Chapter Six

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Three days before the operation was scheduled to occur, SHIELD won the court case. Tony's lawyers had labored valiantly, but there was only so much they could do against a spy organization that knew all their secrets and wasn't afraid to use them.

Fury was wise - he delegated somebody else to call Stark Tower. A congested looking man with a nametag reading Agent Fischer appeared on the screen, looking down his nose. "I've called to discuss the erection of a monument in the name of Margaret Carter, and to arrange SHIELD retrieval of the corpse," he started, but never got to finish his sentence.

"Don't you dare."

Steve's voice was low and terrifyingly even. Bruce's eyes widened a little, and Clint rocked back on his heels in anticipation. It was only very brave or very foolish men who stood up against Captain America when he sounded like that.

"You see her as nothing more than a - " the captain stumbled slightly on the word 'corpse' and couldn't say it, " - than a body. But Agent Carter was a fine, living woman who put everything on the line during times worse than you can imagine."

He stepped nearer, looming over the monitor, voice sinking to a stern rumble that was guaranteed to command attention. "Because of her legacy, you owe her your freedom, your organization, and probably your life. SHIELD can put up all the monuments they want, but she deserves at the very least to rest beside her parents in the country she sacrificed so much to defend."

On the screen, the pictured agent looked visibly intimidated, gulping audibly as he faced the prospect of directly opposing the captain's authority. Behind Steve's back one fist was clenched tightly, knuckles shining bone-white through the skin, and his friends could see how hard he was working for control. Tony took the opportunity to jump in. "Yeah, what he said. If you want her, come and get her - we won't make it easy."

Fischer's mouth opened, but Tony was faster than he was. "Oh, look at that. I think your face must have broken my clean, sustainable power source - the image is getting fuzzy." He pulled the cord out of the wall and the screen went dark.

Steve took a deep breath and then turned to face the Avengers with resolute eyes. "Right, I guess that's our cue. Bruce, how soon can you start the procedure? Do you have enough blood, or do you need more?"

Bruce did, in fact, have enough blood. The Avengers led dangerous lives and had their own little blood bank as a safety precaution, filled with units of blood they had donated for themselves in case of future need. Over the last week, Steve had also given incredibly large amounts, far more frequently than was healthy for anyone who wasn't a super soldier. He'd been looking a little anaemic, but insisted he was fine.

"We're not quite ready though," Bruce pointed out. "It'll take some time to get the room all fixed up and finish installing the equipment. I don't estimate being ready to start for at least twenty-four hours, and then we'll have to wait for the medical personnel to arrive. I'm also concerned that SHIELD will notice their sudden arrival and realize something is up."

Thor cleared his throat to get attention and shifted his weight. "Could we not call in the physicians in advance and permit them to stay in the tower until Doctor Banner has arranged the room to his liking?"

Steve nodded firmly. "Thor, that's perfect. Bruce, call the doctors and get them in here one or two at a time at shift changes, blending with the regular employees; then when you're ready, you won't need to haul them all over at once. Small actions will be more likely to fly under the radar than big ones."

Thinking fast, Tony whirled toward his girlfriend, snapping his fingers. "Pepper, we still have the funeral arrangements set up in England, right? Let's push it up. Cap and I have a distraction to plan."

The captain balked immediately. "Tony, I'm not leaving."

Surprisingly, it was Natasha who stepped into the conversation. "Steve, they know she's here, and they know you want to stay with her. If you leave to go stage a fake funeral, they'll follow you and give Bruce and the doctors time to take care of her."

Steve knew she was right, but that didn't make it any easier. At last he nodded reluctantly. "Right. Tony and I will go to England with a decoy casket to draw them off your backs. Thor, you'll stay here. I want someone with flight capability at the tower just in case. Natasha, you and Clint stay too. You know SHIELD better than any of us."

Natasha tipped her head back, arching her eyebrows confidently. To the uninitiated, she might have looked fairly harmless at the moment, dressed in a pair of fuzzy pajama pants and a tee - but everyone there knew she was fully armed and as dangerous as ever.

"If they try to come into the tower, we'll be ready for them," she promised. Behind her, Clint cracked his knuckles and grinned.

