Chapter 20 – Help me make it through the night

The bright, clean light of a summer dawn broke into the window of Joe's bedroom, and made him stir and open his eyes. It had always been his habit, when he could choose, to wake at dawn; too early in the summer, and often too late in the winter. However, as a rule he would wake alone.

Not this time. He turned and looked at the person in his bed with something like curiosity.

Joe came from a different world, and it had taken him months to even understand the rules of this one. If, indeed, it had any rules at all; sometimes he still wondered. But last night had been his first direct attempt to live within such rules. He had allowed a woman, and an older woman at that, to pick him up in a bar; with the clear and apparently passionless purpose of having sex. Which they had indeed had, and if it was only a matter of the unimportant mutual masturbation his partner seemed to want, it would have been really quite an impressive performance.

Kathleen. Margaret Kathleen. A romantic name, a name fit for old songs – for a woman about as romantic as a bank ledger.

With some help from Nick Fury, Jacob Carter and his team worked through the morning and into the early afternoon through the various folders and papers, establishing facts and sequences of events. James Jefferson, the investigator, sketched out a number of things to be done – witnesses to be found and interviewed, documents to be hunted down, supporting evidence for dates and facts. Suzanne Marcello Yap planned the legal strategy for the release of the evidence and the inevitable arrests and prosecutions. Carter and Fury mostly listened, occasionally breaking in to make suggestions or pointing out difficult areas. Carter still held his fishing rod, and even caught a couple of fishes; to anyone who saw them from a distance, they would have looked like a fishing party, Washingtonians having a break from work.

Valentina, on her boat, was also fishing – indeed, with more success than General Carter, to her dismay. She hated the sight of fish in the bottom of her boat. She had never forgotten the time her father had taken her fishing, and she had seen the fish flop desperately, and slowly die, and then be gutted. But she could not say it; not only it would be an implied criticism to General Carter (and to every other amateur fisher), but she had a suspicion that it would not go well with the idea of a hard, practical, trained SHIELD agent. And killing innocent animals was far from the worst thing she had done in her time as an agent.

But she still would rather have used a different cover. The little rowboat made a perfect cover and observation point, allowing her clear lines of sight up and down stream and on both shores.. She never let her guard down, occasionally moving her boat up and down to do visual inspections of the river, and carefully noting every person and boat who passed by. She was a well trained agent, and even five years under enemy control had not dulled her skills.

They broke up by mid-afternoon, re-ordering and putting away their thick folders. General Jacob Carter stood up and said: "Director, you have my thanks. I don't have to tell you just how precious this material is. You have extended our investigation into many directions, but also shortened it by at least a year."

"Cleaning up sewers is part of my job, General. I've seen this crap piling up for years, and I'm glad of a chance to flush it."

"Well, I guess the flushing will begin in a year or less, thanks to you."

Meanwhile the Countess had made her way to the shore. "Incidentally, General Carter," she said, "congratulations on a good day's fishing." And she handed over to him the four fine specimens she had caught. Together with Carter's own couple of acceptable ones, they would indeed add up to quite a day's catch.

"Don't you want them for yourselves?"

"No thank you, sir. Director Fury doesn't much like fish, and I..."

"You don't either?"

"Something like that. At any rate, that little lot ought to tell anyone that you were conscientiously fishing and could never have been having confidential meetings or being handed classified material." Carter grinned. Hands were shaken, and the two groups parted; General Carter, Marcello, and Jefferson, to go to their SUV, parked a couple of hundred yards away, and Fury and the Countess to their boat.

Nick Fury and Countess Valentina paddled downstream, as a country music station played on the radio they had taken with them. Fury still remembered his surprise at finding that the sophisticated European aristocrat had a weakness for redneck sounds. He was a hard rock man himself, but over the years he had learned to like some of the stuff, too. Some of Sammy Kershaw's songs spoke to him; and Hank Williams, going back; and Johnny Cash; and it had nearly hurt his mouth to admit it, but there was something to Dolly Parton other than dyed hair and Silicon Valley frontage. And then he thought Valentina had died, and he had kept listening because the songs reminded him of her.

And now here she was with him again, and Charles Pace playing on the stereo. He wondered what he had done to deserve this miracle. And as for his once and future lover... she was beginning to feel like the long years of sleep and manipulation had never happened – she was an agent and Nick Fury's lover, and the sun shone in the sky, and the Potomac was just as she remembered it

From the moment General Jacob Carter had come home, he had been working. His Mexican housekeeper had barely managed to get him to eat a small dinner, and at eleven in the evening he was still at it. That was when his young house guest had taken all her courage in her hands and gone to speak to him. He really needed to get some sleep. The work was not going to go away. It was still going to be there in the morning.

General Carter grinned inwardly. He could tell that Jen Hailey was quivering inside, but still she was taking it on herself to tell a man three times her age, her host and prospective superior, a General in the Air Force, what he should do. And dammit, she was right. As soon as she managed to get his attention, he realized that he was tired and really needed some sleep. He wondered whether this "mother-older sister" attitude was natural in women, or what. At any rate, she had a point. He smiled at her, trying to reassure her, to calm her nervous fear down. He made his way to his bedroom, patting her on the head as he did, and she bid him good night.

When he woke up the next morning, he could not remember anything else. It was as if he had already been sleeping as he reached his bed.

Out of nowhere, a hideous, terrifying sense shook Nick Fury, both in mind and in body. Rags of consciousness ripped through him as he struggled against... something... as he struggled. And then suddenly he was awake, taking great gulps of air in the night. And Valentina was next to him, naked, sobbing.

She had tried to strangle him. She had tried to strangle him.

For a minute, two, three, neither of them did or said anything. Fury's gasps turned to heavy breathing, and Valentina kept crying. Then he reached across the bed, and turned her over, and looked in her eyes.

"I thought I could have trusted you."

"I thought," she answered through her sobs, "that I could trust myself!"

"I take it this is another we-love-ya card from Hydra?"

"I think... I was waking up in the middle of the night, to go to the toilet... and I saw you... and I felt my mind just slip into sort of like rails, moving along by itself... I nearly did it, Nick, I nearly did it!"

"But you didn't," he said, caressing her cheek.

It was pretty horrible. He had promised himself never to have sex like that again, not after

"It is true so far as I know. Of course, it may be some other piece of garbage that Hydra put in my head... God, Nick, I can't even trust

To make love with her was all that he could do, even though it was all wrong.

Monday morning. Jacob Carter has woken up, feeling better than he has in months.

is working on the material supplied by Nick Fury; he is finally ready to release a report, and does not care if he dies afterwards.

He gets a call from Joyce, Sam – and Buffy. Buffy! It turns out that she has been released, as suddenly and inexplicably as she had been interned.