Freezer Burn (48/?)
This is not a double post. This is me splitting up one chapter over two entries because I am too prolix for LJ.
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
Steve followed the bottle-blonde hostess through a maze of too-close-together tables crowded with customers out into the backyard garden, which wasn’t a garden at all, but had plastic chairs around simple tables under umbrellas. In a corner, Natasha and Clint were already seated. Natasha spoke to the hostess in Greek, asking for lord knew what, as Steve adjusted the orientation of his chair.
“What’s the word?” Clint asked after the hostess left. It had been a warmer than seasonal spring day in New York, but it had cooled off as evening fell and between that and the fact that it was Tuesday, not a popular dining-out day, and the ambient noise of Astoria with the honking cars and elevated train a block away, they would be fine if they kept their voices down.
“Our original mission is scrubbed,” Steve answered, putting the napkin on his lap. “But we’ve got a new one.”
“No HAHO?” Clint looked disappointed. He’d been so ridiculously excited at the idea of parachuting into Minyar that even though other options had presented themselves during the planning phase, Steve had kept to the original. Because jumping out of planes was exhilarating no matter how many times you’d done it before and Clint’s childlike glee had been such a joy to behold.
“Not unless you want to jump off the Helicarrier’s flight deck.”
Clint’s eyebrows raised and Natasha looked up from the menu.
“We’re taking the big car?” She asked mildly.
Steve nodded, but said no more because their waitress appeared and it was time to order. Natasha handled all of it, as usual, right down to being the one to go back inside to pick out the fish to be prepared. The waitress was a little scandalized by that -- it was something she felt Clint or Steve should have done -- but went along with it because Natasha didn’t give her a chance to do otherwise.
Steve had spent the entire day -- the third in a row -- trapped in the theater off of the bridge discussing the new plan for Minyar now that it had been upgraded from “possibly about to become a HYDRA base and definitely of interest to Schmidt” to “already a HYDRA base and definitely the location of George Tarleton and possibly also Schmidt.”
Maya Hansen’s computer and internet history had indeed been found sooner than later. She’d been very good at taking precautions, but, as Tony had predicted, she’d gotten lazy a few times and used her home internet connection when she shouldn’t have. Communications with Tarleton were discovered -- she had indeed been the one to warn him that SHIELD had come up with his connection to both modoc and AIM -- and enough information had passed between them that they were both now facing treason charges.
But the information flow had been both ways and now SHIELD knew for certain that HYDRA had made Minyar their headquarters and most important research site. Which did not negate the need for a reconnaissance mission, but instead just took Steve and Clint off of it to save them for the main invasion.
Natasha returned triumphant, followed shortly by a man who produced a bottle of white wine and three glasses, giving Steve the first glass to taste.
“Fury has decided that we are done playing around,” Steve reported once they were alone again, letting his tone indicate that those had not been his precise words. “We are going to take Minyar before any other monsters can escape from there. Including Schmidt or Tarleton.”
The days in the theater, sitting in the stadium seats with heads of action and support units and analyst sections, were hard. This was a big mission, the biggest offensive mission SHIELD had ever planned -- as opposed to the repulsion of the Chitauri invasion and the Triple Bombings, neither of which had allowed SHIELD to have a say in the shape of the battle until it was already begun -- and the weight of the knowledge that they had one chance to get it right was heavy on all of them.
He was vague with the details not because of security concerns nor because of Natasha’s uncertain status -- Fury had elliptically told him to keep Natasha apprised -- but because things were all still very much up in the air. Literally so, already, and soon to be more.
“We’ve got drones and satellites buzzing like mosquitoes, apparently,” Steve said. “We are possibly borrowing the satellites of other nations without their permission, too, but I don’t think I’m supposed to know that.”
Their waitress returned with a bowl of pita wedges and a plate of dips. Steve knew from past Greek food experience that the pink one was probably tarama and one of the white ones would be tzatziki and another would be feta, but guessed wrong which one that would be and found the potato dip first instead. He was chewing on that when the waitress came back with two more plates, a sizzle platter for the saganaki and a dish of grilled marinated octopus.
“How are we justifying the ‘Carrier taking off after being parked for so long?” Clint asked as he squirted lemon juice on the saganaki and portioned it out. “There’s no alternate side of the street parking in the harbor.”
Steve waited for the basket of bread to be delivered before replying. “There’ll be a couple of news articles about a change in the engine and system test schedules. The public will be invited to watch one of the launches once the schedule is finalized. There’ll be a couple of short cruises, get folks used to the Helicarrier being more mobile again.”
The Helicarrier was never supposed to have been parked long enough to need its bottom scraped; apparently it had been a much more frequent flier before the Chitauri invasion. But it had needed repairs after that and then it had stayed in the harbor because SHIELD had been a presence in New York during the cleanup of Manhattan and then, well, inertia. It was much easier for everyone if getting on and off the Helicarrier didn’t need something with a jet engine. Much cheaper, too.
Steve wasn’t sure how he felt about the Helicarrier returning to being sky-based. He was not above disliking it just for the convenience factor, but mostly he disliked it because it removed SHIELD from the everyday life if was meant to protect. Working off of a Helicarrier floating in the sky made him feel too much like a god on Olympus and that was not what he’d signed up for.
