"Ambassador," said Zola, as peevishly as a computer AI could, "You lost the asset."
Showtime.
Jamie closed Tetris and switched to the app on her phone that Jarvis installed once she got close enough the Zola's computers that morning. It was too easy to override Zola's controls with Tony's own AI, but then again Stark had fifteen years to perfect Jarvis and Zola only three to preserve his dying brain.
"You were the one who told us to try to breed it again," Pierce countered.
"With the proper controls! You did not follow the procedure."
"We wouldn't've needed the controls if we chose a different plan to contain Rogers. Karpov stopped that part of the program because it never worked. But no, we always have to do it your way."
"I rebuilt Hydra from the ashes! It is I who created Project Insight. We must stop this bickering – I have the directives to maintain the future of Insight."
"Couldn't agree more with that first one," said Jamie, and her former owner turned. "The second, not so much."
That was Jarvis's cue; it overwrote text-to-speech commands in Zola's code, rendering the dead scientist speechless. About time, too – Jamie had always wanted him to shut up.
Pierce snarled, "You also didn't tell me it used to be Captain Rogers' wife."
"He went to a lot effort to make that irrelevant. Obviously it didn't work."
Jamie's phone buzzed: a text from Steve, asking for the password to the security feeds in the bunker. She replied that Jarvis had them, stowed her phone and saw Pierce smirking when she looked back up. "Who's handling you?" she asked.
SHIELD, and they're doing a damn good job of it.
"Why would you think someone's handling me?"
"Because you can't operate without a handler."
"That's the triggered state. Not me."
"You're the same. It's just more compliant than you."
Steve sent another text: «10 min out. Are you done yet?»
"I don't kill people," she told Pierce. "Not willingly."
«give me 5»
"So Helena Malone forced you to kill her? She had a wife. A daughter. You knew that, and you left her in your cryo chamber for us to find."
She'd left Malone there to keep the sensors from blaring a warning when the temperature lowered.
"She's the only one I don't regret. She deserved it."
"Hmm." Pierce pressed a key on Zola's keyboard and pulled a gun. "Zhelaniye."
Oh, lovely. She'd finally deigned to buy the words from the Russians. "How much did you pay?"
"Rzhavyy," continued Pierce. "Semnadtsat'. Rassvet. Pech'. Devyat'."
"You shelled out forty-five million for me. Didn't they want an equal amount for the words? – They said I was useless without them."
"Dobrokachestvennyy. Vozvrashcheniye na rodinu."
"The Soviets paid an equivalent of a hundred million to Zola. They didn't find out he was dying till a month later. Thought they were cheated."
"Odin. Gruzovoy vagon."
Karpov had retired when the KGB splintered and Hydra took back their asset. He settled down in Cleveland, Ohio, of all places, and hid the trigger book along with his personal notes in the basement wall of his house. Jamie knew of it because she'd found him months ago and retrieved him for SHIELD; the book she kept for herself and showed only to her shrink.
Electroshock therapy was a bitch, even with the low buzz SHIELD's diodes had and the sedatives she insisted she didn't need but had to take. It took three slow months for them to work through all the words and phrases.
"They probably charged you extra 'cuz you were desperate."
Pierce curled her lip into a smirk, probably to hide the fear that her last resort to bring her former asset to heel had failed. "You think you know so much. You barely know anything – I wiped your brain enough to make sure of that."
"Sure," Jamie conceded. "Then you tied me to a bed for four months and didn't wipe me at all. You can blame Zola all you want but you got sloppy and that's on you."
The new supreme leader of Hydra, appointed when her boss was arrested in the third round of government purges, adjusted her aim from Jamie's head to her chest – as if she didn't know the translucent shield she'd activated was two-way.
"You aren't that good a shot," Jamie told her. "That's why you always had me do it. And that's why I hated you, always did. You never did your own dirty work."
Pierce wasn't going to confess to anything. Steve wanted her to and so did Fury – hell, everyone did. If she confessed she wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court and the inevitable trial wouldn't drag on.