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Everybody was busy getting ready for the grand deception. Upstairs, Bruce and Tony were squabbling about the installation of the equipment. Well, Tony was squabbling - Bruce was too absorbed to notice. Thor had volunteered to do the heavy lifting, and Clint and Natasha were busy enabling security measures that could be snapped into place at any moment.

Steve probably had things to do - he probably had a lot of things to do, but at the moment, only one was at the top of the list. JARVIS sounded faintly surprised when the captain entered his security code to get into the lab. In all the time he'd spent in the tower, he had only ever entered the lab on a handful of occasions, and never when it was empty.

Of course, it wasn't completely empty. Peggy was there.

Sliding the cover of the cryo window open, the captain steeled himself to look at her face. She looked exactly the same as the other time he'd seen her. He shook his head. Of course she wouldn't have changed at all; she was dead, frozen stiff. At that moment, his crazy idea had never seemed more wild. What could a few quarts of blood do for a dead woman?

Steve squared his jaw. Then again, it couldn't possibly make things worse. The worst case scenario was that nothing would change.

The best - well, he didn't dare think about the best case scenario.

He laid his hand on the thick window and took a deep breath. Then he let it out again without words, searching vainly for the right thing to say. "Peggy," he finally whispered softly. "Peggy, I am so sorry you had to die for me."

The seconds ticked silently by as he looked into her face one more time. If it wasn't for the ice sparkling in her hair and on her face, he could have imagined that she was asleep.

He had only seen her sleep a handful of times; she was normally too professional for that. Besides, wartime Europe hadn't exactly been a safe place for women to let their guard down. On the occasions he had seen her asleep, she had been rolled in blankets; a shapeless blob on the ground with the rest of the Commandos.

Still, there was one time that he held close against his heart. They had been in the Cabinet War Rooms in London for a briefing, and by the time it was done, the air raid sirens were going off outside and the guard at the door told them it wasn't safe to leave.

"Is there anything I can do?" Steve asked, following close on Peggy's heels.

Peggy shook her head, threading her way through the narrow hallways. Steve didn't really enjoy being down there; the air was thick and stale, heavy with smoke and body odor and stress. Even though he didn't have bad lungs anymore, he still reflexively choked every now and then.

"No, not unless you want to tackle an airplane with your bare hands. We'll have to stay the night."

Well, it wouldn't be the first time Steve had slept on a floor. He didn't particularly mind, though he wasn't sure if there was a space large enough for him to lie down in without getting tripped over. Actually, he was more concerned about where Peggy would sleep, though he wasn't sure how to ask.

"Right this way, Captain."

She was descending a flight of stairs that went straight down into the floor. It was narrow, steep and short, and Peggy had to duck under the doorframe at the bottom. Steve Rogers pre-serum would have had no trouble, Steve thought wryly as he struggled after her. Of course, he also would have been curled up in a corner, blue in the face from an asthmatic attack brought on by the bad air.

Peggy was waiting for him. "It's not exactly the Hilton," she explained, swinging her hand out to indicate the room, "but it's dry and supposedly bomb-proof."

They were standing in a basement just tall enough that it couldn't quite be called a crawlspace. The air was significantly worse down here, hot and humid and even more stale. Beds lined both sides of the long room, most occupied for the night. "Pick a bed," she advised, walking past him. He tried to follow and smacked his head against a low beam hard enough to see stars. Somebody giggled, and he stooped lower, flushing.

"Peggy," he hissed, reaching her side. She was slipping off her shoes at the foot of one of the iron bedsteads. "This is the girl's room; where do the fellows sleep?"

"There isn't one. Everybody sleeps everywhere," she told him, pulling out her hairpins and tucking them into her pocket. "You can try to kick an officer out of his room upstairs, or go downstairs if you like - but if you think this air is bad, it's even worse down there."

There was a level further down than this? Steve shuddered at the thought. Peggy shrugged off her jacket and lay down on the bare mattress just as two or three secretaries came down the stairs. Unlike Peggy, they were wearing dressing gowns and curlers, carrying their sheets and giggling when they saw Steve standing awkwardly in the middle of the floor.

Blushing fiercely, Steve started toward the stairs going down. Bad air or no bad air, it had to be better than facing giddy dames in nightgowns.

"Oh, for heaven's sake Steve, get in bed." Peggy flapped her hand at the mattress next to hers.

