Have an early chapter, since I'm getting my wisdom teeth out tomorrow and am liable to forget to post this.
"That's the –" gasped Jamie, "more up, top a' the cunt – shit that's –"
She moaned, her legs kicking and sliding against the sheets. Steve thrust into her quickly now, counterpointing his slow pushes from the minutes before, and adjusted his angle to get more friction out of the condom.
Steve came. His arms gave – this was their fifth round tonight, even his stamina had limits – and it was all he could do not to fall on her too hard. Automatically his hand reached down to rub around her clitoris in one of her favorite patterns, enough to push her over the edge.
He calmed down just as her moans turned into gasps, heavy pants, and Steve checked himself for injuries. They were common for both of them now, when they had sex, but if they treated them fast enough no one was the wiser.
No injuries, but the condom felt loose. He moved around a little and felt a distinctly different sort of smooth, wet on his side, which could only mean –
Shit.
Steve withdrew but Jamie grabbed his hip, mouthing "no", and he held himself in her. She didn't trust him to do what she wanted, and the physical way she asserted herself – keeping her legs tight around his waist, for example – Steve found odd. She still had problems disobeying orders so why would she feel comfortable ordering him around?
Well, no one could argue he understood his wife. Fury certainly didn't; she acted like Jamie wanted to be cooped up in this house bought by Stark's AI and secured – supervised – by Stark's closed-system monitoring.
His phone beeped – and again, again, oh great it was ringing. Jamie kept her hand firm on his hip but he managed to snag it from the nightstand and answered.
"So there's this new book out about us – it's like seven mini biographies, 'cept it's six 'cuz they combined yours and Jamie's – anyway, it's great 'cuz it looks at the propaganda reels and that one where Frenchie has to clean her knife on her pants, they spend three whole pages on it –"
"Jim," Steve panted, "now's not a good time."
A pause, then, "Are you having sex?"
Jamie gave him an odd look, confused, and he remembered she could hear Jim through the tiny phone speakers.
"Uh..."
"Good for you. It's about time. Who is she? Or he, y'know I always thought the way you looked at Lieutenant –"
"She's not – it's just sex, okay?" Steve stammered, and winced because there Jamie went hiding her facial expression like she always did.
"That's fine, you aren't ready for commitment yet. I get that. Are you still wearing your wedding ring? No, everyone knows who you are, they'd understand."
"I'm gonna hang up now."
"...Well if it's just sex then she probably doesn't care –"
"I'll call you back in an hour, okay?"
"Fine. Have fun. Be safe. Make good –"
Steve hung up. He nuzzled Jamie's neck and told her, "I didn't mean it. I was just trying to get him off the phone."
"I know." Jamie turned her head and met his mouth for a kiss. She let go of his hip and he pulled out, almost leaving the rubber inside.
Yes, this was definitely a problem.
Jamie broke off. "The condom broke."
"Yeah. We should think –"
"I just had my period."
"It was two weeks ago."
She scowled but didn't bother echoing her words from earlier in the evening: What day is it? I don't know. I remember different days were supposed to feel different but hell if I know. It feels like I've been stuck in this damn house for too long.
It was for her own safety that she stayed inside; she knew that, and Steve bore her complaints and eased her discomfort the best he could. Once the doctor cleared her physically, and the shrink mentally, then Fury would start talking about some sort of concealed outside activity. It was condescending as hell but even Steve admitted that in a lot of ways Jamie still hadn't gotten herself together.
Sure, she could act the part: she cooked every recipe she found online, read all the books Steve brought by on his weekends and break days, chose clothes to buy online and exercised a consistent four hours a day. She learned five languages and enough advanced math to race Tony Stark in solving equations; she brought Steve's phone back to life after he threw it against a wall in frustration.
But she still froze if he said the wrong phrase, or used the wrong tone – hell, if he did anything not on her list of okay actions. She recovered her flinch instinct and Steve learned that his calming touches outside the bedroom made her miserable; inside she kept him close, unused to someone gentle on top of her.
"I can get the morning-after pill for you," Steve suggested. "It's good for seventy –"
Jamie shook her head. "If it comes, it comes. We're Catholic, right? Life begins at conception, all that?"
That was bullshit. It was an act of rebellion, Steve knew – seizing control over whatever she could.
She was making progress – the psychiatrist, vetted by Stark and Fury for two straight weeks, assured them both of it. But none of that mattered anymore: Jamie was pregnant. The two missed periods, four plus signs on the tests and an ultrasound confirmed it.
