Chapter 9: Dare You to Move

Summary: In which there are more flashbacks and much forward movement.

Notes: I'm back! Hope you guys have had a good week! I thought I'd get this up early since I finally feel like I've got a good flow down and I think I've put enough distance between where I've posted and where I am currently in the narrative. Gotta keep a wide enough gap or I'll catch up to myself.

Anyhoo, here we are. Hope you guys like. We're really getting to the grit of this part now, things are going to start moving forward, narratively, at a more rapid pace. Not totally sure that 'narratively' is a real word, but we're just gonna go with it and pretend it is, okay? Okay.

Couple things: A few of you have mentioned the flashbacks being a little confusing, in that it's not always clear when our characters are in one. I do, in fact, try and make that pretty clear in the paragraphs preceding and following a flashback. That being said, with this one, that was sort of my goal. Remember, I mentioned that? I want things to be a bit fluid-too fluid-so with everything that's going on (Darcy spending most of her time in a weird fugue state, Bucky remembering old, old things) you, as a reader, aren't entirely confident where things are, either, at least until you're out of the memory. Make sense? Don't get me wrong, if anyone needs clarification on a particular bit, shoot me a question and I can answer. But I did try to build that in on purpose.

Also-and this is seriously cool-The Wintershock fandom Tumblr featured me in their Author Spotlight this week! I know! I'm so flattered, I wasn't sure I had that many people reading my drabbles. We did a little interview! Really exciting! So, go check it out here: post/155957466813/author-spotlight-marvellitchick

You may have to copy/paste, the embedding didn't really work. But anyway, that's ridiculously cool, and a shout-out to foreverdrunkatheart for recommending me! You are made of sparkly awesomeness and I'm not really sure how to thank you-I can't email you a hug, but the thought it IS TOTALLY THERE!

So, without further ado (I know, I talk a lot-small wonder I'm a Tom Hiddleston fan, eh?) here we go. As always, I do not own Marvel (sigh) and the chapter title is taken from the Switchfoot song of the same name. Seemed very fitting and it's a great song-go give it a listen (In fact, at risk of sounding like a total retro geek, everything on the A Walk To Remember soundtrack is good)!

Enjoy! Love you all. Let me know how you like. Also, apologies if the formatting here is weird-the site was acting really wonky...

((()))

"Idiots," the doctor muttered under her breath. "All of them. This is why my mother told me never to work with men."

Blinking, Natasha looked up from the blood bag she was carefully stowing, making sure to study the label. 'Lewis, Darcy' it read in the woman's clear printing. 'Type A+'. She frowned. In all the time she'd spent with her in the past six months, she'd never needed to ask to know she hated her family—and their name. It just went to show how awful she'd felt recently that she still hadn't changed it. For all her independence, Natasha knew she wasn't beyond the draw of old, traditional romance.

Killian had tasked her with helping the doctor—Erwin, she'd been right—with organizing her recent findings. While it was a fantastic opportunity to glean further information—Aldrich had proven more secretive than she'd initially thought, which was making her job harder—she had no illusions. He didn't trust her, and she was nearly sure him putting her in the back was a bit of a test of faith. Her next few moves—depending on whether or not she learned anything of particular use—would be critical. She'd have to be careful—he was watching her closely, no matter how nonchalant an air he gave off.

She shut the drawer and straightened. "Why is that?"

Erwin jumped, turning away from her paperwork. "I didn't even realize I said that out loud."

Natasha smiled. "Good to know I'm not the only one that does that."

Total. Lie. Steve constantly ribbed her for being more tightly wound than his old school nun.

Erwin sighed, then offered her hand. "Clytemnestra."

Natasha was careful to smile and shake her hand with a firm grip. "Natasha." She said nothing about the apt pairing of AIM villain with the vengeful woman of Greek myth her name evoked. For a moment she had the fanciful notion of who her Agamemnon would be.

"It's just that this is a total mess. I mean, if you're going to bother with Super Soldiers, at least do it right. There were no medical protocols followed, it's like no one bothered to read any archived files previous to jumping—I mean, it's no wonder there's a botch to correct! And a huge one, at that! And it's all on my head! Chauvinistic assholes."

Natasha barely hid her raised eyebrow. "That bad, huh?"

Erwin slumped into a rolling desk chair. She'd been set up in a makeshift office in the back, tucked in beside the bed, with a small desk, some files left out, and a medium sized portable cooler. Natasha knew that the fridge in the kitchen held more temperature sensitive materials, not to mention she was itching to sneak into the garage, where she'd set up the EMP equipment. If she could get back there, she could work on turning her mysterious equipment off so Bucky could make a move.

She hid her grim grin at the potential prospect of nothing but the soft, subtle sound of snapping necks as he slid through the house like a shadow.

"Ugh, God, you've got no idea." She pulled her fingers through her blond ponytail restlessly. "This chick that Aldrich is hung up on is a perfect example. It helps, when creating a Super Soldier, to not dose her with the wrong stuff."

Natasha sat down, curving her body into a language that had worked wonders for her in the past. If she leaned in and tipped her head to the side, it usually encouraged openness, a feeling of empathy and belonging. "The wrong stuff?" She shrugged. "I mean, don't get me wrong—I've nursed a grudge with Darcy for months, but how does a subject get dosed incorrectly?"

Erwin leaned in, voice dropping as she darted a mischievous look around. "Well, really what it boils down to is the fact that he should never have banded up with the idiots he did. They were overeager with their equipment, with Project Paperclip, with everything. That warehouse was wide open. I mean, they were sitting ducks. And then to just let Schmidt run unsanctioned code like that?" She sighed again. "I should shut up. If they find out I've told you any of this…"

Natasha smirked. "Don't worry. I wouldn't mind sticking it to Killian too, although he's not at the top of my list."

Erwin grinned. "He's such a rat bastard. He's got it in his head he can do better this time. Thinks if he can combine the effects of the Extremis serum and the Super Soldier serum that his associates developed from the original subject's blood that he can finally do some serious damage."

Her heart began to pound, just like that, running away from her like a champion sprinter as an awful thought occurred to her. "Original subject?"

The doctor glanced over her shoulder. "The Winter Soldier."

((()))

"Right this way, Mr. Rogers. If you'd follow me, I can show you to the appropriate holding unit."

Sighing, Steve followed the suited agent through the dim, faux lobby, through the doors, and into the real building, cleverly disguised as an abandoned factory tower.

"At our current count, The Fridge contains exactly two-hundred-and-seventeen individuals brought up under a number of charges, most of which the US Government isn't even aware of." The agent gave a little half smile. "Also, we have the largest store of weaponry, both quantifiable and unquantifiable in terms of current physics definitions. We work with a number of scientists to understand just what we've got in our inventory, but you can understand the need for the extra steps this morning when you arrived—our security is, of course, paramount at this location."

