Warnings for the f-bomb being dropped a few times.

By the time Stevie got down to the workshop, the place had gone to hell. The apparent intruder—singular—was small, probably about the same size that Stevie had been before the serum. The man—she assumed he was fully-grown and not twelve—fought like something between a wild animal and a Russian ballerina. He and Natasha were locked in a vicious battle that had taken out at least three of Tony's worktables.

They broke apart for five seconds, and Stevie could see the anguish in his eyes. "Natenshka," he whispered. "What did they do to you?"

Natasha went rigid. "How do you know that name?"

Stevie was at the right angle to see his eyes go wide with hope. "You remember James." At no sign of recognition, he tried, "Yasha? You remember Yasha?"

Natasha pounced. There was no other word for it. She crouched a minute amount and sailed over the workbench between them like a puma exploding over a boulder. She bowled over the man, rolling them until they were smack against one of the glass cases that held who-knew-what and proceeded to slowly strangle the man.

"I will not," Natasha panted, enraged. "I will not go back to the Red Room. The only capacity that you will have me is my dead body, and not even that if I can arrange it."

"He escaped," the man wheezed. "They did things worse to him—he was an American soldier—Natenshka—"

Natasha kneed the man in the stomach and let go of his throat. The man gasped for a moment and coughed. "Talk," she commanded.

"He was an American soldier in World War II," the sandy-haired man said. "He and most of his regiment were captured by Hydra, and they experimented on him. Official story is that he managed to break out, break out the prisoners, and died while covering the back of someone else. What actually happened was that Hydra managed to capture him again, and used electricity to wipe his memories of his previous self. The method was unstable because the cocktail that they gave him worked and made him…some kind of superhuman."

"A supersoldier," Natasha said.

"A superassassin," the man said. "Do you remember?"

"What's his actual name?" Natasha demanded.

"Barnes," the man said. "James Barnes."

There was a long pause, and then Natasha turned at looked at Stevie, her green eyes huge and puzzled.

Stevie managed to choke out, "James Buchanan Barnes?"

And then her green eyes turned horrified.

The man looked startled. "Uh, yeah. How'd you know that? And, uh, did someone yank you out of a Marvel comic book? And feminized you, somewhere along the line?"

"What's your name?" Natasha asked.

He looked at Natasha, and then at Stevie. "Steve Rogers. I'm Agent Rogers of MIRROR."

Natasha sat back on her heels, looking at him with frank bemusement. "Stark, you can come out of hiding now. Come fix this mess."

Tony slowly stood, cobbled-together repulsors glowing softly on his palms with the metal frame and wires winding their way up his arms and to the reactor in his chest.

He managed to sum up what they were all thinking with two words: "Well, fuck."

"What's 'well, fuck'?" the male Rogers questioned hurriedly as Natasha hauled him up by one arm. "Having Einstein-Rosen bridges spontaneously opening might be 'well, fuck' for the rest of the world, but for me it's just another Tuesday, so either this is a lot weirder for you people—which I doubt, because you have a real-life and feminized Captain America and possibly a cyborg of Tony Stark—or there's something that I'm missing."

"Kid, you're missing a lot of things," Tony said bleakly.

The male Rogers bristled. "Excuse you, I'm twenty-four, not twelve."

Stevie rubbed her forehead absently. "Steve," she said loudly, making sure that the two didn't devolve into squabbling. "What year were you born?"

"1988," he said. "Why?"

Stevie said some words that had Tony's eyebrows flying into his hair. "Because," she said, "my name is Stephanie Rogers, and Natasha doesn't know who you are because she's actually never met you, because I am you from an apparently vastly different dimension."

"Is it Thursday?" Tony muttered.

"No, it's Tuesday," Steve said.

"It's actually Saturday," Natasha said.

"What year were you born?" the male Rogers asked the female.

Stevie glanced at Natasha, and then Tony. "1920."

Steve gaped at her for a moment, and then turned to Natasha. "Nineteen-twenty?"

"I ended up joining the Army in 1942, spent three months in Basic and then got turned into a supersoldier in the basement of somewhere in Brooklyn," she said mildly. "Then I was dubbed 'Captain America'. Which is apparently a comic book series in your world?"

"It's a comic book series, here, too," Tony said. "Only it was based off of you, and not just someone's imagination."

"Why MIRROR?" Stevie asked. "Why does one universe have SHIELD and you have MIRROR?"

