maybe Nick didn't give detailed orders. Maybe he was shot while doing it. What did he want Steve to do with it? "Fury gave it to you. Why?"

Steve ignores her question and asks his own "What's on it?

Dammit, she's losing control of the conversation; have to be honest "I don't know."

But that just makes him more angry "Stop lying!" This anger is dangerous; kind of exciting to her but while she trusts him to not hurt her too badly she can't let him stop her investigating. Time to defuse things, so she jokes "I only act like I know everything, Rogers."

"I bet you knew Fury hired the pirates, didn't you?" He snaps back and that floors her. Fury hired them? Thinking quickly that makes a lot of puzzle pieces fall into place. The ship was SHIELD but had stuff on it that Fury couldn't get to, someone else in SHIELD had secrets on it. So he hired the mercs to compromise the ship and give him plausible deniability on a raid with trusted agents, her and Steve. Talking fast, she nods ""Well, it makes sense. The ship was dirty, Fury needed a way in, so did you." Hoping that'd placate him. I'm on your side, Dammit Cap. I just need you to see it.

He tightened his grip and shook her, growling "I'm not gonna ask you again." He's convinced she knows the secret, lying about it will just fall down later so need to derail things. It reveals some of her history, but only a little. He's not ready to hear that the Winter Soldier is here, the KGB super assassin controlled by HYDRA, her old mentor from the Red Room. The deadliest man she'd ever met, but Steve had faced him once already and lived.

Tell him a little "I know who killed Fury."

Steve stops, hurt and concern in his eyes. Loosing Fury in his apartment wounded him deeply, an affront to his nature to save and protect.

So she carries on "Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists, the ones who do call him the Winter Soldier. He's credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years."

Steve frowns, no one is top of their game for that long, so it must be a myth or a name used by a group "So he's a ghost story."

She shakes her head, she needs to make him understand the danger he's in. She swallows nervously and decides to share a secret.

"Five years ago I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran, somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control and went straight over a cliff, I pulled us out, but the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me."

She's not faking the faint quiver in her voice. The failure and the pain are still there, fresh in her memory.

She pulls up her shirt and shows him the scar where the bullet went in. his eyes go wide, a moment of empathy and compassion. You need to learn to hide your emotions better, Captain, if you're going to survive in the spy game.

"It was a soviet slug, no rifling."

Steve looks at the strip of skin she's exposed, the ugly puckered scar two inches right of her navel. Looks like a high velocity slug, it would have gone straight through the muscle of her abdomen and her intestines and out of her back and hardly slowed. The sniper must have been an expert, any higher or lower and he risked hitting bone that would deflect the bullet. As it is the shock and trauma of the wound must have crippled her. Steve pauses. She was shot in the gut and almost died.

She sighs, "Bye-bye bikinis"

How could she joke about it? It must have been terrible. Then he look at the memory of fear and pain in her eyes and understands it's how she copes, making light of the terrible things she's endured.

"Yeah, I bet you look terrible in them now." He says and is rewarded with a hint of a smile.

"Look, going after him is a dead end. I know, I've tried." She holds up the flash drive.

"Like you said, he's a ghost story." The only way she can earn his trust is to trust him with this. If she tries to run he'll run her down and just take it, then never trust her fully again.

He takes the drive and looks at it, then back at her.

She's nervous. Will he accept her onto his team or try and do this alone?

"Well, let's find out what the ghost wants."

They head out to the car park, watching for STRIKE agents but things seem clear.

Natasha starts looking down the rows. "We should swap cars, steal something fast but average"

"We keep the truck, it should be safe for a few more hours and I'm not taking a car from someone in a hospital"

"Suit yourself, we need to head over to the mall. We need casual clothes and there should be an Apple store where I can plug this drive in and see what's on it"

"You can do that in a store?"

"Well, not normally. But I've a few bits of tech that'll get round the locked down ports on a Mac easy enough. I just don't want to risk plugging this into a computer with anything useful on it, in case it's loaded with viruses"

"I don't understand the whole thing of machines getting machine diseases but I'll take your word for it"

"They're just programs that act as booby traps, think of it as like hiding a grenade inside a box with a code book. If you don't open it right it blows up in your face"

"Makes more sense"

Pulling into the mall parking lot Natasha checks her jacket pockets.

"Ok, I've a few credit cards they won't know about yet, so I'll go get us some clothes"

"I'll stay here with the drive"

She glances at him, questioningly. Was he being distrustful? No, just being careful. Once he's made up his mind it's hard to shake it.

"Ok, I won't be long"

A short time later she reappeared with two bulging bags. "here you go, new sneakers, jeans, shirt, jacket, hat and glasses stolen from the display stand – those ones have plain glass not prescription lenses."