She'd only had two periods, after three months too malnourished for her body to think about reproducing. Hydra had had to stimulate ovulation and cross their fingers that the fertilized egg would attach itself to her uterus.
Fury arranged for the Strike team to transfer to Duluth, Minnesota. Steve and Jamie moved into the basement of a SHIELD lawyer and his husband, an agent retired from the field by a bout of super-pneumonia that left him wheezing. The couple had a five-month-old baby and Fury cleared them to be included in this little conspiracy; the cover was that they decided to adopt after having one biologically their own.
Except for everything, it was just like they'd always dreamed of: go home after the war was done, buy a house somewhere that Jones and Dugan would hate them for because it was so damn cold, raise a family and keep a low profile.
Never mind that Jamie couldn't leave the house.
Steve drove his things up in a U-Haul truck and knocked on the house's front door. "Hi!" said the man who answered the door – Chinese, sharp face, hair down to his neck, a baby clutching at his chest. "I'm Jason. My husband's Tyler, he's at work right now. Come on in. She's in the basement."
"Thanks."
Jamie unpacked the bedroom while Steve and Jason brought the boxes in. There wasn't much, most of it Steve's unwanted tchotchkes that the Barnes family had saved, and Jamie's clothes. She window-browsed online too much.
Steve finished making a list of things to buy for the kitchen and found Jamie sitting on the bed with a pile of old photo albums. She ran her fingers over a black-and-white picture of her family: Jamie standing next to her mother, who had little Pete in her arms but still couldn't hide the baby bump that would be Becca, and her father stood behind them both and held Frank.
"I don't – I remember this," she said quietly. "But I don't feel anything about it."
Steve sat down next to her on the bed. "It's the last picture of your mom. Before Becca was born." Before she died getting her into the world.
"Were we happy?"
"I dunno," Steve confessed. "It was so long ago. I only met your mom a few times, I didn't spend a lot of time at your place a lot until..."
Until he was eighteen and she was going to help him with art school homework and instead showed up drunk and furious at her newly-ex-boyfriend for letting another girl take him in her mouth. Her dad worked nights on top of his day job as a carpenter and her aunt slept in her own rented room next door so no one stopped Steve from falling into bed with his best friend.
Jamie turned the page: their high school graduation, delayed by the year she'd taken off to make rent money. Her dad was so happy she went back for senior year he got a picture taken of her – Steve right next to her, obviously – after the ceremony.
Steve told her that story, and the next one and the next and only choked once they got to their wedding photo. "We didn't bother with a ceremony," he explained, "we didn't have the money. We talked to Father Caffrey and said our vows during Sunday mass."
"We should've saved up for new clothes but your mom didn't want us to wait. She wanted..."
Don't touch her don't put your hand on her shoulder don't do it she'd in a good mood don't ruin –
Jamie cleared her throat. "She wanted to see us married 'fore she died."
She turned the page, looking past a happy photo of herself at four months pregnant – "you miscarried, uh, the week after I took this" – and into the war years: a picture of her at work welding an airplane together, before she was drafted, that made it onto the second page of the New York Times.
The album ended soon after, and Steve fetched the next one: a collection of candid and posed shots that Dugan, the group photographer, took when they weren't on missions and distributed for his teammates to send back to their families. The first time Steve saw Rebecca, a month after he woke up in 2003, she'd given both albums to him.
Jamie flipped through the photos and Steve recounted, "Dernier and Falsworth are dead – they're the oldest, I think Frenchie even remembered parts of the Great War. She was eight when they signed the armistice. Dugan, he smoked too much – lung cancer in the eighties. But before that he settled down with a sailor and married him the first chance he got. They adopted five kids.
"Jones went to college on the GI bill, desegregated Georgia Tech. She's still the doctor in some small town near where she was born – I've talked to her on the phone. Still makes jokes that'll get anyone to laugh. Morita..."
"His dad died."
"Yeah, in forty-two. Morita never got married. He's the famous uncle who'll outlast everyone else, or so he says. The only good explanation I got of modern politics I got it from him. It took him three hours to get through it all."
"He called you one time. I know, I knew his voice. He said you sounded like you'd just had sex."
"Well, I had."
She huffed a laugh, rubbed her six-months-full belly. "Food?"
"Oh, uh," spoke up Jason from the hallway – when had he come down the stairs? – "I made dinner – I'm betting you're hungry, 'specially..."