Steve felt like he was being walked through the beginning stages of a sales pitch, but smiled awkwardly anyway. "I understand. No worries. I expected some red tape."

"Not to mention, your presence was off-the-cuff and we weren't told of any appointments…?"

Steve smiled again, shrugging. "Yes. I apologize for my abrupt arrival. There…wasn't time to…make arrangements. I'm working a bit of an unplanned op."

Wait, now he had to apologize? All things considered, whether or not he worked for the largest container of enemies of the state in North America, Steve was fairly certain he still had a higher clearance than most agents.

Well. At least it made for a nice change from the flattering, yet exhausting usual round of, Mr. Rogers, I'm such a fan. Really. I mean, I pretended I was Captain America when I was a kid, you know? Fighting Nazis! I even had a little plastic shield. It's so nice to meet you. You've done great things for this country and we all love you. You're a national treasure. Could you sign my trading card? Or anything, really. My dad will be so angry if I don't get an autograph!

The agent walked him through what felt like a winding thatch work hallway, and Steve—even with his sharp senses—was hopelessly turned around in just a few short moments.

And they were awkward moments. It was clear that the agent was distracted by what were clearly other, more important things he needed to be doing other than escorting what he seemed to assume was a self-important superhero around his facility. They walked in silence.

He'd been to The Fridge before; last winter, when Bucky had been taken. He and Natasha had flown out on the same airline to keep under the radar, to see if their charge could give them any information concerning his potential whereabouts. It was likely a fool's errand, trying again.

But he had to.

For his Darcy.

Maybe if he tried a different tactic—'Bad Cop', as Darcy had called it, switching it up where he usually was insistent and diplomatic while Natasha went the circuitous route—maybe he'd come up with different results.

How did that saying go, though? The definition of insanity was attempting the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results?

He sighed, pulling a hand through his hair as he widened his strides, moving to keep abreast of the likely passive aggressive efforts of the agent to make him feel inferior.

This was the other angle he usually got from people, although it was rare enough that sometimes it took him a moment to recognize it: defensiveness. Certain personality types responded to his persona in a negative manner, reacting opposite to most people. Most people were more than willing to bow down, as it were. But some…some found the need to express their own capabilities and strength, as though to show him up.

He sighed again.

If he had known, then, that the shtick they gave him would cause so much grief, he might not have agreed to any of it.

He wasn't Captain America. He was only Steve Rogers. He was the same guy—more or less—that he had been before the War. He just had a few scars. Nothing compared to Bucky, of course, who'd come out of the War decidedly worse for wear.

But it wasn't like he walked around Holier than Thou, with an arrogant attitude. He wasn't out to dominate anyone. Truthfully, he'd just as soon quit all this, go home with Natasha, and spend the rest of his life on the couch, curled up with her watching TV. But he was in too deep now, and that wasn't how it worked. He had a responsibility, and really, if he was honest with himself, he liked his job. It kept him busy, and he felt like he was doing good—or at least trying to.

God, who was he kidding? Usually he felt like Sisyphus, pushing an impossible load uphill, only to watching it roll back down again, despite his best efforts. Admittedly, he'd felt that way during the War, yes, but it seemed like everything post-Battle of New York had been an uphill challenge, decidedly more so since the destruction of the Triskelion and he and Bucky's dismantling of SHIELD.

He felt sort of…rudderless.

This—this awful thing with Darcy—gave him a sort of purpose again, a new challenge to tackle, and it being so personal made it all the more imperative that he find a solution—and fast.

They'd all worked so hard. They'd endured so much.

Didn't they deserve a little…something? Something that at least vaguely resembled happiness, however temporarily they had to bargain.

"Right this way, Captain Rogers," the agent suddenly spoke up, leading him left down another nondescript hallway. Of course, really, it was only nondescript as most maximum security prisons could be. The cells that lined the halls were large to accommodate for their huge, programmable doors, and only about six fit down each row—at least the ones he'd seen so far on his impromptu tour. There were three on each side, all made of high-tensile steel, their doors clanking into place with a few taps on the nearby touch screens and a swipe of a security card, like the one hanging around this agent's neck, designed like a hotel key.

"It's just Steve," he said, smiling in an attempt to calm the waters. "Really, I haven't been a…captain for a while now. It's all just ceremony, really." He shrugged.

Bucky had been the one to earn his rank.

The agent merely nodded.

Steve rolled his eyes and sighed again. Darcy. If she were here, she'd probably have some choice snark for this guy, let alone a hilarious comment or two, muttered to him under her breath.

He let that thought calm him as the agent slowed them to a stop in front of one of the gargantuan doors, swiping his card under its touch screen with an air of authority. "Here we are, Captain. Do you think you'll need an escort with you inside?"

He nearly snapped that he was perfectly capable of beating both of them to a bloody pulp right there in the hallway, but held his tongue. It wouldn't be Captain America of him to be anything less than cordial. So he smiled—maybe leaking just a bit of condescension into it, maybe not—and shook his head. "I think I'll manage. I'll be sure to let you know if I'm…in any danger."

The agent nodded. "Of course. I'll be back to collect you and escort you out as soon as you're done. You have twenty minutes." And he was gone, walking off the way they'd come and taking a corner hard.

Sighing again, Steve went through the doors, his eyes finding his target with ease where he sat at a desk in the middle of the room, looking decidedly more alert than the last time they'd been. "Hello, Captain Rogers," he drawled in his thick accent.

Steve smiled grimly at Aleksander Lukin and hit the button on the inside of the door, the metal clanking and protesting as the cell shut behind him, locking them in. "Hi. Got a few questions for you. Shouldn't take long."

((()))

Natasha leaned forward even more, not needing to fake her rapt attention overmuch.

Erwin smirked. "Yeah. Apparently that's what started this whole mess. After the Soldier went rogue, Lukin was desperate to get him back. Rumor has it there were still samples of his blood that Zola had stored in that old facility in Siberia, so he started hiring out some of the greatest minds to tinker with it. Came up with this, apparently all cobbled together from the old man's notes. Obviously, it's highly inferior to the original. I mean—look how he turned out, and then look at her."

Natasha nodded, nibbling on her lip before she could stop herself, her heart pulsing with that feeling that told her she was on the very knife-edge of golden information.

Erwin nodded, clearly enjoying the gossiping whole-heartedly. "Well, she's A-positive. He's B-neg. That serum that Lukin derived contains antigens from his blood."