She shrugged off her leather jacket and pulled on a striped hooded top

"One secret for a good disguise is layering. If you can quickly take off a layer and alter your profile it makes it easier to hide in crowds"

She watches him change, smirking "Though how we're going to hide those chiselled features is a problem. Maybe try not to look so wholesome and righteous?" She wiggles out of her jeans and into a pair of black leggings. "Though that may help, no one will expect to see Captain America in a suburban mall. The real problem is the facial recognition cameras, so keep your hat brim down"

Once they've changed they head into the mall, heading for the Apple store.

"Now, the First rule of going on the run is, don't run, walk. Running attracts attention"

"If I run in these shoes, they're gonna fall off." Steve grumbles as the casually walk into the Apple store. Row after row of painfully slim white computers make his head spin, computing machines should be big, with depth and substance. Things with instruments and dials and fuse panels that you need goggles to operate.

Natasha picks a high spec machine and starts to casually look at web pages.

"Ready?"

"Ready."

She puts her mobile down on the computer and runs an app. The Mac freezes, the screen goes black and then it reboots with a command prompt. "Cute little SHIELD toy, to get round all the protections installed it just shuts it down and makes it restart with us running the show."

She holds out the drive.

"Now, I know this hardware, it's designed for internal use only, not a civilian machine. The drive has a Level Six homing program installed, so as soon as we boot up SHIELD will know exactly where we are."

"How much time do we have?"

"Uh...about nine minutes from..." She plugs the drive in and its active light flashes "now"

She rapidly scrolls through all the files, every time hitting a dead end of stubbornly encrypted data.

"Hmmm.. well, Fury was right about that ship, somebody's definitely trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort of advanced multilevel encryption, it keeps polling out to a verification server and then rewriting itself to counter my commands."

"Can you override it?"

"The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me. Slightly." She checks her phone, SHIELD have four units inbound already. She tries all her cryptography programs in turn, trying not to rush. Each hits a dead end. She sighs, this is harder than she thought. If she can't crack the drive herself, the next best thing is finding the verification server and using that to open the drive.

"I'm gonna try running a tracer. This is a program that SHIELD developed to track hostile malware, so if we can't read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from."

A bearded long haired Apple employee sidled up, obviously wanting to sell them lovely sleek computers but without being pushy or materialistic or negative.

The man smiles "Can I help you guys with anything?"

As Steve stumbles for a reply Natasha drapes herself around him with a loving smile and answers "Oh, no. My fiancé was just helping me with some honeymoon destinations."

Steve jumps, stumbling to play along "Right! We're getting married." And tries to smile.

The Apple employee grins and says "Congratulations! Where do you guys thinking about going?"

Steve glances at the screen, the very Non-Apple mapping program was showing and frowns as he recognises the place names then hesitantly replies "New Jersey?"

The salesman looks surprised and says "Oh." As his thoughts derail. Who goes to New Jersey on their Honeymoon? Confused he grasps at the first thought in his head to carry on the conversation "I have the exact same glasses." Steve just looks at him, as the salesman isn't wearing glasses.

Sarcastically Natasha jokes "Wow, you two are practically twins."

Still confused, the Apple salesman looks Steve up and down and says "Yeah, I wish." He gives an awkward finger guns salute to Steve "Specimen!" then thinking he's overstepped at Steve's nonplussed confusion he backs off " Uh...if you guys need anything, I've been Aaron."

Steve nods, bemused "Thank you". What does Specimen mean? Some sort of complement? Nothing to worry about now, it's been almost eight minutes. He hisses to Natasha. "You said nine minutes, come on."

"Shh, relax. I've got it. Wheaton, New Jersey. You know it?"

Steve feels a shudder like someone walked over his grave. "I used to"

The Nine minutes are up and he feels the tension of an impending fight. "Come on, let's go"

He pulls the flash drive from the computer and puts it into his pocket, zipping it closed. Too many missions have got screwed up because of dropping something important in a fight

Walking out of the store he can see over the crowds, lots of men with short serious haircuts making a beeline for the store. Dark jackets concealing pistols or short frame submachine guns. Hopefully Runlow isn't far gone enough to risk a fire fight in a crowded mall?

He whispers into Natasha's ear " Standard tac-teams. Two behind, two across, two coming straight at us. If they make us, I'll engage, you hit the south escalator to the metro." But he's astonished when she just wraps her arms around him and pulls him close.

"Shut up and put your arm around me, laugh at something I said."

"What?"

She sighs. Spycraft really isn't his strong suit yet. In a firm tone she orders "Do it!"

He tucks her under his arm and leans in, laughing. She hopes it's enough.

Luckily it seems to work, the two agents coming right at them go past and into the store

"I can't believe that worked!"

"it's misdirection. People's minds have a predisposition to see things with shapes they expect and understand. They expect you to be big and ready to fight, so this puts them slightly off and we do the rest. It takes a lot of training to break from those preconceptions and see things as they really are."

"Training you've had?"

"Of course. You should feel it too, your subliminal pick up was off the charts."