Jamie didn't need a confession. Pierce had already said the words and copped to torturing her; her conversation with Zola was icing on the cake. Jamie had done her job.
"Alexandra Pierce," she said, "you're under arrest for treason, terrorism, murder, conspiracy to commit, racketeering and bribery, in addition to other charges. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. You have the right to be held for trial in the country in which you've been arrested. Do you understand these rights as I've told them to you?"
Pierce curled her lip into a smirk because yes, Jamie had told her who was handling her.
"I'll take that as a yes."
She called the elevator, hit a command on her phone and watched Pierce vanish on the other side of the safety doors. The version of Jarvis on her phone informed her that it had uploaded the recording the SHIELD's mainframe.
The bunker was dusty, empty, and the silence overwhelming as she left the building. She had to stay out of sight when Steve's Strike team arrived to take Pierce in – Fury wouldn't make Jamie's employment public for another few months but they were ready to –
Jamie walked out of the bunker and faced thirty – five, six, seven – figures: guns drawn, the letters FBI bright and bold on their vests.
Standing orders said she couldn't harm any law enforcement. She didn't resist as they slammed her against the side of a van, or when they read her the same rights she'd given Pierce and pulled a black bag over her head.
"Mama!" shouted Cait as Jamie walked up from the basement apartment to the house's first floor. She slammed into her mother's leg and buried her face in the pants fabric.
Jason approached with another toddler on his hip, concern fighting the grin on his face. "So how pissed is Steve gonna be with the FBI?"
Steve was already pissed – he'd read what Jamie wrote on the prisoner transfer forms, after all. "He said he'd file a complaint."
Cait bounced on her heels, lifted her arms up and fussed. Jamie complied, payed no heed to the silent eyes trained on her from the living room.
"It wasn't that bad," she added.
"When was the last time you ate?"
Jason got like this sometimes, worrying like Jamie was his child. At least he was openly concerned – not like Steve, who stuffed his worry down and couldn't control his body language.
"I had water on the flight up here. Stark doesn't keep food on his plane."
Her neighbor rolled his eyes and disappeared into the kitchen. Cait knocked on her mother's metal arm, calling her attention so she could say, "Gone."
"I was working," Jamie told her. "We told you I'd be gone for a while."
"Da!"
"He's also working. He'll be back soon."
She ran her hand through Cait's hair; it was a comfort now, on the other side of six days in FBI custody. There were forms to fill out and so, so many interviews to go through but right now all Jamie wanted to do was eat, shower and play with her daughter. In that order.
Jason returned with a plate of food. "When you're good to debrief," he said, "let me know. We can do it in the library."
"The dog?"
The puppy, more like. A half-grown pitbull mutt that Barton found – Steve: "Of course he'd find a pet on a combat mission." – but didn't have space for in his apartment. She was happy, ran around the yard too fast for Cait to keep up and peed constantly in the kitchen.
"She's been whining for you. But we got her to use the dog door a few times." Jason pointed at the food. "Eat."
Debrief was easy, just recapping Jamie's arrest and so-called torture by the FBI. She recounted it easily – nothing to censor about being locked in a room with a bag over your head for four days straight.
She finished and Jason looked at a loss for words, letting the library fill with the sounds of the co-op daycare that the Heungs hosted. Finally he remarked that Steve was right to file a complaint and moved on.
They'd broadcast the exchange live on TV and over the internet; after all who wouldn't want to watch SHIELD and the FBI trade prisoners, or get their first glance of the infamous Sergeant Barnes?
Everyone's expectations went out the window when Steve unlocked Jamie's thick armcuffs and handed her the transfer forms. One of the FBI agents had stuttered a protest when Jamie signed the lines on Pierce's forms certifying that the woman had been Mirandized properly, but fell silent just as easy when Steve returned Jamie's gun, badge and phone to her.
Yeah – she had a badge now.
Cait insisted Jamie stay in the living room with her until daycare ended, which made for an awkward afternoon with the other parents. She firmly planted herself in front of her mother so that Jamie couldn't get up from filling out her forms while Cait herself copied her on a doodle pad. The only time either of them left the room until the daycare ended was when Cait, a month into her potty-training, declared that she needed to pee.