They worked their way through the appetizers -- Steve wished he knew where to get octopus to try to make it at home -- and discussed what sort of advantages and disadvantages there would be to having the Helicarrier itself on site. It would shorten the logistical and personnel supply chain to minutes, but only if the Helicarrier remained unbothered and the air around her clear of enemy aircraft or weaponry.
“It’s not much help if we have to keep diverting resources to protecting the ‘Carrier,” Clint pointed out. “Especially if it comes out of our air support.”
Steve held up the octopus dish, but nobody else took any, so he put the last three pieces on his plate.
“The Russians are going to treat this as an invasion, which it is,” Natasha pointed out, daintily swirling pita around the taramosalata. “Whatever aircraft they have that has gas and parts to fly will be in the air. And HYDRA’s got those ground-to-air laser cannons that can take out the ‘Carrier’s support flotilla, at least.”
Steve could only grimace agreement; these arguments and counter-arguments were already on the table. He’d contributed very little to that part of the discussion because that was not his area of expertise; of course he wanted the ground forces to have the best resupply and protection available, but where the happy medium would be for that, he couldn’t say and so he hadn’t.
The appetizer plates were cleared, the wine glasses refilled, and a quintet in skinny jeans, striped scarves, and chunky plastic eyeglasses were seated at the opposite end of the space.
“Oh, look, it’s your people,” Clint said brightly. “You should go join them.”
Steve cocked an eyebrow. “Since when am I a hipster?”
Natasha coughed to cover a laugh.
“I learned that word a long time ago,” he told her primly.
“You’re a guy in your twenties who lives in DUMBO, dresses like a dork, and takes pictures of his food,” Clint said as he leaned back so that dinner plates could be distributed. “Granted, the dated fashion sense is not meant ironically in your case, but to the outside observer...”
Steve was still glaring when the waitress showed up with the two fish Natasha had selected to be grilled -- one was a red snapper, he couldn’t identify the other -- and a plate of grilled shrimp. She was accompanied by another woman who delivered the lemon potatoes and greens.
“Oh, yes, how is your epistolary romance going?” Natasha asked as she deftly deboned the red snapper with only a fork and spoon, serving out fish as she worked.
“What are you talking about?” Steve asked warily, since he could take a pretty good guess from context. Also, Clint was a terrible gossip.
Natasha gave him a look that clearly stated that better liars than him had crossed her path before and found no easier way through.
“It’s not a romance,” he sighed, serving out potatoes to Clint while he had his plate raised so that Natasha could give him the fish that wasn’t red snapper. “We’re friends, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” Natasha repeated, laying down the spoon and picking up her own plate so that Clint could give her shrimp, which had been placed at his elbow.
“We don’t really spend any time together,” Steve explained, struggling, as he always did, to express his thoughts on the matter. It was not helped by his thoughts not being terribly clear. Peggy had thought it charming. “We don’t talk about anything other than food, usually. We often don’t talk at all. At least not in person. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”
It was not, as he’d tried to explain to Peggy, how either a friendship or a courtship worked. Peggy told him he’d slept through a lot and yes, nowadays texting and the occasional email could count as both. He’d been horrified at the thought that he might have been leading Miranda on, but Peggy had first laughed at him, then assured him that he was still in possession of the same guilelessness that had ensured no hard feelings when he’d captured the hearts of the entire secretarial pool -- for starters -- and done nothing with them. Which hadn’t lessened his embarrassment, but at least put him a little at ease with regard to Miranda. Whom Peggy liked by proxy already and thought he should court for real, but he was not going to mention that to anyone.
Something might have shown on his face because Natasha’s teasing tone gentled. “Does she know it’s not a romance?”
Steve smiled. “She’s well aware that being seen in public with Captain America does not work well with her being in hiding from HYDRA,” he replied. “And I’ve told her about Peggy, so...”
Clint made a noise and pointed to the plate of greens, which Steve handed him. “You didn’t tell her the part where Peggy broke up with you a long time ago.”
Natasha shushed him. “Pah, that’s not the part that matters.”
She looked like she was about to ask Steve something else, so he asked plaintively if they could talk about bad guys now?
And so they did.
Steve and Fury had just determined that there was a likeliest explanation for how both of them had this time and place marked down for a meeting that neither of them had scheduled when that likeliest reason strolled into Fury’s office, his somewhat sheepish (but not really all that sheepish) sidekick in tow.
“Extremis works,” Tony announced, Bruce taking up a rear guard position most of the way to the conference table. “That is both the good news and the bad news.”
Steve looked back at Fury, who looked a little outraged but mostly curious and wary and that particular kind of self-awareness that went with remembering that he was the one who’d demanded that Tony work aboard the Helicarrier in the first place. He gestured for Tony to keep talking.
“Maya Hansen was lying through her teeth to both the DoD and FuturePharm when she told them how far along she was, to different degrees,” Tony began. “She told Washington she was at Point A, everyone at FuturePharm saw that she was at Point B, but only HYDRA knew that she was really at Point C, which is the point where she was doing human testing.”
Steve reacted, horrified. But Fury spoke first.
“Successful testing or are we going to find mass graves when we get to Minyar?”
“You assume those are mutually exclusive,” Bruce said wryly from his position at the conference table, where he’d taken a seat.
