The note on the kitchen counter said "outside with Cait, be back by 6ish", and Steve found them throwing leaves at each other in the woods.
"How're my favorite women doing?" he asked, kneeling down behind Cait. She giggled and handed him more leaves, and he threw them at Jamie. His wife countered with a much better-packed ball of leaves and snow. Steve had to brush his eyes of the stuff before he could help Cait build a dirty snowball of her own.
The sun set as they wandered back through the moonshine tunnel, Cait dead-tired on her father's arm. He put her down to a late nap as Jamie collected and hung their jackets.
"I made dinner. Chicken, nothing fancy." Jamie came to a stop just short of the kitchen and eyed the bags on the counter. "You got groceries?"
"Yeah. We were out of" – Steve opened the refrigerator to put the milk in – "nothing. Anymore. You went shopping too?"
Per the new agreement with Fury, Jamie had one of SHIELD's face masks, a three-mile radius off-base and a set of fake IDs. It was risky but in return both she and Steve signed back up on missions when the deal was set.
And the circle of knowledge expanded, with two more agents brought in to manage security on top of their regular jobs.
"Yeah. You said, we were out of everything."
"Okay. So we have double."
Back before – "everything", Steve supposed, was the only non-cliché word – Jamie would hum as she did housework. Of course she didn't anymore but he could still see it in her eyes, her hands, her movements as she rearranged the cabinets to fit extra food. She was humming.
This was a good day. She'd had been having more of them lately, with the new meds and the new deal with SHIELD. She didn't ask how Steve pulled it off – Director Johnson was still an unknown to her – but there was life in the house and it hadn't been there ever before.
This was a good day, and Steve had a chance of pulling this off.
"So, I dunno if you remember," he began, "but I hate tomatoes. Always have. Something about how they change color as they ripen – and they bruise in the heat and y'know we never had air conditioning so they always got soft and mushy so fast, and then they'd smell and attract flies but you always bought 'em, still do. You love 'em."
He put the wheel down on the counter in front of Jamie; she didn't react.
"Can you please tell me why you don't like cheese?"
New meds, new shrink, new peace, a new computer so that Jamie could analyze on her own the information she stole from Hydra, and a brand-spanking new apology from Fury for being a shitty handler. Steve still had no idea whether Fury had manipulated Jamie on purpose or just didn't realize she'd equated SHIELD with Hydra, but Jamie didn't seem to hold it against her either way.
It was a good day, so his wife's expression didn't immediately close off. "I don't know."
"Whatever it is, it's okay if you –"
"I said, I don't know."
Steve nodded, returned the cheese to the fridge and asked, "Is it a trigger?"
"No, I –"
Jamie closed her eyes, breathed deeply. "I don't know. I look at it and I don't like it. I taste it and I don't like it. I'm sorry I... I shouldn't've stopped you from buying it."
"It's okay. I don't mind, I can get my cheese fix at the office." She huffed, a small laugh. "But y'know what the shrink said about pushing yourself."
"She said not to do anything I feel off about."
"She also said to get out of your comfort zone. And we do live right next to cheese country."
Jamie tapped her finger on the counter. "I'll pull up some recipes, make something next week."
"Thank you." He kissed her cheek. "How was your day?"
"It was good. I finished that book Tony recommended."
Steve fished one of the pans out of the oven: six chicken thighs, still hot and sizzling and covered in butter. Most of the calories they got came from the sauces Steve made religiously and the powder-soaked vegetables they ate so often, but it was still nice to eat regular food.
He was sick of butter, and cheese had a shit ton of calories too. But now was the time to count his blessings and not push his wife any more on the subject.
"You mean the one his assistant gave him for Christmas?"
"Yeah, I don't know what she was thinking. It's good though. I think he should read it."
"What's it about?"
"The Enigma machine, how Britain used it to crack the kr– Nazi's codes. Written by one of the guys who worked with Peggy 'fore she transferred to the SOE."
"At Bletchley?"
"Mhmm."
They finished up dinner, made out for a while on the couch and only stopped when their daughter cried. Steve almost plowed into Jamie in the hallway, stopped in front of Tony Stark's Christmas present. "I still don't understand why he had to frame it," she grumbled. "I already downloaded it for you."
"There's something about having a physical copy."
"Something dumb, yeah."
Cait wailed again – hungry, probably – and Jamie added, "I'm gonna give her a bath."