"That feeling when things kind of don't fit right?"

"That's it. Listen to that gut feeling"

They get onto the escalator going down, heading to the exit to the parking levels.

She spots Rumlow on the floor below, coming up. They have a second or two before he'll see them and no simple misdirection can stop that. Time to Fight, unless Steve can follow her lead here. She swallows nervously, this could go very badly wrong but it could save them.

"Kiss me."

He looks at her in shock "What?"

"Kiss me. Public displays of affection make people very uncomfortable."

Come on Rogers, learn to compartmentalise.

He looks nervous and uncomfortable as he agrees "Yes, they do. "

She quickly reaches up and pulls his face down to hers. Closing her eyes she kisses him on the lips, pressing her body against him. The body language of young love, definitely not what Rumlow will be looking for.

Steve was stunned, one moment was ready to fight and the next he's locking lips with Natasha Romanov, The Black Widow, a master spy and deadly assassin who he expected to taste of blood and death and gun oil and instead she's soft and warm and tastes of bubble-gum. It feels strangely natural to put his hands on her hips, to pull her to him as they kiss.

Near the bottom of the escalator they break apart and he softly mouths "Wow"

Just for a moment she looks at him with a wide eyed mix of fear and need, then the calm control snaps back and she smiles a little knowing smile "You still uncomfortable?"

Shifting his hips to try and get his raging erection in check he answers "It's not exactly the word I would use."

They rapidly headed out into the parking garage and back to the truck.

"Back roads?" He asks.

She shakes her head "Distance is our friend now, we need to get moving"

"Ok, I95 it is then" he says and gets them moving.

Natasha curls up in the passenger seat and watches him drive.

After a lot of uncomfortable silence she stretches out then breaks the silence and asks "So, where did Captain America learn to steal a car?

"Nazi Germany."

She raises an eyebrow. Modern cars with steering locks and alarms? Perhaps he learnt the theory then, but that's a SHEILD auto pick in the ignition so he's updated his methods since then.

"And we're borrowing. So get your feet off the dash." He adds, in a scolding tone more suited to a naughty child.

She smiles and curls up more, taking her feet off the dash, fighting down the urge to say "yes sir". That'd give her all sorts of ideas they don't have time for. But damn, that kiss had been hot.

"Alright, I have a question for you, oh, which you do not have to answer. But I feel like if you don't answer it though, you're kind of answering it, you know?"

He can guess what's coming, but has to ask "What?"

"Was that your first kiss since 1945?" she asks, a little too fast. Teasing or eager?

He sighs "That bad, huh?". He felt his heart sink, it sounds like she didn't feel the same rush he did when they kissed. Maybe it was just the years of pent up desire, in his head hardly any time had passed but for his body it'd been seventy years.

"I didn't say that." She says, but her tone is still teasing.

"Well, it kind of sounds like that's what you're saying."

"No, I didn't. I just wondered how much practice you've had."

He looks offended "You don't need practice."

"Everybody needs practice."

That explains it, He thinks. For me it's a natural thing, between two people in love but for her it's a skill of tradecraft, something to learn to do well so you can manipulate people.

He answers in a rather short tone

"It was not my first kiss since 1945. I'm ninety-five, I'm not dead."

She presses on "Nobody special, though?"

He chuckles "Believe it or not, it's kind of hard to find someone with shared life experience."

He wonders how much she knows about his private life? How easy it is to find people eager to spend some time with him and how hard it is to relate to them? Women who were born decades after he went into the ice. Who grew up with television and plenty. They're like a different species, even before the issues due to his strength and endurance come into play.

Natasha shrugs like it's no real problem

"Well, that's alright, you just make something up."

There, in a nutshell, is the difference between us, Steve thinks. I try and stand for Truth, you avoid it at all costs. "What, like you do?"

"I don't know. The truth is a matter of circumstances, it's not all things to all people all the time. And neither am I."

For a moment he pities her. "That's a tough way to live."

She shrugs. "It's a good way not to die, though."

"You know, it's kind of hard to trust someone when you don't know who that someone really is."

"Yeah" She feels a chill run down her spine. If she tells him who and what she really is, he'll hate her, lock her out, maybe never speak to her again. But maybe she can offer him an olive branch, let him get close to her on his own terms.

So she offers "Who do you want me to be?" There you go. Whoever you want, Captain. Whatever and wherever. Just say you want me and I'll be yours.

He looks over from watching the road and asks "How about a friend?"

Fuck. Did I just get friend-zoned by Captain America? I almost climb naked into his lap and he just wants a friend? She laughs softly and shakes her head in disbelief

"Well, there's a chance you might be in the wrong business, Rogers."

Notes

The SHIELD Triskelion is on Little Island in the Potomac River in Washington DC , just south of Theodore Roosevelt Island and the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge.

wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt_Island

Steve Rogers' Washington DC apartment is at 1614 Connecticut Ave NW