Natasha blinked. No, no, Bucky was A-positive, too, it was in his file. Then she blinked again, horrible realization crashing down on her. Banner must've trusted the intel they'd gotten on him from HYDRA, the information about his progress in the Winter Soldier program. He'd have no reason to retest Bucky's blood for a Type, he'd have assumed something like that would be spot-on. He would've used the samples for other typologies, other tests, establishing a baseline under the assumption, all the while, that James Barnes had Type B-negative blood. Except it wasn't. Somewhere, some of their intel was wrong. So, so wrong. "So, she's essentially…"

Erwin nodded, helping her put the pieces together. "She's exhibiting signs of a transfusion reaction. That's serious. Like, deadly serious. I think the only thing keeping her alive right now is, also, the serum. It keeps trying to repair and boost, and act like it's supposed to, to make her into a Super Soldier, but her white blood cells keep attacking Barnes' antigens, which, in turn, pulls her into a headlong spiral. Frankly, even with the serum, I'm surprised she's survived this long. She's a strong one. Someone took impressive care of her."

She flinched inwardly. Someone, indeed. Natasha would normally have squashed any outward sign of her reaction, but this time, she thought her wide-eyed look of shock seemed appropriate.

It all made sense.

Why Darcy had only brief episodes, rather than one ongoing trial.

Why she wasn't showing signs of consistent enhanced ability.

Why Bruce was unable to narrow down just what was wrong with her.

It all made blinding, horrific sense.

Quickly as she could, pushing all her racing thoughts out of the way, she swallowed. "So, you think you can fix it?"

Erwin shrugged. "I should be able to boost the serum to fix the problem with my supplemental dose of the corrected version that I've been synthesizing, but unfortunately, I won't know for sure just what will happen until I dose her. And I need to force an episode for it to work. Her blood pressure needs to be raised."

Fear pricking her again, Natasha nodded, her eyes flitting around the room, taking stock of the entrances and exits, the French doors, the ensuite bathroom, and the single doorway that led down to the second set of French doors that opened directly onto the dining room adjoined. "So why don't you?"

Erwin visibly hesitated, glancing back again. "That's the thing. I told Killian that I had narrowed the mechanism down to the release of adrenaline. But now I'm not so sure. If these findings are correct—and they are—it would have to be more related to Serotonin production. I'll have to synthesize a whole new catalyst."

Natasha sighed, sitting back, feeling like she'd been hit by a freight train. How the fuck had they all missed that at the same time?!

The doctor stood, then, abruptly, and studied her. "So. Will you help me?"

An offer of alliances. An offer of…friendship?

Natasha resisted the urge to narrow her eyes at the sudden and unnatural offer. But how did the saying go? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer? This didn't seem like an offer on the up-and-up.

On the other hand…the more she knew, the better she'd be able to make a decision on any potential moves to get the ball rolling.

She stood. "Tell me what you need."

((()))

"You okay?"

Bucky jumped, looking up from the glowing embers of their fire. "Hm?"

Steve grimaced slightly and stole a glance around at their sleeping comrades, Dum-Dum snorting once, twice, before falling silent again, his head lolling to the side. "I asked if you were okay."

Bucky, his skin itching like he wanted to crawl out of it, nodded, suddenly terse. "Fine. Why?"

Steve blinked in the dim light. "Because you're twitching."

"I said I'm fine, Stevie!" Bucky snapped, his temper welling to a rolling boil in under two seconds flat.

Steve flinched. Bucky had never turned his temper on him before. Only on George during one of his drunken escapades. "Sorry."

Feeling guilty, Bucky swallowed, hard. "S'alright." Truthfully, he felt a little…funny.

Steve chewed on his lower lip, nodding. "Stupid question anyway—I just got you out of a Nazi prison camp. Course you're not okay."

There it was again—pulsing impatience. He shut his eyes, trying to center himself, his blood pressure spiking. "I'm fine, Steve. Just shut up." He took a deep breath. "Please, shut up."

But Stevie was like a dog with a bone. "Why don't you sleep? You look like you been run over a few times."

He shook his head, opening his eyes again to look him square in the eye. "I'm fine, Steve. I can't—sleep. I…can't." Did enough of that…in there. And he'd rather not revisit those…things yet, the…things in his dreams, the things in the darkness.

Steve nodded, looking around again, over his shoulder. "Right. Sorry." He sighed. "You s'pose they're out there?"

He swallowed again, staring into the dying embers of their fire. The guys had said they were freezing, but they didn't dare make a larger fire, not when there were HYDRA operatives likely on their trail. It was the War, after all, and they were still in enemy territory. "Course they are. They'll want all their new friends back." He shuddered, then pulled his jacket more tightly around himself to cover the fact that he did so out of fear, not cold. In fact, he was barely chilly.

He couldn't remember much of what they'd done to him—what Zola had done to him—and that frightened him more than anything else, not to mention the fact he'd been mysteriously singled out.

"You're seriously pale. Have you eaten?" Steve started rummaging around in his pack. "I've got some rations here somewhere—"

"No. God, Steve. No." Bucky flinched, swallowing again reflexively. His stomach was churning.

A sudden crack echoed through the hollow night.

They both sat bolt upright, eyes locking on each other.

"You heard that, right?" Steve muttered.

Scowling, Bucky nodded.

In one fluid motion—a move that Bucky would never have expected of his previously asthmatic friend a few months ago—Steve stood, turning around, his shoulders tense. "I think it might've come from over here. I'll go scout it out."

And he was gone before Bucky could snarl at him.

The oaf. Even with his new, fancy serum, his hearing was still diminished. He knew, because the sound had come from behind him.

He blinked. How could he possibly know that? But he did; he felt it in bones.

He didn't have time to puzzle it out, though, because his sharp senses already had him up, moving, turning, just in time to throw his elbow back into the first attacker, sending him sprawling with a grunt into the snow on the ground.

He didn't move.

Bucky stood there, staring, wide-eyed, at the unconscious soldier—at least twice his size—downed by a last minute, ditch-effort punch to the gut.

A growl had him looking up around him, then.

Five. There were five others. And all of them were decked out in the very best of the best gear, the only things visible in the cold, their thin, angry lips, a mustache here, a red ear there.

No vulnerabilities in sight—

And Dot—his favorite sniper rifle—lay in the snow on the other side of the fire, where Steve had been sitting.

He glanced at it, then back up at the men.

"der Vorsprung?" one of them asked, and Bucky had picked up enough German to recognize the smart ass asking if he'd like a head start.

They didn't give him much of one, though. As soon as the words had left his mouth, they were on him, five-to-one and Steve was nowhere to be found, the guys perfectly capable—they'd made it abundantly clear on more than one occasion—of sleeping through a total assault with a battering ram.