Jason's words faded as his eyes fell onto the couple on the bed but he recovered himself quickly. " 'Specially 'cuz you're expecting. C'mon up, we just put the pie in the oven."
"Steve hates pie," Jamie commented.
"Only if it's apple," added Steve hastily, when Jason's face fell. "Casualty of living in New York during the Depression. Apples were everywhere."
"Oh. That's why I thought... I can whip something else up."
"Don't worry about it."
Jason retreated with a comment that he and his husband would be ready to start eating whenever their new tenants were.
"You didn't have to tell him that," Steve said, pressing a kiss on his wife's head. "I would've eaten it."
Jamie muttered, "I thought we didn't have to do things we didn't want to," and shut the book. She slid off the bed and returned it to its place on the bookshelf, running her fingers along the binding and onto the third of their three photo albums: the war years, as told by propaganda photographers and Howard Stark's man Jarvis.
Steve followed her fingers down this binding with his own. "I was gonna be polite. Usually a good idea. Like it'd be a good idea not to make our landlords wait when they've made us dinner."
"So I don't have a choice."
"That's not – 'course you do. If you don't want to go I'll tell them you're having a bad day and bring you some food down here."
Jamie walked out of the room and up the stairs. Steve sighed and followed.
"We were briefed about the calories," said Jason. "So we made two of everything. Nicola gave us these packets?"
Tony Stark's creation, a powder that dissolved into boiling water and maximized calories. Steve already had experience eating enough non-enhanced food to get through the days but Jamie still occasionally had stomach problems from the constant starvation.
"Anyway, we have those stocked. And here's my husband."
Tyler Heung slid a baby boy into the highchair and sat down. He reached his hand across the table and shook Steve's. "Hi, I'm Tyler. I work in the legal department."
"Steve, but – well, you already know that."
Jamie loaded her plate with two of the small potpies and stuffed a forkful into her mouth.
"Um, so, yeah, some of the food is ready, obviously," Jason said.
His husband added, "I think the carrots might be done."
And let the awkward silence descend.
"The basement actually predates the rest of the house. This place used to be a bootlegger's distillery during Prohibition. The tunnel leads out to the woods, it's next to the water heater in the basement. It's what she'll" – Jason pointed his fork at Jamie – "use whenever she needs to leave."
"When'd they build the new house?" asked Steve.
"When an up-and-coming field agent in the nineties decided to try her hand at making a safehouse," said Tyler, returning to the dining room with steaming carrots. "I helped Nicola buy the property off the books. She asked us to buy it from her when we moved up here, gave us a good discount. We've been playing babysitters to anyone she needs to stash ever since."
Steve took the carrots and heaped a pile onto Jamie's now-empty plate. "How long do they usually stay?"
"No more'n a couple weeks at the max," Jason replied. "You're our first long-term residents."
"And the first to pay rent," muttered his husband.
"In any case, we're happy to have you. The house is also a Faraday cage – I can show you how to hook your phones up to the wifi to get reception."
Jamie chewed her food, swallowed and replied, "Already know how to do that. Guests have a separate network, then?"
She carried most of the conversation for the rest of the evening. Steve learned what a Faraday cage was, how thermal vision blocking worked, why the basement had its own wifi router and that every room was actually soundproof. "And the staircase doors are locked with a fingerprint scanner," said Tyler. "We'll know whenever you come up here and you'll know when we go down to the basement."
"Like if we ever steal your maple syrup."
Steve laughed. "That gonna happen often?"
"We're always out. It's a curse," sighed Jason.
Tyler shoved his husband playfully and kissed him, short and lovingly. Steve's stomach knotted but he grinned just the same.
Jamie cut herself a slice of pie.
The clock said 0548 and Jamie was already out of bed. She kept an interesting sleep schedule but it was mostly all the naps she took – a double-whammy of sixty years of sleep deprivation and a baby one week past their due date. Steve's moment of panic passed once he found her in the kitchen, reading an e-book and tapping at her phone randomly.
Jamie had taken to modern technology better than Steve did. Then again, she'd watched color TV news reports of his death in 1945, used GPS to hunt down a Soviet defector in the 60s and communicated with her handlers on long missions over cell phones in the 80s. Adapt or die.
If it was up to Steve he'd stick a TV in the living room and a notepad on the refrigerator and say "that sounds interesting" whenever Tony Stark went on about a new invention; Jamie took Stark's ideas and ran with them and though the experimental heliscreen on the fridge was nice, it all still went over Steve's head sometimes.
