Steve woke. Bucky was sitting up and panting, real hand pressed to his forehead. He'd moved on to the floor again. Steve had made The Soldier go to sleep on the bed, Bucky had clearly woken up and moved to the floor, without waking Steve.
"Buck?"
"Atwood is HYDRA."
"What?"
"Senator Lucy Atwood is HYDRA."
"You sure?"
"Sure as I'm breathing."
"Okay, well-" Steve reached for his cell 'phone.
Bucky was beside him in half a second, metal hand over the 'phone. "What are you doing?"
"I was going to message Romanoff."
"Don't."
"What?"
"You don't know who's going to see that."
"You think HYDRA's stolen Romanoff's 'phone?"
"Hell, they really didn't teach you anything, did they?" Steve was a little too sleepy to be insulted. "Look, remember how in the forties, when you made a 'phone call, there was an operator who could listen in if they wanted. This is the same. But it's not an operator now. It's a machine that never forgets anything."
"SHIELD used to use-"
"Yeah. Remember SHIELD? We find a way to tell her face to face. It can wait that long."
.
Atwood, to Romanoff's chagrin, was extremely careful. All her electronic devices more complicated than a toaster fit in a single briefcase, which rarely left her hands. She had a housemaid, an elderly Vietnamese woman who never seemed to go out. The groceries were ordered in. Had Romanoff still had SHIELD hardware at her disposal, she would have put a sizeable dose of some sort of food poisoning agent in to something the housemaid was going to drink, to improve her odds of slipping a hand through a window to plant a proper listening device. The one in the airbrick hadn't yielded anything even a bit incriminating in over a week.
Atwood was extremely careful.
Finch? Slightly less so. Barton had had more success with him. Not quite directly, but Finch had a friend he seemed to see quite a lot of, and sometimes in odd places. Barton had, yesterday, managed to bug the friend's car.
.
Ten days after the Mexico incident, Cheney came back with another counter offer, to a near silent room of Avengers this time, they knew the game. Cheney even submitted an electronic form to them, so Jarvis could scan and compare.
"More significant changes this time, Sir." Jarvis said, before Cheney had even gone two floors down in the elevator. "There is no reference to Court Martials in this version. If an Avenger breaks the law, trial is by jury or bench. ATCU may demand blood samples for a specific list of tests at twenty-four hours notice, or as part of medical care if an Avenger is injured or unwell. I'm still cross-referencing the list of tests. Privacy is better, no elected officials this time, each Avenger's details are known by three specific handlers only. There is also a right to refuse to deploy, though fiscal penalties apply for this, and offenders will be confined to barracks."
"It matters who the handlers are." Barton said. "If, say, it's Fury, Hill, and… for sake of argument, Coulson, that's fine."
"If it's handlers we know and trust." Romanoff said. "People who would die rather than turn us over." Bucky looked significantly at Romanoff. "Figure of speech." She said.
"If it's Cheney and two henchmen he picks…" Banner said.
"Much less fine." Barton finished.
"Sir," Jarvis interjected, "the aforementioned tests are mostly consistent with common ER protocol, they do however include quite extensive screening for illegal or regulated substances, and some more specialised enzyme and endocrinological assays: Createnine Kinase, Troponin, Cortisol, Adrenocorticotrophic hormone, Renin, Aldosterone, Dihydro-"
"Thank you, J." Stark said.
"So they've made a shift from prospective studies to observational studies." Banner said. "Though, thinking about it, if we all live on site, they could expose us to stuff without our knowledge before taking scheduled samples."
"How do we keep that down, though?" Rogers said. "What do we demand to stop them doing this?"
"Residual samples only." Banner said. "They have to be taking blood from us for a medical reason, then they can science the leftovers. It'll at least slow their progress."
"Do you think they'll go for it?" Rogers asked.
"They're going to try and make supersoldiers." Banner said. "They've been trying to make supersoldiers since you. AIM, HYDRA, SHIELD, The Kremlin… Erskine had a real dangerous idea. We have to at least slow them up as much as we can so fewer people die for this."
Rogers took a long breath through his nose and let it go again.