Steve glanced between her and Tony. "Uh…well, we had SHIELD, until about two years ago. Natenshka and I—well, my Natenshka—we ended up burning it to the ground to expose HYDRA."

Stevie jerked, goosebumps rising on her forearms. "Excuse me?"

He shifted away from her. "Yeeeaah, that was kind of our reaction. Turns out that HYDRA was a hell of a lot sneakier than anyone suspected. It was Operation: Paperclip that did it, back after the war."

"Oh," Tony said, his eyes lighting up with understanding.

"Operation: Paperclip conscripted Nazi scientists to work for the British or Americans," Natasha explained to Stevie.

"Apparently, the Stark of my universe had some inkling about SHIELD's shadiness, because as soon as Natenshka and I brought SHIELD down, he had SWORD up and running within the month. After being a scarily good Director and making sure that Earth still survived a few more times, he passed it over to Phil, who renamed it MIRROR."

"Someone likes Coldplay too much," Tony said.

Steve shot him a smirk. "That was at least a quarter of the reason why he named it such."

"I don't understand the reference," Stevie admitted.

"Coldplay's a band," Steve said. "One of their song's lyrics goes: be my mirror, my sword and shield. And, okay, I'm sorry—but my alternate self is Captain America? What the hell? Are you yankin' my chain?"

Stevie looked down at herself, decked out in full body armor. "No, not to my knowledge. Personally, I find it amusing that my alternate self brought down HYDRA without being a lab rat. Especially when it was in SHIELD, of which I've never gotten along with."

"Oh, no, I was a lab rat," Steve disagreed. "Asthma, heart murmur, scoliosis, two different immunodeficiency diseases and a list of allergies quite literally as long as my arm."

Natasha and Tony both whipped their heads to Stevie to see if she had been the same.

"Of course, you're a guy, you got lucky," Stevie said dryly. "Did you have rheumatic fever or was that just me?"

Natasha's lips pursed, which was as good as a full-body cringe from anyone else.

"Oh, Lord," Steve swore, groaning, which Stevie took as a yes. "How the hell did you survive that in the mid-thirties?"

Stevie smiled tightly. "Bucky Barnes."

"Was he a nurse in this universe?" Steve asked, puzzled.

"He was my best friend and he refused to let me die," Stevie said baldly. "Even when the priest came and gave me the Last Rites."

Tony looked at her up and down. "I'm sorry, I can't see that."

Stevie smirked. "I used to be shorter than you by about four inches, and looked more like bones covered in taut skin. I'd get sick every time the temperature dropped below seventy, and winter was a Russian Roulette of illness: pneumonia, bronchitis, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, flu, mono, polio, measles, chicken pox. Sometimes it would be two or three back to back. One winter was pneumonia only to turn right around with scarlet fever."

"Fifteen years old?" Steve asked.

Stevie nodded.

"And you didn't have the pills," Steve said. "Jesus Christ, how did you survive without modern medicine?"

"Pills?" Tony demanded.

"If you get scarlet fever nowadays," Steve said, "you take a series of pills for five days, and it's gone. Unless you have severe immunodeficiencies, you don't have to worry about relapsing with rheumatic fever, which can and does damage your heart. She didn't have the pills, and her immune system—even if it hadn't already been compromised with the immunodeficiencies—would have been compromised anyway because she just got done with pneumonia. The illness itself can take months to run its course with another year for full recovery. Scarlet fever should have killed her within three days." He hesitated. "A good analogy would be that she survived Bird Flu only to have come down with Ebola."

The color drained out of Natasha's face.

Tony said some emphatic words that should not be repeated to small children.

"Like I said," Stevie said with a tight smile, "Bucky refused to let me die."

"That doesn't work like that, though," Tony protested.

"Then you find a medical explanation for me," Stevie shot back. "And good God damnit, if Bucky's still alive as a brainwashed Red Room soldier, you can ask him, because by the time that it got that bad, I was past delirious and straight into comatose."

"So we have multiple problems," Bruce summed up later in a meeting with the other Avengers.

"Is he supposed to be the Hulk?" MIRROR-Steve whispered to Natasha.

"We need to contact Jane Foster and Reed Richards—"

Tony groaned theatrically and Natasha whispered back, "Yes. Why?"

"—to get this guy back to where he came from," Bruce said.

"I know that I fell through the rabbit hole, but I didn't expect to end up in a Marvel comic book," Steve whispered.