One of them jumped clean on his back, and without thinking, he reached over his shoulder and his only thought was to get himself some breathing room to take on the other four.

By the time he'd taken that breath, the Nazi had sailed clean across the clearing, where he smacked into a tree trunk, his spine cracking, and he fell to the ground—where he didn't move.

The third soldier came at him with a smirking snarl, but the sound cut off when Bucky head-butted him, sending him sprawling onto the crunching ice.

He had never before head-butted anyone, let alone learned how to do it without making himself scream in pain.

The other two circled him, smiling and laughing.

So he threw himself over backward, snatched up Dot in his right hand, landed neatly, took a knee and punched off two shots.

It was different, actually being close enough to feel the hot spray of blood, rather than watching it all through his scope, but the sensation didn't register so much through his shock.

He stood, barely breathless, and turned to find Steve standing on the edge of the clearing, his own gun drawn, but hanging loose in his limp hand. He blinked, cocking his head and shifting his feet, his mouth opening and closing, once, twice, three times.

Head clear and senses sharper than they'd ever felt in his entire life, Bucky crossed the clearing, sat down in his original spot, and set Dot on the ground at his feet.

Steve followed suit, slowly, and in a jerking manner, as though his brain was stuck unable to compute the scene before him. "I…was going to say that we ought to wake the guys and head on out before they found us. I can see that that won't be a problem."

Bucky cleared his throat and added a small log to the fire. "Nope."

Sighing, Bucky pulled himself from the old memory, skipping their further flight from the woods of Europe and their triumphant return to base, Peggy's expression as she stared at Steve, the cute nurse he'd slept with that night in the medical ward tent.

Mary. Her name had been Mary, and she'd had blonde hair and bright green eyes.

His CO had found them all shacked up the next morning and sworn a blue streak at him and chased him back to his tent in his skivvies.

He'd laughed the entire way and Dum-Dum had been waiting in the doorway with his flask open in a toast.

Looking back now, it seemed so obvious: he'd been changed already, irrevocably, altered and molded, made into something that resembled human, but couldn't quite pass for all the flaws.

His senses had never been so sharp before, his keen sniper's eyes only made keener, his reflexes better than ever.

They'd made him into a machine.

And he'd had no idea.

If he had…

All the same, he knew, deep down, that he wouldn't have changed anything. Any alteration to his path and he may have missed out on Darcy.

And he wouldn't trade that for anything.

Not for anything.

So he stepped out from the shadow of the overhang on shore and crept up behind the guard in black.

He'd wandered just a bit too far, wandered just barely outside of the protective barrier that had been set up to repel him; Bucky knew because he'd spent the past two days very carefully testing where the line was, the edge of the signal that knocked him silly. He'd darted in and out, pushing himself too far so that he could learn just how much of the signal he could take—very little—and trying to block out the sound of Darcy's screams.

That footage she'd mentioned, she'd mentioned it so many times now, the footage of him having his mind wiped down in that bank vault, before the fall of the Triskelion, his screams…The idea that he knew what it felt like, now, to hear it from the other side made his skin crawl.

But he pushed that back, now, pushed it back and off as he very casually crept up behind the man in black, said a prayer asking for forgiveness from a God he wasn't real sure he believed in anymore, and reached up and snapped his neck.

He wasn't even out of breath as he stood there, watching dispassionately, as the man crumpled at his feet, dead in the sand.

((()))

It was dark when Steve finally stepped outside again, and he took a deep breath, the memory of that vault where they'd met Zola's digital self still too fresh in his mind, the bogie that had crushed the building on top of them.

He took another deep breath, nerves swirling in his stomach as it became clear what he had to do. Huffing out a frustrated—and guilty—sigh, he took his Starkphone out of his back pocket, hit a speed dial key, and braced himself for the bad, bad conversation he was about to have.

So bad. God, it was going to be so bad.

"Captain Over, talk to me," Tony Stark answered a bit too brightly, as had become his habit since he'd admitted to missing Darcy.

Well. That was about to get a whole lot worse.

"Tony. Hey," he said, haltingly.

A pause. "You never say 'hey'. What's wrong?"

He swallowed. "I'm, uh…I'm in Alaska," he said, stupidly.

Another pause. "Alaska? Just felt like taking a tour of The Fridge, or what?"

Well, Stark had never been one to beat it around the bush.

"I had a…uh, very enlightening conversation with Aleksander Lukin."

A longer pause this time, and Steve winced, knowing Tony was putting the pieces together with that alarming speed with which he did everything. "What don't I know, Rogers?" His tone was decidedly cooler.

He opened his mouth to tell him that the only reason he'd kept his trap shut this long was because of Natasha, but then he snapped it shut again, unwilling to implicate his wife, no matter how well she could take care of herself. She was his wife, for God's sake, and he had always had too much loyalty to play a trick like that.

"Rogers," Tony repeated, sounding about as angry as Tony Stark was able to get, and found it curious that he had a definite 'ruffled daddy feathers' sort of thing going on, even down the phone line.

He swallowed. "I wanted to tell you sooner," was all that came out at first. "He, uh…he made it clear that…we missed a few things…last spring."

In fact, Lukin's half-mad cackling had almost felt like something out of a bad B-movie horror flick that Darcy would've shown him, giggling at the horrendous acting all the way through it, until Steve had to thump her on the back to dislodge the inhaled popcorn, rolling his eyes.

The cracking of computer keys. "Miss what? Out with it, Rogers."

It all came out in a rush that he couldn't stop, didn't want to stop. Steven Grant Rogers had loved his mother, dammit, and she'd been a good woman, and she'd raised him to always tell the truth, especially to his friends, and no matter how strangely he and Stark got along most of the time, Steve still considered him a close friend. He'd kept his mouth shut long enough, too long, and it was starting to make him itch. "AIM thought they infiltrated his HYDRA cell, but he knew about it the whole time, and he let them get away with a small sample of Zola's tainted serum, so that he could back-door it later and get it back. Of course, we got to him first—but we hacked the system and found out that your people from the private jet never made it, they were eyes and ears for AIM, and—" He came to an abrupt halt, horrified by the heavy, full weight of the words he spoke, all the implications, every possibility striking through him like lightning, some strange sensation choking his throat.

Fear. It was fear.

And guilt. Oh, God, he felt awful. He'd kept the truth from Tony—from Tony!—who loved that girl like she was his own—who still struggled with guilt over his past sins, and every bad choice he'd made in the name of The Avengers.

"And what, Steve?" Tony urged, sounding calm, too calm, the clacking of the computer keys ceasing. "Who has a Jaguar parked at my beach house, Steve? They didn't take a car."