"At least, we need to ask to know who the handlers are before we sign."
"How steep are the penalties for not deploying?" Barton asked.
"The formulas strike me as deliberately obscure," Jarvis said, "but it equates to about two weeks pay lost for every mission declined. Pay scales aren't explicitly discussed in this document."
"So they must be thinking of deploying us as often as every fortnight." Stark said. "That's… a lot."
"I guess we're a PR tool." Rhodes said. Rogers and Bucky made eye contact. Both started sniggering.
"The more things change..." Bucky said.
"I didn't mean…"
"Every bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy's gun!" Bucky shouted. Rogers cuffed him in the back of the head, but he was laughing.
"That was in history class in middle school." Wilson said. Rogers threw a pen at him.
"No, I mean like… school siege somewhere overseas or busting drug gangs… Wouldn't that look cool?" Rhodes said.
"Wouldn't that make ATCU look good?" Romanoff refined.
.
"The world's gone crazy right now, I know that, but some things stay the same. Loyalty is still loyalty. Friends are still friends. A promise is still a promise."
"We're not what we were, Jonas, all that hardwear, all that infrastructure just…"
"Hey, cut off one head…"
Clint froze in Nat's kitchen, one burger lifted out of the pan. He glanced at the timestamp on the recording. 08:22:46. He might want to come back to that. That was a HYDRA mantra. His phone was playing directly in to his hearing aid. He was listening to uploads from the car bug he'd placed with Finch's friend.
"I know, I know. But… It's hard to believe in manifest destiny right now, you know?"
"Imagine how they must have felt at the end of The War." That was Finch's friend. The older, steadier voice, with what might have been the edge of a Russian accent he was trying to hide. A car horn covered his next few words. Clint flipped the burger and grumbled in frustration. "-progress with Ithun or Sandrauriga?"
"Honestly, I thought Sandrauriga was going to be impossible right now. I was working towards Ithun, then…" This was a good moment to ignore a burger. Clint turned his back and picked up the list of HYDRA code words Nat had shoved in the cutlery drawer. HYDRA dog whistle plus speaking in code was enough to make Clint very suspicious. "this came up. Synthesis isn't going to be instant, but all you actually need from that point in is Valkyrie, and we've got that, neat alcohol, and to purify. Then you got Sandrauriga." God bless Nat, she'd even alphabetised the list. Clint idly shuffled the pan one handed as he turned the pages to get to 'S'
"Okay, what kind of kit are you going to need?"
Sonder. Too far, back a page
"Well, vacuum distillation is traditional, but, honestly, I'm sure if you gave my boy just an old-fashioned-"
"Oh hell!" Clint said, so loudly he drowned out the rest of what the second man said.
.
"You happy?" The large, moustachioed man asked, holding a mirror up so Steve could see the back of his head.
"Thanks Joe."
"Easily pleased." Joe said, then laughed at his own joke, a harsh, rasping laugh, as Steve stood up and pulled a few bills out of his pocket. Joe preferred to be paid in cash. "And your friend? He has a lot of hair." Bucky shifted self-consciously. "Like Disney prince." Bucky avoided Joe's eye, so maybe he couldn't see Joe smiling.
"I want it short." Bucky said, standing and moving over to the barber's chair.
"Best way for a man to be. Until you get old like me and have to comb over." Steve chuckled quietly. Bucky was too tense to. It had taken a bit of coaxing to get Bucky in here. He was worried he'd black out. That had happened twice so far in public, once because a car backfired, once for no obvious reason. It wasn't dangerous as long as Steve noticed it had happened. The only problem would be making sure Joe didn't say anything.
But Bucky seemed to be settling down. He looked less drawn and his breathing was settling. Joe was holding court, as he usually did, about today's fad that irritated him. The flavour of the day was diets. Last time it had been people talking on the 'phone on the street.
Steve's cell 'phone buzzed in his pocket. He wasn't doing anything else. He checked it. Barton.
"Problem. Assemble. Usual place."
"How urgent?" Steve texted back.
It took Barton under a minute to reply. "1700"
So not that urgent.