Steve stayed in the hallway to reread the article. As always, his eyes were drawn to the words "winter soldier" and "gone rogue" highlighted in green. Tony had to invent a new kind of highlighter ink to keep the newspaper print from running when he annotated it.
One of the reporters had requested an interview with Steve, trying to get his thoughts for the gigantic article. He asked her not to mention him but he still showed up everywhere: Jamie's rumored powers compared to Steve's own confirmed ones, how close he and Howard Stark had been – they hadn't, actually – and the too-accurate guess that SHIELD would eventually send their supersoldier to take down the other.
Jamie reemerged with a whiny Cait in her arms, glanced at the article and said, "They talked about you too much."
"At least they didn't mention you," he replied, and followed her into the bathroom.
Steve dodged a flying plastic boat just as Jamie dumped a bucket of water over Cait's head. She howled and kicked – "It's warm, don't be a baby about it." / "She is a baby." – and by the time Steve wrapped her in a towel both her parents were soaked.
"She has your throwing arm," he commented, rubbing Cait's hair dry with a towel in one hand while the other kept her squirming to a minimum.
"I'll sign her up for little league." Jamie sighed, switched the water to the shower and shed her clothes. "You're welcome to join."
"I'm a little old for little league, don't you think?"
Jamie tossed a bucket of water on him.
"I'm going to Moscow," she told Steve, after Cait finally fell asleep and they dragged each other back to their bedroom. "Leaving in the morning."
"To the KGB?"
Jamie nodded. "They have – I'm going to be seen. A lot. The government won't be able to cover it up."
"Is that the plan?"
She kissed him. "That's the plan. And Jemma's flight gets in tomorrow afternoon."
"I thought that was next week."
Jamie shook her head. "That's Tony. They're going to the same conference but she has to get here early to prep."
"How long's she staying?"
" 'Till she goes down to Saint Paul for the conference."
In the morning Steve moved Cait's crib into their bedroom and changed the sheets on her bed. He picked Simmons up from the airport and listened to her chatter on about her newest research project with Fitz – "When are you going to ask him out?" Steve asked, and Jemma veered into stuttering about how they were just friends – the whole drive back.
"Oh, I always forget how cozy your flat is," she said as she hung her coat up. "Basements are wonderful. Where's Jamie?"
"On assignment. She'll be back tomorrow morning."
Steve retrieved Cait from the Heungs and let her toddle over to Jemma, who gasped and scooped her up. "Hello there, Caitriona. Such a pretty name. And no one will confuse you with Jenny down the hall from you, or give her your Very Important research data hard drive. I pulled you out of your mum, did you know that?"
Cait made baby noises and laid her hands on Jemma's face.
"Can you say Jemma? Jem-a?"
Steve laughed and handed Jemma a plate for dinner.
In the middle of the night Steve's phone buzzed: his news app, dropping a story out of Russia into his notifications. It told Steve that his wife had snuck into the Kremlin, shot dead a minister dead as he prayed in one of the churches and vanished into the screaming crowd of tourists – but not before someone caught her on camera. The photo was smartphone-shot and blurry but Jamie – left forearm, narrow back, brown hair and wicked-looking assault rifle – could be seen clear enough.
No, that was not something the government could cover up.
He scrolled past the analysis, the paragraph that relayed that Tony Stark couldn't be reached for comment, and zeroed in on the witness comments: "Kept to herself," said one tourist. Another mentioned she'd asked a question in German-accented English about the architectural history of the cathedral spires, and a third commented she'd gone through security before him and hadn't had a bag on her, so how did she get the long gun in?
Jamie returned in the evening with matching ushanka hats for Cait and Steve, a Soviet science history book for Simmons and a replica Fabergé egg that she put on a shelf in the dining room. The minister, she said, had been the current chairman of the KGB. Cait wore her hat inside for a week straight – Steve had a picture of her waving goodbye to Jemma with it on – until she spilled sauce on it, and Jamie hid it for outside use only.
Jemma left for the conference and Tony swung by after he finished his own presentation in St. Paul. Jamie gave him a dyed wool shawl – "we all know you'll forget to get your assistant something for her birthday" – and he ate dinner with it covering his head, claiming he was now an honorary Russian grandmother. "So did you pick this up before or after you went all Jason Bourne on Soviet Harvey Milk?" he asked.