Fear in Tony's voice, too. Desperately repressed, but it was there.

Steve took another deep breath, swallowing back his nerves. "Aldrich Killian, Tony. Killian's alive. He's got Darcy."

((()))

"I was right. This is it." Erwin laughed, a carefree sound, nearly a giggle, turning to smile at Natasha, who had frozen in place behind her. "It's linked to her Serotonin reuptake!"

Natasha swallowed, forcing a smile and nodding. They'd been working most of the day, only stopping for sandwiches around noon. It was near dark now, the sun sinking below the water. "Is that good? Can you synthesize the filler, now?"

Erwin nodded vigorously, grinning from ear to ear. "Yes! And thank you, so much, for your help!"

Natasha shrugged, doing her best to mask her racing heart, her rising panic. "All I did was hold a few things still and jot a few notes."

Erwin shook her head. "Oh, but that saved me so much time! I can get started on the new filler right away." She laughed again, hopping once, combating her image of 'brainy beauty' with that of a college sorority sister. "Oh, Killian will be so happy! The sooner I can test the filler, the sooner we'll find out if this whole serum will work! His work won't be lost, after all! His vision for a stronger military and his own force will still be valid!"

Natasha swallowed, blinking away the images of blown up soldiers on city streets, Happy lying in his hospital bed while he tried to watch Downton Abby with one eye swollen shut.

Not good.

So not good.

Tony was going to blow a circuit.

Swallowing, she took a step forward. "Did you still need me?" she offered. "I can keep up with you in here. I don't need nearly as much sleep as the average person."

But Erwin raised a hand, waving her off. "Oh, God, no. You go get some rest. I've got this! In the morning, I'll show Aldrich what we accomplished and then we can really get started!" The small woman continued to work like a little engine that could, and Natasha, lingering in the doorway with a worried, pinched brow, could think of absolutely no valid reason that she could make up in order to stay.

She drifted down the hall and out into the living room, where Darcy had finally sunk into merciful sleep, her soft, long brown waves limp along her back and shoulders, obscuring her face.

Her heart gave a tug, and she bit her lip to keep the anger at bay, the unexpected urge to cry. There it was again. She wanted—no needed—to call Steve, every fiber of her being pulling her back to him, across an entire country.

Too far. He was too far away.

The blast of homesickness nearly threw her off her feet and propelled her into the couch, the feeling so new to her—having moved around her whole life—that it filled her to full and made her so heavy that, for a long, awful moment, is was too difficult to move, too difficult to even ponder the idea of moving, the decision of where to go paralyzing her with fear.

She reached out a hand and steadied herself on the back of the couch, studying Darcy, imagining Bucky's expression when he finally saw her, his cold, murderous rage, the swath he'd cut through the house.

The mournfulness that would hit him later, when it was over, and all that was left was a wife that had been broken beyond recognition.

While her best friend stood there and watched and did nothing.

No.

She stood, straight, taking a deep breath of the sea air off the ocean. She wasn't doing nothing. She was doing what she did best—playing the long game. She was laying the groundwork for the real hurt.

The Winter Soldier.

Smiling grimly, she gathered herself and crept through the room, noting the distinct missing-ness of Aldrich, and made it to the door of the attached garage.

With a certain amount of trepidation and not a small thought for her own sense of self-preservation, she stepped determinedly into the garage, glancing once over her shoulder as discretely as she could manage.

Unsurprisingly, it was empty of cars. Tony kept all of his expensive toys—including the pretty, white Ferrari F12 Berlinetta that Darcy was a huge fan of—either in the basement of the Tower or in his collection garage out at the Malibu house. She'd heard him offer them the use of a rental from some supercar place he was on the in with, but they'd refused, so it was no surprise either that the only two cars on the property were the two their group had so politely arrived in.

She wasn't sure just what the deal was with the two little old ladies that kept up the place when no one was here. She didn't want to think too closely on that right now, hoping they'd been paid to keep away and emptily threatened to keep quiet, but she forced it to the back of her mind as a costly distraction when she so desperately needed to focus. She could worry about them later.

Hung on the walls were all the usual garage accoutrements. Yard and landscaping equipment. A lawn mower sat off in the far corner, waiting for the groundskeeper. Weed whacker. Assorted tools. Hammer. Box of nails and screws. Yard stick. A packed up set of lawn croquet. Various spare tires, a shovel, on and on, a bike stashed in the corner.

But none of it explained the set up in the closest corner of a computer tower, a set of dual monitors, or the small, black, blinking box humming with a low emission that made Natasha narrow her eyes.

Glancing back once more, she crossed to it and nudged the space bar on the keyboard, wanting to see the display on screen, but unwilling to move the mouse around in case there was some sort of internal security set up that might give her away.

She didn't speak Grey's Anatomy, and while she understood enough tech to do some rather advanced hacking, the screen that came up was so full of medical jargon that even she was a little lost. It appeared to be an advanced set up for signal output and on the right monitor was an image of a brain scan. It didn't seem to move or react, so it was nothing more than an image, and not a live shot of some sort, but the name "Barnes, J" in the bottom corner made her jaw clench.

She didn't need to wonder where they'd gotten their hands on a brain scan of the Winter Soldier, but what was clear was that they'd been studying the pattern in this particular image. She'd spent enough time around Bruce to recognize a low level of activity—lit up a decreasing blue—in his amygdala, the center thought to control emotional memory, as well as contribute to reactions in PTSD patients.

There was a long cord running from the tower, to the monitors, to the little blinking box, and the humming it was emitting seemed to vary, low, high, and a constant, pulsing thrum matched the various equalizers on the second screen.

They were conveniently labelled: EMP and TMS.

So the low level EMP was pulsing every 60 seconds, and the TMS was on a constant level hum, low enough—if she understood it correctly—to not affect anyone in the area but for the sensitive, cognitively altered Winter Soldier.

She sneered.

Good. They were good. Erwin was good, the bitch. What better way to keep them apart than to strike while the iron was hot, keep an eye until he was out of range, hit him with a nasty binaural wave, then keep their quarry in what amounted to an invisible cage?

She ducked slightly to see around the box. The wires were thin, easy enough to grab, tug, and snap, severing the output device from the machine doing the talking. The fragile electronics would also be vulnerable if she were to apply just a single Widow's Bite, if she could manage to smuggle them around from where she'd hidden them in her bag. She'd carefully slid them into a little false pocket, and when they'd searched her upon arrival, they'd totally missed it, the amateurs.

Part of her wanted to see if she could manage another sneak outside, so she could find Bucky, assess his condition—there had been something very, very wrong with him the last time they'd spoken that had felt separate from Darcy's captivity—and she wanted to make sure he was alright and ready to act on her signal, not that she knew what it was going to be yet. It surely had something to do with all this equipment, and that made her itch to turn it off even more.