“There are going to be fewer bodies than we’ve come to expect from HYDRA,” Tony answered, pacing in a tight pattern, then he stopped. “Where Maya was officially stuck, at Point B, she’d realized that for Extremis to work at all, it would need to be mated with a very specific DNA sequence - 97% of the world’s population is ineligible. Now, three percent of almost seven billion is still a lot of people - over two hundred million, for those who went to art school - but that’s just the greatest possible pool of candidates. The actual pool of candidates will be much smaller - we’re talking hundreds to thousands, depending on a few factors.
“I’m one of them, by the way. Ironically, considering how eager HYDRA’s been to grab your genetic stuffs, Captain America here is not - sorry, buddy.”
Steve shook his head, he couldn’t care less. “I already won my lottery.”
“Anyway,” Tony went on. “The point is that Maya and HYDRA know that Extremis will only work on a select group within this tiny subset of the population. The focus of her work was not to broaden the pool, but get it to work with what she had on hand. She wanted to get Extremis to work perfectly on one test subject rather than be weak sauce for a dozen. Which means she was testing, but on a very small sample size. We’re missing some of the more recent notes, but it seems to be under a dozen total.”
Fury frowned. “I’m still waiting for the good news.”
“The good news is that HYDRA can’t use Extremis for much of anything right now,” Tony said, pausing in his arc and turning sharply on one heel. “There will be no army of super-soldiers waiting for us.”
“Just mecha spiders and the usual cast of thousands of cannon fodder,” Bruce piped up, drawing a frown from everyone.
“They only need one super-soldier,” Fury pointed out and Steve didn’t need to look to know Fury was looking at him.
“Only if it’s the right one,” Tony said. “And they haven’t gotten him yet.”
Steve thought of something. “What if they’re not trying to create an army of super-soldiers? What if this is for Schmidt?”
“We checked Schmidt’s DNA - we have some on file - and he would not have been eligible,” Bruce answered. “We have no idea whose body he’s been in since he vacated Andreas von Strucker’s, but the likeliest candidates to have the DNA sequence were not the likeliest candidates for Schmidt when he was shopping for bodies in Northern Europe in the 1960s.”
Fury’s phone beeped, but he ignored it. “What do I do with this information, Stark? Because I have to figure out how to assault an exquisitely-defended base inside hostile territory without sending my people needlessly to their deaths. And you are keeping me from that. So while I appreciate the cleverness of your drawing my attention to your update - with a stunt that you will not repeat - unless there is more to this story that will have an effect on what happens at Minyar, then we are through.”
Tony stood still. “What you do with this information is up to you, Director. I’m here to tell you that Extremis works, HYDRA is trying to make it work for them, and that when we go down to Minyar, someone should be looking for where they’re doing that because it’s something that we should take away from them or destroy. We both know that whatever happens at Minyar, HYDRA won’t end there any more than they ended after Schmidt disappeared or after the ’51 raids. And so when they go back to being cockroaches under rocks, they shouldn’t be able to take Extremis with them. Eventually, like a million monkeys with typewriters, they will produce Shakespeare.”
And then he left, Bruce giving a little wave as he followed.
When it was just Steve and Fury again, Steve turned back around in his seat. “He’s not wrong.”
“No,” Fury agreed. “He’s not. But I don’t know that we have the wherewithal to devote manpower to tracking down a technology that doesn’t work, that might never work, in the middle of a firefight full of technology that already does.”
Steve grimaced because that was true, too. They both knew that if HYDRA were to figure out Extremis on their own, then a small loss now would save far greater losses down the line. But that was a big if -- Tony hadn’t sounded like he was at all close to figuring out Extremis, either -- and throwing lives away on a possibility was not something that would rest lightly on the shoulders of the men issuing those orders. Which would likely be both of them.
“You sure you want him along?” Fury asked.
Steve nodded. “Absolutely.”
Tony wanted to go -- expected to go -- and had been training for it. He’d spent more time in the suit over the past month than in the past year; when he wasn’t at the Helicarrier working on Extremis, he was in his workshop fiddling with the suit. (Or back in the boardroom of Stark Industries, having made his triumphant return as of the start of the month, although Pepper was minimizing his responsibilities there mostly for her own convenience.) Tony was not aware of just how much resistance there was among the SHIELD hierarchy to having Iron Man on the battlefield -- and Steve had no intention of him finding out.
“Just to be clear, you want him there for strategic and tactical reasons, not because leaving him home will send him crawling back into a bottle.”
Steve rather suspected that Fury was not nearly as unhappy with the idea as he made himself sound, but one could never be sure with Fury.
“I want him there because I’ll need Iron Man,” Steve replied. “He is the Avengers’ primary air support, first and foremost, and he brings plenty else that we’ve been missing.”
Fury wasn’t wrong about what Tony’s likely reaction to being left out would be, but that wasn’t Steve’s primary concern. If he thought Tony would be anything less than an asset in the field, he’d have let SHIELD’s planners keep Iron Man out of the equation. He would never risk the lives of the men (and women) under his command on what would amount to a morale booster. He worried about Tony, but shoring up his fragility could not come at the expense of anyone else’s life.
“Speaking of what’s missing,” Fury said, “you’ve got the extra gear for the Widow all sorted?”