"I'm thinking French toast? For breakfast?"
Jamie shrugged, eyes still on the book.
"Have you eaten yet?"
"Not hungry."
"Why?"
She tapped on her phone again, once more twenty seconds later, and replied, "I ate a lot last night."
Steve looked down at the phone, at the stopwatch app showing early laps of fifteen minutes, descending into the five-minute range. "Are you in labor?"
"I think so." Jamie frowned. "Hard to tell."
"How long?"
"Woke up around four?"
Steve used the fridge screen to search when to go to a doctor for contractions. "Okay. I'm calling Jemma."
Jamie went back to her book.
She didn't make a sound when she pushed their daughter out. Her eyes grew vacant and she balled her fists so tight Steve was afraid she'd break her fingers, or the prosthetic's metal plates, but she never opened her mouth.
Simmons threw up twice, she was so concerned, and it didn't help that her medical training expected the mother to be screaming bloody murder, not gritting her teeth and breathing steady. She kept repeating that she was just an Academy student, she had two PhDs but that didn't mean she was a medical doctor, why was this her job – but she still pulled the baby out and only left for her hotel room when the SHIELD doctor arrived.
They named her Caitriona, after Steve's grandmother, and Tereza, because she was the first Barnes baby in two generations who came naturally and without complications. Steve filled out the birth certificate with the parents listed as Tyler and Jason Heung and her name Katherine Theresa.
"I think you have a boner for trees, we need to stage an intervention," said Tony, once he arrived at the house in his shiny self-driving car. "All right, where's the kid?"
Steve moved out of the doorway and gestured to Jamie, nursing Cait on the couch while the TV played reruns of crime dramas.
"And there she is."
"In the flesh," commented Jamie. She brushed Cait's baby hair from her eyes and tickled her cheek to get her to latch back on and nurse; she would break off if she lost her mom's eyes.
"Aw man, no one's gonna believe me when I tell 'em I've seen the Winter Soldier's boobs."
"You're disgusting, Tony."
"Better or worse'n my dad?"
Steve thought about it. "If you were his type you couldn't walk past him without getting looked over, but he was never crude or explicit. He got bored with someone fast. Jarvis spent maybe half his time getting Howard's flames off the warpath, and the other half covering up all of Howard's illegal activities."
Tony frowned. "So all those lectures about breaking the law..."
"Homosexuality was illegal in Britain then," Jamie murmured. "Colonel – colonel – he didn't care what Stark did in his free time, no one did but the civilian cops hated gay Americans. The army had to ban all off-base relationships to be equal about it."
"Your dad was a civilian, technically. They couldn't order him to stop."
"He spent – he spent – he..."
She faded off, stuck in another memory rut – her therapist's words. Steve waited for her to shake herself out of it, but when her eyes stayed glassy after more than a few seconds he kissed her cheek and said, "He spent more nights in a London jail cell than I can remember. Eventually the cops and the gay clubs made a deal – they'd stop raiding 'em if they banned Howard Stark from every premises."
Tony laughed, rolled his eyes. "And he lectured me about breaking laws."
"What laws did you break?" asked Jamie.
"Uh... I might've been addicted to cocaine for part of college."
Steve felt the need to point out, "You started college at fifteen."
"Yeah. And?"
Jamie rolled her own eyes. "Steve. Don't be a twit."
"Don't be a twit," said Mark Flanagan, and his buddies laughed at Steve's bleeding face, torn pants, shoes lined with –
Steve walked away.
They had laundry to fold, jeans and flannel and the last of Jamie's stretchy maternity pants. Steve put it away slowly, trying to control his breathing like the therapist had advised him. How couldn't Jamie have remembered why –
How couldn't she have remembered. Wow, Steve thought – he must really be a twit if he was thinking that.
"Steve," said Jamie quietly, knowing he could hear her from the living room. "We should have dinner soon."
Okay. "Okay."
Steve returned to make dessert – lemon merengue pie, one of the many foods he'd discovered he loved now that he had the money to buy things he didn't know he'd want to eat – as Tony continued a rant about Stark Industry's current chairman of the board of directors, who seemed convinced he was still CEO. "God forbid he ever loses the board," commented Steve, launching their friend into a new topic: all the "weather underground wanabes" on said board who wanted to shift the company's focus to renewable energy.
"Y'know what, Obie's right about this – we're iron mongers. We don't do energy."