She stiffened, Steve explained, "Yeah, so that was a cover up," and then added when Jamie wouldn't, "Before she went into the Kremlin. She had some time to kill."
"Harvey Milk, time – two more for the hit list."
"You're hilarious, Tony."
"Just one of my many talents. Pass the peas?"
"Team three in position," reported Agent Picah.
"Barton, in position."
"Berger, in position."
"Team four in position."
"Ready on my mark," Steve breathed into his comm.
Romanoff, on her first post-defection mission, commented, "They just served the appetizer. Dinner crowd's thinning. I'm going to approach –"
"Not until I give the go-ahead."
Steve could just hear his newest team member thinking her idea was the best. For all Natasha was a master at slipping into the right role for any situation, she was also a solo actor and was not good at all used to taking orders from someone during a mission.
Slipping as poison into the target's soup was something Jamie would do if she didn't want to be noticed – if she did she'd go with a headshot – and when Steve thought up the plan he thought it'd be a good one. But now...
"Romanoff, get her to invite you to dinner."
"I'll need two minutes, spearmint gum, a yellow pad and shitty pencil and... that ugly beige plaid scarf I keep seeing everywhere. Really, why do you people love it that much?"
"Dolohov."
"Or a knit scarf."
Five minutes later – Amelia Dolohov worked fast – Romanoff stumbled up to the booth where Cecília Laís Medeiros sat and asked if she could interview her about the recent crime spree that some experts were blaming on the drug gang the woman was the head of.
Medeiros was happy to correct the record for young Ms. Rivero. Romanoff tapped the bench four long times halfway through dessert, shook her dinner partner's hand and bounced happily out the door. "O que uma bela moça," said Medeiros, easily in earshot of the bug Romanoff planted. "Talvez seu editor vai dar-lhe uma chance. Oh – desculpe-me. Onde fica o banheiro?"
"Team three, ready to move on my mark. Berger, time for a distraction."
"You got it."
Berger started up his corporate car and crashed it into the fire hydrant just outside the restaurant. Steve listened to the ensuing altercation with the restaurant owner, Medeiros' niece, in one ear while in the other Romanoff found an excuse to get in line for the bathroom.
Medeiros, their target, was the head of a Rio de Janeiro-turned-international gang. She visited her family's restaurant for dinner every night she was in New York City, and on those nights the Restaurante da Bahia became the most heavily-guarded building on Manhattan Island.
"Are we sure we want to take her down?" he'd asked Fury when she handed him the assignment. "She's run the cartel quieter than her sister did. Less violence, too."
"She's expanded into five other Brazilian states and is matching the Sinaloas for cocaine imports into the US. So far this year the TSA's seized four times the number of drugs linked to Brazil than they have in the last five years altogether."
"So we put people inside, make more busts. Not open up a vacuum –"
"Medeiros' second is a twenty-year CIA plant. This is a favor to them."
Okay, then.
Berger and Julia Medeiros screamed at each other on the sidewalk as Barton cut his way through the bathroom wall and Steve jumped from his perch on the fire stairs onto the target's backup security in the alley. Team three flooded the front of the restaurant; team four the kitchen; Romanoff disabled the bathroom guards.
Steve barely heard the first shot over the screams in its wake.
He finished with the cartel guards and stormed into the kitchen. Past the other cartel guards bound on the ground – the staff cowering – second shot – swinging doors – broken chair leg and pen –
Steve tripped, turned his fall into a roll and ducked behind a booth in time for the third shot. Fourth, he glanced around his cover: the figure shadowy as they walked around a cracked lamp.
Five, Steve rolled out, over his shield, and threw it at the –
"Jamie," he whispered.
She caught the shield with her left arm – metal arm – turned and threw it back. Steve doubled over as the shield hit his stomach; when he looked back up, his wife was gone.
The day passed in a blur. Medics evacuated the wounded agents and the rest of the team cleared the building. Medeiros, of course, was safe and sound right where Barton had cuffed her to the bathroom pipe, because Jamie didn't care about Brazilian drug lords.
Gallagher. Pence. Rios. Picah. Dolohov. All confirmed Hydra.
Why the hell had she gone after low-level members? – Steve was responsible for his agents and no one had told him where to assign the dirty ones. Only Jamie, knowing perfectly how her husband ran his team, could guarantee her targets would exclusively sustain injury but even then the risks...