This was another one of those 'throw me on top of that Chitauri ship' moments, wasn't it? She was being stupid and reckless—and she'd asked Steve to be her accomplice. A man she loved, despite her past and her reservations. A man that was seriously awful at lying.

Well. If he'd slipped by now, she supposed it was just as well.

Come morning, she'd be moving on this.

She couldn't let them inject Darcy with whatever that crap was going to turn out to be. Now that she knew what the problem was, Bruce could patch her up good and quick—hopefully—and they'd be back to normal, at home, in the Tower, having dinner on Friday nights and racing each other to keep up on Game of Thrones.

Her and Darcy could sprawl on the couch with drinks and chat.

The guys would come in, all sweaty and worked from a sparring session.

Tony would barge in with takeout pizza and a movie.

Pepper would come in later and try to drag him out like he was a little kid at the grown up's table.

Darcy would laugh and insist he stay.

Oh, God, now she wanted to move back into the Tower.

She'd be better able to keep up with all the SHIELD garbage—stuff like this—if they were there full time.

She reached up to rub her increasingly aching forehead, jumping when the door slowly opened with an ominous creak.

Panic lanced through her sharply, and she tugged at the nearest thread she could manage. "Killian," she snapped. "When were you planning on telling me about all this?!" She gestured wildly at the equipment as the man in question stepped off the threshold and crossed to her, eyes narrowed.

For a long moment, they stared each other down, Killian willing her to break and Natasha refusing, her mask having long practice holding in place in even the direst of situations—like when you were caught by Captain America ripping classified information onto a flash drive on a freighter, stealing information for your boss that he'd already…oh, never mind. That was still such a mess, that if she looked too closely at it, her past became a knotted tangle too tight to even see through.

And to think, she could've just punched out Sitwell and his expensive tie right then and maybe that might've gone a little more smoothly from the start.

Finally, Killian smiled, that same sly smirk that told her he had other, meaner things than this up his tailored sleeves. "Hm…" He thought for a moment, eyes skyward. "Never." Then he fluttered his lashes at her in a grotesque flirtation likely designed to throw her off. "Why, Ms. Romanoff? Does this in any way change your affiliation?"

She sighed out a long, low snarl, and gestured again, jutting out one hip. "No! I would've come in here and turned up the dial on this thing! I want my revenge on the bitch, damn it, and I don't feel like getting my head caved in by that sniper bastard!"

It worked like a charm. God, he really thought she was this petty, mouthy woman?! She'd have to remember this alias for later…

Aldrich laughed, slinging an arm around her shoulder and turning them, leading her back out of the garage. "Now, now, there's no need to rush things. We have all the time in the world, and then some, Natasha, dear. Not to worry. The good doctor's applications aren't about to fail us, and Mr. Barnes is safely outside the bars of our cage. So don't you worry your pretty, pretty head." He handed her up the step and back into the back hall of the house. "Your little friend will get exactly what she deserves to get, I'll acquire precisely what I've been striving for, as will the doctor, and you'll get all the revenge you crave. Alright?" He spoke soothingly and slowly, like she was a small, tantrum-throwing child.

So she used that to her advantage, rolling her eyes and turning around with a careless air, imploring him to follow her. "Ugh. Fine. But if this starts taking too long, I'm not about to sit around and wait for you and your agenda, Aldrich. I came here for one thing and I will get it. Make no mistake."

To her surprise, his hand landed on her shoulder—not her arm, a much more casual place—but her shoulder, the very curve of it, his fingers wrapping softly around it and turning her around again. She found his face had softened and his eyes had taken on a seductively predatory gleam. "That doesn't, of course, mean that you can't have other things…in the mean time?"

She bit back her sigh. And here it was—the seduction attempt. She really should've penciled it in so she'd have had the perfect response at her fingertips. As it was, she sidled up to him, close—close enough to even throw him off a little—and smiled, that curling grin that drove Steve a little crazy, though he'd never admitted it out loud. "Oh, Killian. You should know: I never mix business with pleasure." And she stalked—carefully swaying her hips in her tight jumpsuit—down the hall back to her room.

When she'd reached her door, he called after her. "Has Captain America ruined other men for you already?"

She paused, halfway through her doorway, to raise a brow at him. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

And she disappeared inside.

((()))

Tony was silent for so long that Steve couldn't stand it for more than a few seconds. "I'm…I'm sorry, Tony. I wanted to tell you, but—"

"But your wife went in under deep cover and you didn't wanna blow her mission by telling your colleague about it—your friend," he finished, cutting him off sharply, his voice still that same level of eerie calm.

Steve swallowed reflexively, unable to drum up what might be taken as an appropriate response. Tony was sharp—sharper than most people gave him credit for, which had never made sense to Steve. The man built robots from scratch, had programmed an entire butler for his house, his cars, his own high-tech suit. How on earth people could take him for anything but sharp was beyond him.

Which was, of course, why Steve was so blasted awful at lying to him. Truly, it was some sort of miracle he'd lasted this long, or that Tony hadn't noticed any tics Steve was sure he displayed. It was all a dead giveaway that Tony was distracted by Darcy's absence from his life.

"Contrary to popular opinion, I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm also not the brash hothead everyone on earth seems to think I am—although I will punch you the next time we're face-to-face, make no doubt about that, Rogers."

Steve sighed. "And I'll let you."

Okay, so apparently Tony Stark's snark was ever-present, even in times of anger. Something on the line slammed, then slammed again.

"What was that?"

"The lab door. I'm locking up and coming out there."

Steve opened his mouth. "Tony—"

"Don't fuck with me right now, Steve. I'm meeting you. Now start from the beginning. I want everything. And I mean everything."

((()))

Natasha configured a plan in the dark that night. She'd check on Darcy, try and nail down a timeline for Erwin, then get into the garage and disconnect the relay for the TMS device that was creating the impenetrable bubble around the house. Then she planned on relaxing a bit and watching Bucky mow down everyone in his path until he got to Darcy, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

Things did not go according to this plan.

She woke much earlier than she'd anticipated to yelling. Loud yelling. Chaotic yelling, arguing, two raw voices, one belonging to a panicked Clytemnestra, the other to Killian.

They weren't loud enough, however, to cover up the bright constant ringing underneath.

Heart stuttering as she recognized the sound, she threw back the covers and slip-slid down the hall in her socked feet, glad she'd chosen to sleep in her relaxed fit gear—black top and full leggings, just in case she needed to be ready to go at all hours.