"Hydra uses Stark weapons."
Tony froze. "What."
"The anti-aircraft weapons 'specially," continued Jamie. "That spy plane that got shot down over the USSR, that was them. They wanted to end the – what was it?"
Steve answered, "Détente. And you used their guns, right?"
She nodded. "I like Kalashnikovs better."
"Hold on, I think I had something in my ear. There's no way you like Kalashnikovs more than Stark guns."
"SRs are too flashy, too much shit in 'em. Too much weight."
"You can free-lift five hundred pounds."
"Seven-fifty," Steve cut in, "and weight matters a lot for snipers."
Tony huffed. "Well I haven't heard complaints from the GIs."
"You think soldiers get to choose their weapons? It's the contractors and lobbyists." He spooned filling into the pie crust. "Y'know what doesn't screw people over?"
Jamie: "Clean energy."
"What about the poor coal miners?"
Steve slid the pie into the toaster oven. "Build the factories in Kentucky."
"You know how expensive healthcare coverage would be?"
"You only complain about cost when you're looking for excuses not to do something," Jamie told Tony.
Tony huffed and Steve changed the topic: "We'd, um..."
He sat down, rubbed his daughter's head, ran his fingers through her hair. "We can't baptize her now, obviously. But when we do..."
Cait broke off from nursing, seemingly satisfied for now – it would last two seconds, Steve knew, and she'd be back to whining – and squirmed against her mother's grip.
"Wait, you're – you're asking me? Me?"
"No, I'm asking the fourth person in the room."
Tony pointed at Cait. "I think the church doesn't let people be their own godfathers."
"The fourth adult," Steve sighed.
"Oh, so the other genius playboy –"
"You've used that line before," commented Jamie. She lifted their daughter up and burped her against her shoulder. "Just think about it."
"I haven't been to church since my parents' funerals. I'm not..."
Tony faded off, the subject of December 1991 still hanging heavy over all of them.
"I dunno if they'd even take..."
"They will," said Jamie. Steve caught himself at her certainty, and before he could say anything she repeated, to him, "They will."
Ding went the oven. Steve pulled out the pork chops and they moved to the dining room – except for Cait, who went to bed.
"So when're you getting out of this rattrap?"
"Two weeks." Jamie looked up, at the window that showed the front yard.
"Where're they sending you?"
She shrugged. She liked to pretend she didn't care that she'd be out in the world again, seeing the sun and feeling the wind on her face.
Steve knew she hated being inside. She'd always been comfortable in the tall buildings and factories of Brooklyn, but after he pulled her out of Kreischberg she was never comfortable staying in one place for very long, especially if that place was base camp.
He thought her restlessness would go away once the war ended, once they settled down and had kids. Now, it seemed Cait only added to her anxiety.
"Well. Have fun."
"Don't let Fury know you told me that."
Tony laughed, the tension brought on by the thoughts of a mission faded, and they passed the rest of the night – the whole two-day-long visit, really – at ease.
Four days before Fury was set to arrive and supervise Jamie on her first mission, Steve forced himself to voice the thoughts he'd had tumbling around his head since Tony visited.
"I could talk to Fury about arranging something for Sunday mornings. No one pays attention to the people in the back – or maybe after missions, even overseas, by the time anyone recognized you you'd be long gone and they do services in vernacular nowadays so you'd understand them and the words come right back..."
He faded away as she shook her head. "Fury wouldn't let me."
"You don't know until you try."
Jamie closed her eyes, shook her head again, took a shaky breath. "Let it go, love. Let it go."
Steve knew better than to push her. He let it go, reluctantly, and returned to prepping for his own mission.
The day of the mission Fury said two words – "suit up" – before disappearing into the moonshine tunnel. Jamie bolted straight for her room and reappeared in her uniform not a minute later.
She'd sewed that thing for months, hidden pockets and chest straps and elastic bands built into the pants lining that needed a stitch that she'd never quite got down and still needed Steve to do for her.
Her eyes lit up as they hadn't in months wearing it.
Steve smiled, kissed his wife goodbye and told her to be safe. "When'll you be back?"
"Twelve hours," she replied, tapping her leg. Steve didn't miss her glances towards the boiler room.
"All right. Knock 'em dead." Jamie winced. "Er, not really. You know what I mean. Good luck."
She left. Steve wandered around the apartment, empty of his wife for the first time he'd ever been there. He wondered if it felt as quiet when he left for work every day.
He didn't like it.