Natasha was not an official part of the mission planning, but Fury and others didn’t hesitate to use her name and to assume that she would be part of the Avengers when they went into the field. Steve thought it was past time that her suspension was lifted, but Fury was holding out for something that he didn’t feel the need to explain to anyone. Natasha didn’t seem to care about her official status and was instead rather insistent that it be made known that she was not participating in hopes of getting reinstated. But Steve knew that she and Fury were communicating directly, that they didn’t need him to pass messages back and forth like high school math class, and yet they chose to, anyway. The dance that they were playing with each other had started to make his head hurt, so he’d stopped thinking about it.
“Tapper and someone who might have unauthorized access to the SHIELD intranet took care of that,” Steve answered mildly, blinking innocently when Fury glared at him. Tony and Tapper had never gotten on better than the hour they had spent bypassing requisition forms and supervisory approvals.
There might have been other questions, but then Hsiang came on the intercom to remind Fury that the parts of his schedule that hadn’t been hijacked by Tony were still in effect and he had a VTC with the State Department in ten minutes.
Steve had his own meeting to go to, a much less formal and illustrious gathering of the field commanders to discuss TTPs, expectations, rumors, and what were the most likely ways things would go pear-shaped. By this point, Steve didn’t have to worry too much about how the various units would react to Avengers moving in and out of their sectors, sometimes giving orders and sometimes doing things that were counter-productive to what the SHIELD unit was doing. But it wouldn’t hurt to go over it all again, especially because this would be the first time the entire team would be in the field together in a long time - since Chicago, maybe. The unit commanders had justifiable concerns and the body of information they had to prepare with was ever-changing.
Two weeks later, the Helicarrier completed the third and last systems test and, with crowds gathered, rose into the sky for a three-week cruise. Steve watched from his roof with Peggy, who, like Steve, been on it while it had flown, but had never seen it launch. They both thought it impressive and strange.
A week after that, there was a small gathering at Tony’s penthouse. For the first time in more than a year, all of the Avengers were in the same room. The evening had actually been Thor’s idea, since Steve never would have thought to have a social event the night before a major battle, and everyone seemed glad of it. For Tony and Thor and Bruce, it was their first time seeing Natasha since her flight from New York and anything that might have been lingering was dissipated with grace and good food. Natasha was currently on the couch listening to Bruce describe his house in Shreveport and the boat he was considering buying, Thor interrupting to make increasingly outrageous suggestions for decorations and boat-christenings. Pepper’s laughter rang delightfully through the room.
“You out here by yourself for a reason?” Tony asked, joining Steve at the railing of the balcony facing south.
“Just thinking,” Steve answered. He’d come outside for a moment of quiet and fresh air and then got distracted by the stars and the lights of the city. And his memories.
He’d not allowed himself to dwell too much on the fact that he was gearing up to go after Johann Schmidt again, to destroy HYDRA again, to accomplish all of the tasks he’d rued as unfinished as he’d steered that plane into the ice so long ago. Because if he started to look at it like that, as anything other than just another mission for SHIELD here in the twenty-first century, then he’d drown in the wanting to be back there, back then, where he was supposed to be instead of where he was, which was surrounded by people who were placing their lives in trust of his leadership.
But tonight, he’d given himself a moment to accept that this was more than just another mission. He still missed the people he’d left behind with an ache that stole his breath away, even if Bucky had left him first, even if Peggy were still here with him. Even if he had people who cared about him now and whom he cared for in turn.
“You know, you’re about as predictable as a sunrise,” Tony sighed with a smile, letting himself fall over to the right so that he jostled Steve’s left shoulder. “Come back inside. I’ve got something.”
Steve looked over because he recognized that tone. “What did you do, Tony?”
But Tony was already at the door and Steve had no choice but to follow. He waited a minute, though. It was a really nice night and he needed a beat to collect himself before he faced people again.
Tony had assembled everyone on the couches around the low table, upon which was a bottle covered with rich cloth and brandy snifters, enough for everyone.
“Let’s go, Captain Maudlin, chop-chop,” Tony exhorted, as Steve came back through the balcony door.
Steve was prepared to stand behind the couch, but Natasha, fully restored to her position of queen bee of the Avengers, had Clint and Thor move one way, Bruce the other, and so there was a space for him right in the middle.
“Tomorrow afternoon, we leave to begin a mission that has been more than seventy years in the making,” Tony began in his best showman’s voice, the one that never made it more blindingly obvious that he was Howard Stark’s son. “The Red Skull and HYDRA await us, even if they - hopefully - don’t know it yet. This will be new ground for all but one of us, except not really, because that one of us was a flash-frozen capsicle during the big finale. But he’s awake for this one and he will, I think, appreciate this next bit.”
Tony leaned forward and reached out to pull the cloth off of the bottle… of 1850 Chabanneau. Which he proceeded to uncork and pour expertly into glasses for all of them, giving Pepper the first one and Steve the second.
“There is a story about why this particular year and label means something to our favorite geriatric superhero, but we’d better wait for Peggy Carter to tell it because she’ll do it better than Cap does,” Tony went on as he passed out the rest of the glasses except one, an extra glass because everyone was now holding a snifter. It was the glass for absent companions, Steve realized, and he was touched by it because the absent companions were his. “But the part that isn’t witty and droll and involve very soggy Howling Commandos and a very pissed off Chester Phillips involves an identical bottle to this one being shared at the conclusion of the war by a small group of men and women who’d fought together in it. Who’d fought this battle we’re going to fight tomorrow.”