Sliding into the room like Tom Cruise, she identified the awful sound and could only stand and stare, the Black Widow, utterly slack-jawed.

"I THOUGHT YOU SAID IT WOULD WORK?!"

"YEAH, WELL, I MUST'VE BEEN WRONG, DON'T YOU THINK?!"

"THEN I NEED YOU TO MAKE IT WORK! WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME, CLYTEMNESTRA. WE'VE ALREADY GOT TWO AGENTS MISSING AND THE CLOCK IS WINDING DOWN. YOU SAID YOU HAD THINGS IN HAND! YOU PROMISED ME!"

Two missing security guards? Interesting.

"I THOUGHT I DID! IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN FINE!" She was nearly in tears.

"FIX. IT. WHAT THE FUCK DID I HIRE YOU FOR?! YOU TOLD ME THAT YOU'D ISOLATED THE PROBLEM AND THAT YOUR PATCH WOULD WORK!"

It clearly hadn't.

The constant ring of a flat-lining heart monitor kept up a soundtrack behind them for accompaniment.

Darcy was limp in her chair, head back, hair an unnatural toss of pretty waves along her shoulders. At a quick glance, she looked to be merely asleep. But her skin was a sickly shade of yellow that jolted Natasha into action. "What the hell is going on?!" she snapped.

Erwin was too busy fumbling with her equipment to answer and merely spared her a helpless glance.

Killian turned to her. "Clytemnestra is proving that she isn't even a fraction of the amount of useful that she promised me upon our business agreement three months ago."

Natasha was numb, lost in her own head, awash in a memory. Three months ago. Three months ago, Natasha had been deriving amusement from listening to the whining of Foster and Wanda at not being invited to Darcy's nuptials.

"I can't believe her."

Wanda shook her head. "Like we were never friends."

Natasha snorted, sipping from the glass of wine she'd just poured for herself from the bar in the upstairs lounge. "God, you two are such girls."

Jane's head snapped to the left and she pinned Natasha with a glare. "You mean you aren't upset that Darcy didn't invite you?"

She shrugged. "Why should I be? It's not my party. It's their party. Besides, it would be a little 'pot calling the kettle black', wouldn't it? I mean, Steve and I snuck off to the islands and didn't come back for two weeks."

Wanda made a grumpy noise in her throat. "Except you two were so discreet no one even knew you were an item to begin with."

"And how is that particularly different from Darcy and Buck?"

Jane rolled her eyes. "Well, we knew all about it. We were invested."

Natasha couldn't hold back her second snort as she crossed the room. "Oh, please. No you weren't."

They both stared at her, looking decidedly affronted.

Settling into the couch in the leather-clad common room, Natasha sighed, eyeing the clock. She had twenty minutes to explain this before Steve came to retrieve her for their date—if he was on time and not early, as usual. It was their six month anniversary and, considering they were both part of an elite squad to protect the earth, they'd come to the agreement that six months should always be marked for the simple sake that they'd made it without the world crumbling around them.

"Listen: you're both smart, right? Wouldn't be here otherwise. So this shouldn't be that difficult a concept to grasp."

She paused to sip again. This was bound to make her tense and she wanted to be loose and relaxed for Steve. He deserved her at her best, not at her most KGB.

Wanda cocked her head and stared at her quizzically.

"Simply put, neither of you have taken them very seriously, most of all Darcy."

Wanda blinked.

Jane's mouth fell open.

But neither of them spoke. That in itself was rather gratifying, but she felt compelled to push onward.

"Has James Barnes been guilty of awful things? Yes. Has Darcy done a few fun things in her past that most people would call impulsive? Sure. Everyone's guilty of those things."

Jane's eyebrow rose. "You? Impulsive?"

She smirked, but refused to be drawn down memory lane in her head. It would just ruin her good mood. "Once upon a time, yes. Don't change the subject. The point is, both of them are perfectly logical adults, and you treated—at the very least one of them—like a child."

Wanda let loose a squawk, but was interrupted.

"James Barnes is a war hero. Not 'was'. Is. He is a war hero. I was there. When SHIELD fell. I was there every step of the way, some would even say that Steve and I led the charge. The Winter Soldier was a myth. He wasn't real."

Jane nodded. "A ghost story, yeah, yeah, I know, that's what everyone keeps—"

"But he was. And he had to live with the consequences of…someone else's actions. And if you'd seen the look on his face…you'd never doubt, for one second, that he'd rather have fallen off that train and stayed dead."

Jane glanced awkwardly down into her lap, where she cradled her own glass of wine.

"Darcy's smart. She'd never have stayed on with you to finish her degree, Foster, if she wasn't, regardless of the fact that you don't even share a research field or the fact that half the time most people don't even realize she's there. Which is fitting, really, because no one really noticed that she'd started to patch up the bleeding mess that was James Barnes until they had to look him in the eye."

She was surprised to find just a spark of something there, in the back of her throat. Was it anger?

"He wasn't some animal at the zoo anymore."

Wanda looked away, her cheeks flaming.

"He was a person. And no one really knew what to do with that idea, because that must mean that he needs categorizing. Everyone needs categorizing, yeah? So why not make him the monster of the story, hm? So Darcy…Darcy must be that crazy façade she puts on for the benefit of everyone else, right? Beauty and the Beast? How foolish of her, how stupid, how impulsive. Naïve, silly, suicidal, take your pick."

Jane flinched.

Yes. It was. Anger. And vindication. A vindication that Natasha knew she could never tell Darcy about.

A soft pinging noise went off. No one noticed.

"I know what it's like to look into someone's face and see judgment. I know what it's like to feel anger and regret and shame. And I have to live with that every day, and no matter how it feels in the light of day, what I can't change, when the lights go out and it's just me in the dark, is that I had a choice. I had a choice and while it sounds like something no one would want to stomach, I could've made it any day. I could've made my choice. But I didn't. I did their bidding willfully."

She drained her glass and set it on the coffee table. "He didn't. He got to wake up and wonder what he'd done this time. He got to go on ride-alongs as a passenger in his own head. And he still has to live with the consequences. And Darcy? Darcy was the only one brave enough to look him in the face. There, in that middle ground, no one called anyone a monster, no one called anyone stupid. No one checked anyone for all their limbs or questioned anyone's validity. No one bothered to take the time to understand either of them."

It was silent.

"So is it any wonder that they didn't think to invite you after you'd laughed, scolded, judged and joked?"

Neither of them said anything.

"Am I hurt or angry or upset that I wasn't invited to something as private as an exchange of vows? Am I hurt that the only people invited were the father figure and his wife? No. Not at all. Because if you take the time, and if you have the experience in reading people, if you've got the practice that I've had…seeing through people is so easy, it's not even funny. And I have to live with that for the rest of my life, too."