Romanoff called for backup and extract; Barton stayed behind to coordinate with the local cops. Steve, on orders from Fury, flew back to Duluth, turned in his debrief naming his dead wife as the third party and went home. He was loudly and very publicly ordered to stay as far away from the investigation as earthly possible.
Jamie's uniform lay strewn across the hallway but everything else in the apartment was in order. Steve found both his girls asleep in the bedroom, Cait on her mother's belly. His daughter whined when he picked her up and returned her to her own room but he sang her a couple songs and she slipped back asleep easily.
Jamie was fully awake by the time he came back to her. "I didn't know," she murmured. "Fury didn't tell me and then you were there, and I couldn't back out. Not in front of her. I thought it was just gonna be the Strike team."
"What's her endgame?"
Steve never asked much about the missions Jamie went on. They targeted Hydra and their affiliates, he knew. She'd even had run-ins with Romanoff, before Clint finally got her to defect. But the most they were allowed to tell each other was when, where, for how long and what the combat level would be.
"I expose enough of Hydra to make SHIELD investigate their own. Fury can go after them above-board."
"Why couldn't I know about what happened today?"
" 'Cuz you're a shit liar. And you were on camera. Everyone needed to see you shocked."
Jamie raised her hand and laid it on Steve's cheek. "I'm sorry."
" 'S not your fault." He leaned down, kissed her deeply, stripped himself of his clothes and set a knee on each side of her. Jamie responded with her hands, her mouth, her body – Steve loved this, he always did, he could manage without the physical contact most of the time but he needed this, he really –
Jamie shuddered through her orgasm. She let Steve hold her until the morning came.
The front page of the New York Times read, "JAMIE BARNES CONFIRMED AS WINTER SOLDIER". They had a photo, too, from one of the surveillance cameras in the restaurant: shot from the left, her face turned so that it as well as her metal arm and star were crystal clear on the video. Someone from the Duluth News-Tribune, one of the daycare co-op parents, noted in her article that no one from SHIELD – she'd called Tyler and Jason Heung both – had any comments.
Rebecca Barnes-Santiago had a meltdown over the phone.
The circle expanded again: Steve invited Agent Barton to dinner once the news died down. Clint showed up with a bottle of 190-proof vodka – "for you, if you want it – I know I would" – and a six-pack of beer – "for me – and you, if you wanted that instead of..." – and trailed off when Jamie took both out of his hands.
"Okay. Guess that answers that question."
Right on cue Cait ran up to hug her dad, which was about the moment when Clint's brain decided to take an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Bahamas. He returned to himself when Steve's mother's stew hit his plate and he questioned Jamie about weapons and sniper business for the rest of dinner.
"I'd call that a success," Steve commented, watching Barton's car drive off. He would've offered to drive him home but Clint claimed he had an amazing tolerance from his circus days, and besides Jamie was walking around worse than he.
"Mhmm." Jamie wrapped her arms around Steve's waist and nuzzled his neck. "You wanna celebrate my new curfew?"
"Celebrate that you can't leave the house during the day? Or that we have to keep all the curtains drawn."
"Natural light is overrated," she told him.
Steve moved his hand to stop her from unzipping his fly. "You're drunk."
"Tipsy."
"Is this because of the videos? 'Cuz we should talk about –"
"I dunna wanna talk about it," Jamie slurred. She staggered, leaned against the counter and reached for the vodka. It was a credit to Steve's reflexes – or maybe how drunk Jamie was – that he grabbed the half-empty bottle before she could get to it.
"We need to." Steve set the vodka on top of a cabinet, too high for even him to reach without a stool. "Take ten minutes, sober up and –"
"I don't. Want. To talk about it."
"So when you hand over that flash drive tomorrow to the reporter, you'll be fine? You'll look her in the eyes and –"
"And say nothing, 'cuz that's what I'm ordered to do."
"And when I get the call next week from your sister, and she's yelling because the reporter went public and one of those videos is them gang-raping you – you'll be okay?"
It was a tough decision to make, one that Fury had almost took out of Jamie's hands before Tyler stepped in and drew the line. "It's her on the tape," he said, "so she should decide."
"It'll go a long way to exonerating her," Fury shot back. "In the public's eyes, something like –"
Jamie had cut in: "Something like that will make them feel better about forgiving the things we're doing to take down Hydra. When we go public." She rolled a quarter along her knuckles. "Do it."
Of course, Steve stayed silent in the matter. He didn't want to influence his wife's decision, not on this.