Tony held his snifter up. “So I propose a toast to Messieurs Barnes, Dernier, Dugan, Falsworth, Jones, and Morita, Miss Carter, Colonel Phillips, Doctor Abraham Erskine, without whom none of this would have been possible, and dear old Dad, among a cast of thousands. We aren’t the Commandos and didn’t expect to follow in their footsteps, but here we are, the Avengers, and may we do so with honor.”
The cognac burned going down, but in a good way.
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
Steve followed the bottle-blonde hostess through a maze of too-close-together tables crowded with customers out into the backyard garden, which wasn’t a garden at all, but had plastic chairs around simple tables under umbrellas. In a corner, Natasha and Clint were already seated. Natasha spoke to the hostess in Greek, asking for lord knew what, as Steve adjusted the orientation of his chair.
“What’s the word?” Clint asked after the hostess left. It had been a warmer than seasonal spring day in New York, but it had cooled off as evening fell and between that and the fact that it was Tuesday, not a popular dining-out day, and the ambient noise of Astoria with the honking cars and elevated train a block away, they would be fine if they kept their voices down.
“Our original mission is scrubbed,” Steve answered, putting the napkin on his lap. “But we’ve got a new one.”
“No HAHO?” Clint looked disappointed. He’d been so ridiculously excited at the idea of parachuting into Minyar that even though other options had presented themselves during the planning phase, Steve had kept to the original. Because jumping out of planes was exhilarating no matter how many times you’d done it before and Clint’s childlike glee had been such a joy to behold.
“Not unless you want to jump off the Helicarrier’s flight deck.”
Clint’s eyebrows raised and Natasha looked up from the menu.
“We’re taking the big car?” She asked mildly.
Steve nodded, but said no more because their waitress appeared and it was time to order. Natasha handled all of it, as usual, right down to being the one to go back inside to pick out the fish to be prepared. The waitress was a little scandalized by that -- it was something she felt Clint or Steve should have done -- but went along with it because Natasha didn’t give her a chance to do otherwise.
Steve had spent the entire day -- the third in a row -- trapped in the theater off of the bridge discussing the new plan for Minyar now that it had been upgraded from “possibly about to become a HYDRA base and definitely of interest to Schmidt” to “already a HYDRA base and definitely the location of George Tarleton and possibly also Schmidt.”
Maya Hansen’s computer and internet history had indeed been found sooner than later. She’d been very good at taking precautions, but, as Tony had predicted, she’d gotten lazy a few times and used her home internet connection when she shouldn’t have. Communications with Tarleton were discovered -- she had indeed been the one to warn him that SHIELD had come up with his connection to both modoc and AIM -- and enough information had passed between them that they were both now facing treason charges.
But the information flow had been both ways and now SHIELD knew for certain that HYDRA had made Minyar their headquarters and most important research site. Which did not negate the need for a reconnaissance mission, but instead just took Steve and Clint off of it to save them for the main invasion.
Natasha returned triumphant, followed shortly by a man who produced a bottle of white wine and three glasses, giving Steve the first glass to taste.
“Fury has decided that we are done playing around,” Steve reported once they were alone again, letting his tone indicate that those had not been his precise words. “We are going to take Minyar before any other monsters can escape from there. Including Schmidt or Tarleton.”
The days in the theater, sitting in the stadium seats with heads of action and support units and analyst sections, were hard. This was a big mission, the biggest offensive mission SHIELD had ever planned -- as opposed to the repulsion of the Chitauri invasion and the Triple Bombings, neither of which had allowed SHIELD to have a say in the shape of the battle until it was already begun -- and the weight of the knowledge that they had one chance to get it right was heavy on all of them.
He was vague with the details not because of security concerns nor because of Natasha’s uncertain status -- Fury had elliptically told him to keep Natasha apprised -- but because things were all still very much up in the air. Literally so, already, and soon to be more.
“We’ve got drones and satellites buzzing like mosquitoes, apparently,” Steve said. “We are possibly borrowing the satellites of other nations without their permission, too, but I don’t think I’m supposed to know that.”
Their waitress returned with a bowl of pita wedges and a plate of dips. Steve knew from past Greek food experience that the pink one was probably tarama and one of the white ones would be tzatziki and another would be feta, but guessed wrong which one that would be and found the potato dip first instead. He was chewing on that when the waitress came back with two more plates, a sizzle platter for the saganaki and a dish of grilled marinated octopus.
“How are we justifying the ‘Carrier taking off after being parked for so long?” Clint asked as he squirted lemon juice on the saganaki and portioned it out. “There’s no alternate side of the street parking in the harbor.”
Steve waited for the basket of bread to be delivered before replying. “There’ll be a couple of news articles about a change in the engine and system test schedules. The public will be invited to watch one of the launches once the schedule is finalized. There’ll be a couple of short cruises, get folks used to the Helicarrier being more mobile again.”