Boy, would Howard snicker if he heard that. Relieved to get out of the public eye, Steve gingerly lay down on the bed she indicated. It creaked ominously and he hoped it would hold under his weight.

There was a moment of silence.

"Aren't you going to take your shoes off?" Peggy finally whispered.

Steve thought his face would burn away as he sat up and yanked off his shoes to a ripple of sleepy giggles from around the room. He pulled off his coat and tie too and hung them over the bedpost before lying back down, self-conscious at the feeling of going to bed in a room full of women.

The bed was too short. It wasn't a problem he was used to having. Twisting his legs, he grimaced at the squeal of rusty springs. He lay still, trying not to make any more noise, listening to the muffled sound of the bombs outside. Probably nobody else could hear them, at least not as distinctly, but his enhanced hearing could easily pick out each explosion. How many people would be dead by morning?

Turning his head, Steve's attention was immediately arrested at the sight of Peggy in the bed next to his, already fast asleep. She lay on her side facing him, arms curled up loosely. She looked younger when asleep; the businesslike agent persona fell away and she breathed deeply, like a child.

Something strange happened in his chest then, and Steve looked away, too much a gentleman to stare at a sleeping lady. He couldn't get over the fact that she was comfortable sleeping so near him, with no blanket, no bed roll, nothing to shield herself with. For some reason, he'd never felt so honored at her trust in him as he did at that moment.

Standing by the cryogenic chamber, Steve traced her face with his eyes. If he squinted, she looked a lot like she had on that other night, deep underground on the other side of the world. What if this blood transfusion idea did work? What if...

Something toppled over with a crash and Steve whirled around, snapping into focus.

"Ah, sorry," Bruce was trying to pick up the equipment that he had accidentally knocked over. "I saw you were having a moment and I - uh," he kicked ineffectually at a power cord wrapped around his ankle and finally gave up with a shrug. "I wasn't going to bother you."

"It doesn't matter," Steve said, and slid the window cover shut. "Here, let me help."

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Getting the casket to the jet waiting at the airport was relatively easy. Tony simply sent for a helicopter, which landed on the tower roof in blatant violation of city airspace rules. Clint's eyebrows twitched upward. "How much of a fine will we get for this? That's not a SHIELD vehicle - it doesn't have clearance to land here."

Tony, unconcerned, waved away the idea. "Hey, millionaire here. Honestly, what's a couple hundred thousand among friends? Petty cash. Between Cap and Thor, I spend that much on gym equipment every week."

Shaking his head bemusedly at the exaggeration, Steve shouted over the roar of the rotors. "We'll call from the jet once we're on board."

Clint nodded, giving him a firm handshake. "We'll keep you updated!" he bellowed back with an understanding grin.

Bowing his blond head against the strong gusts from the rotors, Steve helped Pepper in. Tony followed, nimbly claiming the seat at her side, before Steve swung himself up and closed the door. Clint squinted his eyes against the sun, watching the helicopter lift off.

"That's the way a gentleman does it," Natasha said in his ear. Clint didn't jump - he'd known her far too long for that.

"Does what?" he asked, not moving his eyes from the rapidly receding black dot in the sky.

"He helps the lady in first. You've never noticed?"

As a matter of fact, Clint hadn't until now, but as he stopped to think about it, he suddenly realized that it happened all the time. "He stands up too, when you or Pepper walk in the room."

Natasha nodded, following the line of his gaze before she turned back to the stairwell. "He does it all the time; I don't even thinks he does it on purpose. It's hopelessly old-fashioned and endearing. I hope this whole thing works - he deserves a girl who understands him."

Clint checked his watch and trotted after her. "Okay, let's give the medical team a security check and then finish going over protocols with JARVIS. I estimate we've got twelve hours before SHIELD makes their first attempt at infiltration."

Natasha nodded, and they sprinted down the stairs.

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The Cabinet War Rooms are a real place, the heart of the British war effort during WWII, built underground in London as an attempt at bomb-proofing. The facility was top-secret for years. Now it's been turned into a museum. Fabulous place, and I couldn't resist making Steve Rogers try to climb down that awkward little set of stairs. Yes, there were beds in the basement, and employees or soldiers who couldn't go home at night could catch some sleep down there.

Have a great day!