Maybe he should have stepped in.
"Why don't we talk it out?"
"I don't want to."
Jamie swayed, gripping Steve's arms for support, and Steve couldn't tell whether she was comfortable with the contact because she was drunk or because her therapist was finally addressing that issue.
"On that video... one of the men off to the side, he mentions Zola."
Oh. "They have both ends of the trail now."
"Trace forward from Zola, back from the Strike agents, and they'll have the whole conspiracy mapped out."
"Most of it, at least."
Steve kissed his wife, tasting the burn in her mouth. "Won't be long now."
" 'S what I tell myself."
Jamie broke contact and stumbled off into the hallway. Steve had put Cait down hours before, much to her sleepy protests – Barton suggested they could take a puppy he'd rescued and the toddler was very much invested in the idea – so the only sounds in the apartment were his own.
Steve cleaned the kitchen – counters, stove hood, oven, dishes – living room – couch, playpen, table, TV stand – dining room – table, chairs, hutch – and was halfway through the bathroom when Jamie appeared.
"We can do that tomorrow," she told him. "Just come to bed."
Jamie lay on her bed in Brooklyn, naked and stretched out and grinning drunkenly at Steve as he touched her, hesitant. He couldn't believe they had just – he'd just – and it wasn't like he'd had some deep yearning to, honestly it would've been fine if they just stayed friends but this was what she wanted and he could never say no to her, never to her.
Jamie lay shackled to the bed, eyes dead as one of Pierce's agents took another turn on top of her. A hand reached towards her crotch and she tensed, just a shift of a pixel or two on the screen. The man pinched and pulled her skin above where he'd forced himself into and Jamie cried silent tears.
Jamie lay curled up on the bed, the sheets she'd bought with Steve's anonymous credit card, fingering the holes she ripped into it when she climaxed. All Steve wanted to do was hold her, touch her everywhere like he'd done so many times, memorize her new scars and stretch marks, but he knew better.
"Tomorrow night," Steve began, "or whenever that reporter publishes the videos, your sister's gonna call and I can't tell her you're safe, or that you miss her, or that we have a daughter. All I can tell her is 'I can't talk about it'." He shook his head. "I can't stop thinking about it. And I know that's not fair to you. But sometimes..."
Steve took a shaking breath. "All those months, when you thought I was... okay with keeping you in here. That SHIELD – and you stopped coming on to me."
Jamie knelt down next to him in front of the toilet.
"I spent so much time with Cait – I didn't have a choice in it. I couldn't breathe. I thought I was gonna snap and I didn't want to put myself in the position where I might."
"Then why did you – whenever I –"
"I can't say no to you, Steve. I can't." She paused. "I thought you knew.
"You've always been the first thing I remember, every time," she continued. "I trust you, I can't find it in myself not to. It's built into me, it's who I am. I remember that I was so unhappy during the war, miserable – I wanted to go home, I didn't want to go on missions or any of it... but you were there. You asked me to stay. So I did. I can't say no to you."
Memories floated to the front of Steve's mind: surly evenings in bars, the lonely silence that always filled their shared tent in the field, anxiety attacks he had in the hours on missions waiting for combat because Jamie didn't radio in every minute with a bad pun or random thought...
She'd never even told him about the experiment he'd dragged her out of in Kreischberg. She'd only ever joked, talked, laughed when others did too. How could he have missed how depressed she'd been?
"The things I did for Hydra – I'm still remembering them. The doctors, they say that my brain's still repairing itself and it's moving old memories around, recovering them and... and it treats them like new memories. I dream about killing people at the same time as I dream about potty-training our daughter and making dinner with Jason and having sex with you, and they blur together. I kill Cait and torture Jason and burn you alive."
Steve suppressed the urge to hug her, tell her it wasn't real.
"They aren't real. And I know they aren't. But if you... I'm not made of glass, love. You won't break me."
"I know," he mumbled.
"But when you act like that's the case, it feels like I am. That you're scared of what I'd do if you touched me. Like I'd snap and do those things that I dream I do."
Jamie hugged him, burying her mouth in his shoulder and letting him wrap his own arms around her. "Please come to bed."
"Okay."
Steve stood with her still wrapped around him. He carried them both to bed, to sleep not as soaked in nightmares as he'd feared it would be, and in the morning he didn't panic at the note she left saying she'd already left for Los Angeles.