The Helicarrier was never supposed to have been parked long enough to need its bottom scraped; apparently it had been a much more frequent flier before the Chitauri invasion. But it had needed repairs after that and then it had stayed in the harbor because SHIELD had been a presence in New York during the cleanup of Manhattan and then, well, inertia. It was much easier for everyone if getting on and off the Helicarrier didn’t need something with a jet engine. Much cheaper, too.
Steve wasn’t sure how he felt about the Helicarrier returning to being sky-based. He was not above disliking it just for the convenience factor, but mostly he disliked it because it removed SHIELD from the everyday life if was meant to protect. Working off of a Helicarrier floating in the sky made him feel too much like a god on Olympus and that was not what he’d signed up for.
They worked their way through the appetizers -- Steve wished he knew where to get octopus to try to make it at home -- and discussed what sort of advantages and disadvantages there would be to having the Helicarrier itself on site. It would shorten the logistical and personnel supply chain to minutes, but only if the Helicarrier remained unbothered and the air around her clear of enemy aircraft or weaponry.
“It’s not much help if we have to keep diverting resources to protecting the ‘Carrier,” Clint pointed out. “Especially if it comes out of our air support.”
Steve held up the octopus dish, but nobody else took any, so he put the last three pieces on his plate.
“The Russians are going to treat this as an invasion, which it is,” Natasha pointed out, daintily swirling pita around the taramosalata. “Whatever aircraft they have that has gas and parts to fly will be in the air. And HYDRA’s got those ground-to-air laser cannons that can take out the ‘Carrier’s support flotilla, at least.”
Steve could only grimace agreement; these arguments and counter-arguments were already on the table. He’d contributed very little to that part of the discussion because that was not his area of expertise; of course he wanted the ground forces to have the best resupply and protection available, but where the happy medium would be for that, he couldn’t say and so he hadn’t.
The appetizer plates were cleared, the wine glasses refilled, and a quintet in skinny jeans, striped scarves, and chunky plastic eyeglasses were seated at the opposite end of the space.
“Oh, look, it’s your people,” Clint said brightly. “You should go join them.”
Steve cocked an eyebrow. “Since when am I a hipster?”
Natasha coughed to cover a laugh.
“I learned that word a long time ago,” he told her primly.
“You’re a guy in your twenties who lives in DUMBO, dresses like a dork, and takes pictures of his food,” Clint said as he leaned back so that dinner plates could be distributed. “Granted, the dated fashion sense is not meant ironically in your case, but to the outside observer...”
Steve was still glaring when the waitress showed up with the two fish Natasha had selected to be grilled -- one was a red snapper, he couldn’t identify the other -- and a plate of grilled shrimp. She was accompanied by another woman who delivered the lemon potatoes and greens.
“Oh, yes, how is your epistolary romance going?” Natasha asked as she deftly deboned the red snapper with only a fork and spoon, serving out fish as she worked.
“What are you talking about?” Steve asked warily, since he could take a pretty good guess from context. Also, Clint was a terrible gossip.
Natasha gave him a look that clearly stated that better liars than him had crossed her path before and found no easier way through.
“It’s not a romance,” he sighed, serving out potatoes to Clint while he had his plate raised so that Natasha could give him the fish that wasn’t red snapper. “We’re friends, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” Natasha repeated, laying down the spoon and picking up her own plate so that Clint could give her shrimp, which had been placed at his elbow.
“We don’t really spend any time together,” Steve explained, struggling, as he always did, to express his thoughts on the matter. It was not helped by his thoughts not being terribly clear. Peggy had thought it charming. “We don’t talk about anything other than food, usually. We often don’t talk at all. At least not in person. I haven’t seen her in weeks.”
It was not, as he’d tried to explain to Peggy, how either a friendship or a courtship worked. Peggy told him he’d slept through a lot and yes, nowadays texting and the occasional email could count as both. He’d been horrified at the thought that he might have been leading Miranda on, but Peggy had first laughed at him, then assured him that he was still in possession of the same guilelessness that had ensured no hard feelings when he’d captured the hearts of the entire secretarial pool -- for starters -- and done nothing with them. Which hadn’t lessened his embarrassment, but at least put him a little at ease with regard to Miranda. Whom Peggy liked by proxy already and thought he should court for real, but he was not going to mention that to anyone.
Something might have shown on his face because Natasha’s teasing tone gentled. “Does she know it’s not a romance?”
Steve smiled. “She’s well aware that being seen in public with Captain America does not work well with her being in hiding from HYDRA,” he replied. “And I’ve told her about Peggy, so...”
Clint made a noise and pointed to the plate of greens, which Steve handed him. “You didn’t tell her the part where Peggy broke up with you a long time ago.”
Natasha shushed him. “Pah, that’s not the part that matters.”
She looked like she was about to ask Steve something else, so he asked plaintively if they could talk about bad guys now?
And so they did.
Steve and Fury had just determined that there was a likeliest explanation for how both of them had this time and place marked down for a meeting that neither of them had scheduled when that likeliest reason strolled into Fury’s office, his somewhat sheepish (but not really all that sheepish) sidekick in tow.
“Extremis works,” Tony announced, Bruce taking up a rear guard position most of the way to the conference table. “That is both the good news and the bad news.”
Steve looked back at Fury, who looked a little outraged but mostly curious and wary and that particular kind of self-awareness that went with remembering that he was the one who’d demanded that Tony work aboard the Helicarrier in the first place. He gestured for Tony to keep talking.