"Then we have the problem of said guy bringing really disturbing information," Tony said.

"And he's Iron Man? Is it strange that I can actually see that?" Steve whispered some more.

"Yes," Natasha muttered. "To both."

"We have the maybe-infestation of HYDRA into SHIELD, which JARVIS is looking into right now," Tony said. "Then we have Wonder Woman's romance of the ages being murder-ized." He stopped, and looked thoughtful. "Can that be an appropriate nickname since Diana's romance was with a guy named Steve who blew up his plane? No, different nickname."

"Not applicable anyway since we were never together," Stevie said dryly.

Tony frowned. "That can't be. Dad told me stories about you two living up to the Howling Commando's name."

"You know what I did when he was drafted?" Stevie asked. "I shut myself in my room for six hours and cried. He sat outside my door and fell backwards when I opened it. Then I told him that if he died, I'd besmirch his name and tell everyone that we had wild and passionate sex out of wedlock, and then I'd bury him with a Yankees ballcap and tell everyone that he was a fan. And you know what? The fact that Howard told you about that was gratifying, and Bucky's sisters buried a casket with only a Yankees ballcap in it."

"Tell him the other part of it," Natasha said.

Stevie looked at her, surprised. "How do you know about the other part of it?"

"Yasha—James, apparently—got into trouble on a mission that I was blonde for. I broke in and managed to rescue him and he started laughing and said, 'You weren't kidding about the one-woman army part of our deal, huh?'" She paused. "Obviously, we never made such a deal. When he recovered, he couldn't remember what or who he was referring to."

"Cognitive recalibration," Clint said dryly. "I guess they didn't hit him hard enough in the head, Tasha."

Stevie barked a broken laugh. "I told him if he was only faking, I'd personally be his one-woman army and get him out. Which is why I became Captain America for real, not Showgirl America, with Azzano and setting the remains of the 107th and several other divisions from four different countries on the base."

Clint whistled.

"You should have seen it," Stevie laughed, tears streaming down her face. "A fucking tank was flipped. Half the east wing was blown out completely, and I was picking my way across Nazi bodies killed in increasingly creative ways with Bucky on my shoulders. He had a gun, I had this little tin foil shield that had saved my life four times already. Then I had to round everyone else up, and they had scattered in every direction imaginable, including up. I ended up coaxing one soldier down from a fifty-foot pine tree with food like a feral cat from the docks."

Pepper Potts stepped in and plonked a mug of steaming hot chocolate down in front of her, then wrapped the woman that was twice her size in a bear hug of epic proportions. Stevie shuddered once, then gathered herself. Pepper produced a handkerchief from nowhere, handed it to Stevie, and took control of the meeting.

"JARVIS is currently looking into American SHIELD bases for traces of HYDRA, but I've also updated FRIDAY and HORTON on the situation and set them on the rest of the world," she said. She tapped the table twice, and a world map filled with pale blue dots was shown. Slowly, some of the dots turned green or yellow. "Green is definitely no HYDRA involvement, yellow is maybe or traces of HYDRA, red is definitive HYDRA involvement. Blue dots have yet to be gotten to. It's reasonable to assume that if HYDRA exists, per our guest, once they find something, I've set STITCH on invading the servers and finding the Winter Soldier."

"You got STITCH out?" Tony asked, eyebrows raised.

"Are FRIDAY, HORTON, and STITCH all AIs?" Bruce asked Tony, incredulous.

"Yes and they are," Pepper said, answering each question. "FRIDAY is my secretary and digital bodyguard, actually. HORTON helps run the small, day-to-day things that the company needs, everything from ordering coffee and Post-Its to catching the attention of a superior in the event that something life-threatening is about to go. STITCH has not been in use since the last time Tony got kidnapped, since he's basically meant for searching for specific people and destroying anything potentially useful that the captors might use. The first time a dot turns red, STITCH is going to coordinate with whoever labeled it as such, find the reason for it being red, and dive into it."

She paused. "I've left Dr. Foster a message with her 'not-intern' and set up a meeting with Reed Richards," she paused, checked her watch, "three and a half hours from now. I've also yelled at the sky to Heimdall, but I don't really know how far that will get me."

Natasha smiled.

"I have a meeting with the Secretary of Treasury in four hours, so I need to go now. But—Stevie."

The blonde looked at her, and Pepper grasped one of her hands tightly. "If he's there to be found, we'll find him. Promise."