Come dinnertime Jamie found a remote to turn the TV off and discovered the news had discarded their coverage of "did you know Jamie Barnes was working for SHIELD this whole time" in favor of a picture of mother and daughter, once it hit naptime and Cait fell asleep in Jamie's lap.
She paused, taking in the picture. Cait looked so delicate, not the bouncy girl Jamie knew who picked herself up with no help when she fell, chattered away happily at her mother's feet in the kitchen, made nonsense drawings that Steve loved as much as Jamie found disconcerting...
"Oh," said Steve. Tyler skirted around him in the doorway and hung his own coat up. "Okay. So that happened."
After dinner Steve led the kids in a game of monkey-in-the-middle – he, of course, was in the middle – while the other adults did dishes. Tyler insisted Jamie take all the leftovers just as his phone rang for the fourth time: his parents, asking about the rumors regarding the toddler they thought was their granddaughter.
Cait fell asleep the moment Jamie put her down. Steve remarked that this was an earlier bedtime than usual, and Jamie told him they were going to have an early bedtime too.
"Did you –" Steve stuttered, "how much sleep did they let you get? You didn't put down sleep deprivation on the forms but if –"
She silenced him with a kiss. "The death metal drowned out any dreaming. But I still got sleep. I'm fine."
"Okay, then what did you – oh."
Steve was slow on the uptake, always had been, but once he got there he never hesitated to act. Jamie let him pick her up and carry her to their room.
She climaxed, finally, two hours later, sprawled across Steve's chest on the floor.
"Hon?"
"Mhmm?"
Jamie kissed his jaw, the light beard he'd stopped shaving probably when she'd left on her three-week quest to create as big a swath of destruction across Hydra's American bases as possible. "What'd you think 'bout giving Cait a little sib?"
"Now? How about we wait 'till the noise dies down."
"And that'll take – what, six months?"
"Fury told me to expect 'em to be on us for at least a year."
She did the math and frowned at the result. "How about we screw Fury?"
"Together? I don't think she'd be interested in that."
"Mama?"
Jamie groaned and pushed herself off her husband's chest.
Cait gasped from the doorway, pointed towards her parents. "Dada's wee-wee!"
"She sees us both naked in the shower all the time," Steve complained, as Jamie scooped their daughter up. "Sing her a song, how about?"
Jamie woke to a voice that tickled her memory: "...and July fourth and Thanksgiving and Christmas and you never fucking told us? Never told me! You were playing house in –"
"I wasn't playing house," said Steve. "We were both working."
"That's – you have a place. Together!"
"We're married. Stability is good."
"Stability my ass. You wanted the good 'ol post-war family life. You wanted to pretend that nothing was the –"
Steve charged out the bedroom, closing the door behind him, and Jamie was left to puzzle over the woman on the other end of the line. No accent so she couldn't be Peggy; maybe Jones, or Dernier – Dernier was dead, and besides she'd be shouting in French. Jamie couldn't remember about Jones.
The clock said it was 0640 but she felt too hungry to – no, she'd been starved for six days, she couldn't use hunger as a gauge.
Jamie didn't remember putting Cait on her belly when she went to bed.
Her phone relayed the continued chaos that purge #4 of the US government was causing. They'd expanded into the State Department and the DOD this time around, spurring some European countries to start their own witch hunts. SHIELD was suddenly everyone's favorite NATO investigative agency.
Jamie held her daughter to her chest as she got up and walked to the kitchen. She smelled pancakes.
"And can we talk about the kid!"
"A condom broke and she didn't want to take the pill!" Steve parried. He took Cait and sat her down on the counter in front of a plate. "There's nothing wrong with that."
"Oh, she's yours. So there's something okay about this shitshow at least."
"What does it matter if she's mine or not?"
And that, Jamie thought, was why she'd never fallen out of love with this man. And he could make pancakes like a pro – that never hurt.
The woman on the other end of the call sputtered. "It – it would mean – okay. How old is she?"
"Twenty-three months."