“Maya Hansen was lying through her teeth to both the DoD and FuturePharm when she told them how far along she was, to different degrees,” Tony began. “She told Washington she was at Point A, everyone at FuturePharm saw that she was at Point B, but only HYDRA knew that she was really at Point C, which is the point where she was doing human testing.”
Steve reacted, horrified. But Fury spoke first.
“Successful testing or are we going to find mass graves when we get to Minyar?”
“You assume those are mutually exclusive,” Bruce said wryly from his position at the conference table, where he’d taken a seat.
“There are going to be fewer bodies than we’ve come to expect from HYDRA,” Tony answered, pacing in a tight pattern, then he stopped. “Where Maya was officially stuck, at Point B, she’d realized that for Extremis to work at all, it would need to be mated with a very specific DNA sequence - 97% of the world’s population is ineligible. Now, three percent of almost seven billion is still a lot of people - over two hundred million, for those who went to art school - but that’s just the greatest possible pool of candidates. The actual pool of candidates will be much smaller - we’re talking hundreds to thousands, depending on a few factors.
“I’m one of them, by the way. Ironically, considering how eager HYDRA’s been to grab your genetic stuffs, Captain America here is not - sorry, buddy.”
Steve shook his head, he couldn’t care less. “I already won my lottery.”
“Anyway,” Tony went on. “The point is that Maya and HYDRA know that Extremis will only work on a select group within this tiny subset of the population. The focus of her work was not to broaden the pool, but get it to work with what she had on hand. She wanted to get Extremis to work perfectly on one test subject rather than be weak sauce for a dozen. Which means she was testing, but on a very small sample size. We’re missing some of the more recent notes, but it seems to be under a dozen total.”
Fury frowned. “I’m still waiting for the good news.”
“The good news is that HYDRA can’t use Extremis for much of anything right now,” Tony said, pausing in his arc and turning sharply on one heel. “There will be no army of super-soldiers waiting for us.”
“Just mecha spiders and the usual cast of thousands of cannon fodder,” Bruce piped up, drawing a frown from everyone.
“They only need one super-soldier,” Fury pointed out and Steve didn’t need to look to know Fury was looking at him.
“Only if it’s the right one,” Tony said. “And they haven’t gotten him yet.”
Steve thought of something. “What if they’re not trying to create an army of super-soldiers? What if this is for Schmidt?”
“We checked Schmidt’s DNA - we have some on file - and he would not have been eligible,” Bruce answered. “We have no idea whose body he’s been in since he vacated Andreas von Strucker’s, but the likeliest candidates to have the DNA sequence were not the likeliest candidates for Schmidt when he was shopping for bodies in Northern Europe in the 1960s.”
Fury’s phone beeped, but he ignored it. “What do I do with this information, Stark? Because I have to figure out how to assault an exquisitely-defended base inside hostile territory without sending my people needlessly to their deaths. And you are keeping me from that. So while I appreciate the cleverness of your drawing my attention to your update - with a stunt that you will not repeat - unless there is more to this story that will have an effect on what happens at Minyar, then we are through.”
Tony stood still. “What you do with this information is up to you, Director. I’m here to tell you that Extremis works, HYDRA is trying to make it work for them, and that when we go down to Minyar, someone should be looking for where they’re doing that because it’s something that we should take away from them or destroy. We both know that whatever happens at Minyar, HYDRA won’t end there any more than they ended after Schmidt disappeared or after the ’51 raids. And so when they go back to being cockroaches under rocks, they shouldn’t be able to take Extremis with them. Eventually, like a million monkeys with typewriters, they will produce Shakespeare.”
And then he left, Bruce giving a little wave as he followed.
When it was just Steve and Fury again, Steve turned back around in his seat. “He’s not wrong.”
“No,” Fury agreed. “He’s not. But I don’t know that we have the wherewithal to devote manpower to tracking down a technology that doesn’t work, that might never work, in the middle of a firefight full of technology that already does.”
Steve grimaced because that was true, too. They both knew that if HYDRA were to figure out Extremis on their own, then a small loss now would save far greater losses down the line. But that was a big if -- Tony hadn’t sounded like he was at all close to figuring out Extremis, either -- and throwing lives away on a possibility was not something that would rest lightly on the shoulders of the men issuing those orders. Which would likely be both of them.
“You sure you want him along?” Fury asked.
Steve nodded. “Absolutely.”
Tony wanted to go -- expected to go -- and had been training for it. He’d spent more time in the suit over the past month than in the past year; when he wasn’t at the Helicarrier working on Extremis, he was in his workshop fiddling with the suit. (Or back in the boardroom of Stark Industries, having made his triumphant return as of the start of the month, although Pepper was minimizing his responsibilities there mostly for her own convenience.) Tony was not aware of just how much resistance there was among the SHIELD hierarchy to having Iron Man on the battlefield -- and Steve had no intention of him finding out.
“Just to be clear, you want him there for strategic and tactical reasons, not because leaving him home will send him crawling back into a bottle.”
Steve rather suspected that Fury was not nearly as unhappy with the idea as he made himself sound, but one could never be sure with Fury.
“I want him there because I’ll need Iron Man,” Steve replied. “He is the Avengers’ primary air support, first and foremost, and he brings plenty else that we’ve been missing.”