"Tasha?"

She looked up, startled to find Steve, standing in the elevator's open doorway, watching her with deep eyes, a strange sort of relief there in his expression. Obviously, he'd heard most of what she'd said. "Hey."

"You ready? Reservation's for ten."

She stood, brushed off her skirt, and crossed the room, leaving the girls behind. "Perfect. Look at you, Rogers—you really clean up."

"Natasha? NATASHA?! Help Erwin clean up this mess!" Killian snapped, yanking her back to the present with a rough tug.

She blinked rapidly, swallowing back the sensation of months shuffling by at such a rapid speed that they blurred in her vision.

Aldrich gestured wildly. "You fix. This. You said your catalyst would work, and now she's good as dead. You stick her with that filler and you fix this. I need her. She is the key to my machine, Erwin. You don't fix this—you're both done here."

But Erwin was already brandishing another long, vicious looking needle.

And time slowed.

It slowed so rapidly that even Natasha wasn't fast enough to stop it. She lunged forward for the doctor's hand, but missed, catching empty air and stumbling blindly into Darcy, half sprawling in her lap and finding herself staring up into her friend's empty face, and she felt the jerk the moment the needle was emptied into her friend's jugular vein.

Too late.

She pulled herself slowly back, her own heart plummeting into her stomach, the only thought swirling in her otherwise empty mind that Bucky would be eternally shattered and forever irretrievable.

There was a long, hollow moment where all three of them stood there, staring at Darcy's unmoving form, the unchanging tone of the flat heart rate monitor filling the room.

Natasha was strangely unfamiliar with personal grief of this sort, and she sprawled in her mind, uncertain where to go, what to do now, what her next move was supposed to be, totally and completely paralyzed with sorrow.

And then, like an episode of ER—only this one wasn't poorly overdubbed in Russian—Darcy's body jerked, gave a low shudder, and she gasped in a violent breath of air, her eyes snapping open, her hands curling into fists.

But Natasha didn't have time to feel relief or joy.

She was already moving, running, careless of who saw her, for the garage door. She burst in, stumbling clumsily down the step and catching herself on a shelf before she face-planted on the concrete floor.

But between that step and the next, a hand had grabbed up a fistful of her long hair and yanked her painfully back and off her feet.

She landed in a messy heap on the cold stone flooring, the wind knocked mercilessly out of her, and she stared, gasping, up into Clytemnestra Erwin's face.

The doctor sneered. "Thought you'd take the opportunity to fix things, hm?"

Natasha sat up as gracefully as she could, dropping all pretense. She was tired. Holy fuck, she was tired, and why not cut the bullshit once and for all, hm? It had been long enough, and it wasn't as though this sort of ending hadn't been looming this entire time, a seriously distinct possibility from the get-go. She dusted off her hands and leveled the woman with a cool look. "How long have you been in love with Killian?"
Erwin flushed. "Too long. Why do you think I stick around and deal with his bullshit? How long have you been working on that alibi that you were out for revenge?"

Natasha snorted, pulling herself neatly to standing. "Oh, since I walked in the door. Yeah."

Erwin nodded as though this made a casual, careless sort of sense. "Right, yeah."

"That's not your only goal, though, is it, Erwin?" Natasha sneered. "You wouldn't let Aldrich Killian treat you like dirt just for something as pedestrian as love. What do you get out of all of this?"

Oh, yeah, they were all walls down, now.

Erwin crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back on a shelf. "Tony Stark's heart on a plate."

Natasha took a moment to digest that unexpected morsel. Tony? She paused for a second, thinking back. No. No, Stark hadn't gotten into any trouble for a while now-

"He was working the track, in Monaco. That day."

The bottom of Natasha's stomach fell clean out.

Erwin sneered. "You remember? Yeah. I know you were there. Ivan Vanko and his suit. You remember him too?"

Nodding, she took a small, inconsequential step to the left, edging closer to the electronics set up in the corner.

"My brother was working the track that day when he went on his rampage against Stark. He was blown to bits in the first crash around the bend." She growled, mirroring Natasha's movements. "We never even got a body to bury. They said the blast had been so hot, he'd been vaporized instantly."

Natasha rolled her eyes. For God's sake, she'd really defied expectations. Here, Natasha had thought she'd stumbled across a disturbingly ordinary woman in all this, and really she was so painfully derivative.

Again.

She took another step.

Erwin mirrored her again. "I help him with this, he's going to give me an avenue to Stark."

Another step.

Another.

Then another, and again, and again.

"And then what?"

Erwin sneered again, the expression particularly icy, having seen her grin and laugh. "Well, then I choose which one of his friends would cause him the most pain to lose. Same as he did to me."

God. So unoriginal.

Little did she know, the easiest avenue to that end was in the other room, at Killian's mercy.

Just then, a horrible crash echoed from deeper in the house, rapidly followed by a bellow.

They stared at each other.

"You wanna go check that out?" Natasha offered, using the moment to her advantage and diving for the monitors on the wall.

She came down short, Erwin's tiny hand snagging the right ankle of her legging and ripping her from the air.

But Natasha tucked her legs as she went down, bringing the doctor to the floor with her, where they landed in a tangle of limbs.

Kicking, Natasha was able to free herself, but only long enough for the other woman to yank again at her hair, grabbing at her shirt, and swinging her back toward the door.

She landed half on the step, her ribs protesting violently as she gasped for breath. But she was able to collect herself well enough to haul out a hard kick when she sensed the girl behind her and she grinned as Erwin sprawled back, crying out in pain, and landing on her ass on the concrete.

Another crash and another desperate, pleading shout from the house.

This time, Natasha was able to throw herself across the room and successfully reach the computer set up. She wrapped a hand around the connecting cables and pulled, yanking them desperately out of the humming signal box.

There was a huge flash, a deafening zap and crackle, Natasha let everything go with a shout of pain, and the garage went dark. Or, at least, as dark as was possible during daylight hours.

Another hard crash from the house, this one complete with the shattering of glass.

"Bitch!" Erwin snarled in the darkness, but Natasha had the advantage of clearer sight in low light, and she paused only long enough to hook her in the throat, making her choke as she grabbed at her chest. That left her open for Natasha to yank her into the nearest shelf, cracking her head once, twice, and letting her drop, unconscious, to the concrete floor.

Breathless, Natasha straightened her clothing, then picked her up, hauling her across the garage. "Yeah. I know. I've heard that before." And she hefted her over her shoulder and through the window of the attachment, sending her falling through it with a crash. "There. That outta suffice, signal wise. Come out and play, Winter Soldier."