The twenty-three-month-old waved her pancake around, fingers digging in so tight that it ripped and fell on the ground. Steve fended off a fit of crying by plopping another pancake onto Cait's plate straight from the pan, while the dog served its function as a walking vacuum cleaner.
"Plus nine, that's thirty-two... so, five months. It took you five fucking months to knock my sister up, after she got out of four fucking months of being raped twenty-four-seven! Because they wanted to get her pregnant!"
"Becca. I'd put you on with her so she could tell you the difference, but she's" – he glanced her way and stuttered – "she's still asleep."
"Bullshit. You hesitated. Put her on."
Cait poked at her pancake, felt it hot and grinned.
"She just woke up. She's eating."
"Steve, I swear."
Jamie swallowed, held her empty plate up and exchanged it for the phone. "Most people," she said without pause, "when they find out they have a niece, they say congrats and ask for a picture. We raised you, Becca. You don't get to pull this shit with us."
Cait laid the pancake across her face and Jamie handed the phone back.
Jamie didn't have expectations, honestly. She'd had them drilled out of her. If she tried to anticipate her handlers' wants it was as likely they'd flog her for acting outside her set bounds as it was they'd assume she was acting on already-issued orders anyway.
She'd gotten good at realism, though. The chances that breeding would fail – that her next mission would include the order for maximum casualties – that Fury would cut her field time – that her long-lost family would reject her.
Sometimes she was wrong.
She heard the footsteps as she looked around the field in front of her. Steve said they grew mostly corn and kept cattle wherever the corn wasn't planted. Clean-cut stalks poked out of the ground, brittle and hard under her shoes. Olivia woofed her objections to the new person and Jamie called her back. "Don't do that," she told the dog, rubbing her ears and head before she ran off again. "This isn't ours."
"We're planting next month. Once the ground gets warmer. Unless it snows again." The woman sighed. "God, I hope it doesn't snow again."
"When do you harvest?"
"By Thanksgiving."
Jamie stood to shake –
She reeled back against the movement – good, she'd sharpened it on the drive – Steve shouldn't complain that she dipped the whetstone in his cup when –
Jamie's niece spoke quickly – "Oh I didn't – you need help up? 'Cuz you're..." – and then not at all, when she saw the knife.
"Steve said you got out of the car back here. And the dog." She shuffled her feet. "He didn't say that you were pregnant. I would've brought the Gator."
"I'm fine walking." Jamie whistled for the dog, who came bounding up with her legs caked in dirt and a giant grin across her muzzle.
The niece, name of Tabitha, chattered away walking the trail to the house: how her brother Gabriel accidentally broke his fiancée's nose, that time Sam – "she's my cousin – er, Pete's kid" – shoved three different people into the same cowpat because Risa got the farm in their dad's will instead of her, the two grandkids who got into Yale the same year independent of each other, "and boy that was a funny March Meeting – oh we call them that, it's –"
"It's better than calling it 'happy anniversary of the time someone fell off a train and bought the farm for you'. I agree."
"Actually your benefits only bought the front field."
Jamie paused, turned back to give Tabitha a look.
"Steve's got us the woods... and the back field... and the house... and the orchard."
"Should we pay the army back, then?"
"I think he already did. What was it, eight thousand dollars?"
"We already sent most of our pay home anyway."
Jamie squinted at the outline of a chimney spilling smoke through the trees. "That it?"
"Yup."
Olivia bounded ahead to sniff out the surroundings, no doubt catching Cait's baby-shampoo scent in the wind. Tabitha talked about the house, the farm, as they approached: built in the late 1890s, tossed around until the bank took possession of it, like so any others, during the Depression. Jamie's parents got it for cheap before the war had even finished, desperate to get away from Brooklyn and memories of their dead daughter.
"And it's been in the family ever since. They thought Frank would want it but he wound up selling to Pete a couple years after they died. And Pete left it with Risa."
Tabitha pushed the door open, Olivia slipped through her legs and what was, according to Steve's later observations, the whole family turned to greet Jamie all at once.
She woke up at 5AM, the unfamiliar air stirring around her as the dog chased a squirrel in her sleep at the foot of the bed. Jamie never let her on the furniture but Steve had a soft heart.
In the old family crib – she was sure she'd slept in it as a baby – Cait snored softly. If that went on Jamie wouldn't get any more sleep. This was why she'd moved the baby to a different room in the first place, dammit.
Well, no point in getting upset. According to a great-nephew – Peter was his name? She couldn't keep them all straight but she remembered this one lived in Queens, the shame – every branch of the Barnes family took turns making meals. She'd make breakfast, then.
The dog's arrival, bounding up to Jamie before she was redirected to sniffing around the scraps bucket, presaged Steve's slow walk down the stairs. He kissed her good morning and set to work on the pancakes while Jamie continued with the fruit and eggs.
A niece, Aliana, wandered down first and put on coffee. "You know we have Bisquick, right?"
"Bisquick is an abomination," Steve pronounced.
Aliana rolled her eyes and chugged her cup of joe.
The rest of the family – her family, Jamie reminded herself: her family – trickled down throughout the morning. Becca arrived and insisted her sister sit and eat, only to ask moments later, "Are these mom's pancakes?"
Jamie shook her head.
"I'm pretty sure they are."
Becca ate another forkful and Jamie told her, carefully, "Mom never made you pancakes."
Chew, water, swallow – "Yeah, I know that. But it's her recipe. That's why you always made it."
"Mom made clătite. We never had the money for that. This" – she gestured to the flat pancakes on her plate – she should probably eat them – "was cheap."
"Then why'd you say it was hers?"
"To get Pete to eat. He always... cried for Mom but he didn't remember enough to..."
The table fell into an awkward silence.
"It's just flour and eggs," Steve commented. "You had a chicken coop on the roof. 'S how you got meat once a month. Paid more for heating that thing than the apartment itself."
"Well yeah, that's where we got our meat and eggs!"
"And down for the pillows, right?" asked Tabitha.
Just like that, and they devolved into a debate about the best things to feed chickens to get fluffier feathers versus larger eggs. Steve busied himself mixing another batch of pancake batter and fetching Cait when she came trudging down the steep stairs.
Afternoon brought a walk around the fields, which Jamie opted to skip to spend time with Becca.
Of course, Becca didn't want to gossip about the neighbors.
"They shouldn't've let the complaint drop."
"They fired Director Hennessey."
"That's not good enough. If you filed your own complaint –"
[J1] "I'm not a civilian. SHIELD's complaint is my complaint. The FBI didn't know I was an agent when they arrested me – for all they knew I was still rogue. The only thing they did wrong was take that long to turn me over to SHIELD."
"They starved you," Becca challenged.
"Yes."
"They tortured you."
"Becca. Love. I have killed hundreds of people. I've started wars and genocides, killed presidents and – and kids – and –"
Jamie cradled Cait in her arms, rested her chin on her daughter's head and watched her flip the pages of the book she pretended to read.
"They didn't know. For all that I've done, they went easy on me."
She watched her sister's emotions flicker across her face. They were the same as Steve had so often, when he'd remember all of a sudden what Jamie had done because of Hydra.
Congress certainly never forgot, or else why would they force her to live in their backyard? She comforted herself knowing that Becca, and New York, would be an easy drive from DC, but she already regretted letting Steve buy the house without seeing it herself.
"So," said one of the great-nephews, too-cheerful-like, "Boy or girl?"
"Surprise."
"What?" Aliana squawked. "How will we know which unnecessarily-gendered baby things to buy?"
Becca laughed. "If it's a boy, Risa's youngest is outgrowing his clothes faster than she can buy them."
Jamie looked at her sister, honestly confused. "If it's a boy he'll wear whatever Cait hasn't destroyed."
"Including the dresses?"
"No, she goes through those pretty quickly."
Aliana snorted her coffee through her nose and gasped, "I love you, Aunt Jamie. I really do."
Jamie buried her mouth in Cait's hair and smiled.
It was okay to be wrong, sometimes.
Because of course any version of Bucky Barnes will have a whetstone.