Fury wasn’t wrong about what Tony’s likely reaction to being left out would be, but that wasn’t Steve’s primary concern. If he thought Tony would be anything less than an asset in the field, he’d have let SHIELD’s planners keep Iron Man out of the equation. He would never risk the lives of the men (and women) under his command on what would amount to a morale booster. He worried about Tony, but shoring up his fragility could not come at the expense of anyone else’s life.
“Speaking of what’s missing,” Fury said, “you’ve got the extra gear for the Widow all sorted?”
Natasha was not an official part of the mission planning, but Fury and others didn’t hesitate to use her name and to assume that she would be part of the Avengers when they went into the field. Steve thought it was past time that her suspension was lifted, but Fury was holding out for something that he didn’t feel the need to explain to anyone. Natasha didn’t seem to care about her official status and was instead rather insistent that it be made known that she was not participating in hopes of getting reinstated. But Steve knew that she and Fury were communicating directly, that they didn’t need him to pass messages back and forth like high school math class, and yet they chose to, anyway. The dance that they were playing with each other had started to make his head hurt, so he’d stopped thinking about it.
“Tapper and someone who might have unauthorized access to the SHIELD intranet took care of that,” Steve answered mildly, blinking innocently when Fury glared at him. Tony and Tapper had never gotten on better than the hour they had spent bypassing requisition forms and supervisory approvals.
There might have been other questions, but then Hsiang came on the intercom to remind Fury that the parts of his schedule that hadn’t been hijacked by Tony were still in effect and he had a VTC with the State Department in ten minutes.
Steve had his own meeting to go to, a much less formal and illustrious gathering of the field commanders to discuss TTPs, expectations, rumors, and what were the most likely ways things would go pear-shaped. By this point, Steve didn’t have to worry too much about how the various units would react to Avengers moving in and out of their sectors, sometimes giving orders and sometimes doing things that were counter-productive to what the SHIELD unit was doing. But it wouldn’t hurt to go over it all again, especially because this would be the first time the entire team would be in the field together in a long time - since Chicago, maybe. The unit commanders had justifiable concerns and the body of information they had to prepare with was ever-changing.
Two weeks later, the Helicarrier completed the third and last systems test and, with crowds gathered, rose into the sky for a three-week cruise. Steve watched from his roof with Peggy, who, like Steve, been on it while it had flown, but had never seen it launch. They both thought it impressive and strange.
A week after that, there was a small gathering at Tony’s penthouse. For the first time in more than a year, all of the Avengers were in the same room. The evening had actually been Thor’s idea, since Steve never would have thought to have a social event the night before a major battle, and everyone seemed glad of it. For Tony and Thor and Bruce, it was their first time seeing Natasha since her flight from New York and anything that might have been lingering was dissipated with grace and good food. Natasha was currently on the couch listening to Bruce describe his house in Shreveport and the boat he was considering buying, Thor interrupting to make increasingly outrageous suggestions for decorations and boat-christenings. Pepper’s laughter rang delightfully through the room.
“You out here by yourself for a reason?” Tony asked, joining Steve at the railing of the balcony facing south.
“Just thinking,” Steve answered. He’d come outside for a moment of quiet and fresh air and then got distracted by the stars and the lights of the city. And his memories.
He’d not allowed himself to dwell too much on the fact that he was gearing up to go after Johann Schmidt again, to destroy HYDRA again, to accomplish all of the tasks he’d rued as unfinished as he’d steered that plane into the ice so long ago. Because if he started to look at it like that, as anything other than just another mission for SHIELD here in the twenty-first century, then he’d drown in the wanting to be back there, back then, where he was supposed to be instead of where he was, which was surrounded by people who were placing their lives in trust of his leadership.
But tonight, he’d given himself a moment to accept that this was more than just another mission. He still missed the people he’d left behind with an ache that stole his breath away, even if Bucky had left him first, even if Peggy were still here with him. Even if he had people who cared about him now and whom he cared for in turn.
“You know, you’re about as predictable as a sunrise,” Tony sighed with a smile, letting himself fall over to the right so that he jostled Steve’s left shoulder. “Come back inside. I’ve got something.”
Steve looked over because he recognized that tone. “What did you do, Tony?”
But Tony was already at the door and Steve had no choice but to follow. He waited a minute, though. It was a really nice night and he needed a beat to collect himself before he faced people again.
Tony had assembled everyone on the couches around the low table, upon which was a bottle covered with rich cloth and brandy snifters, enough for everyone.
“Let’s go, Captain Maudlin, chop-chop,” Tony exhorted, as Steve came back through the balcony door.
Steve was prepared to stand behind the couch, but Natasha, fully restored to her position of queen bee of the Avengers, had Clint and Thor move one way, Bruce the other, and so there was a space for him right in the middle.
“Tomorrow afternoon, we leave to begin a mission that has been more than seventy years in the making,” Tony began in his best showman’s voice, the one that never made it more blindingly obvious that he was Howard Stark’s son. “The Red Skull and HYDRA await us, even if they - hopefully - don’t know it yet. This will be new ground for all but one of us, except not really, because that one of us was a flash-frozen capsicle during the big finale. But he’s awake for this one and he will, I think, appreciate this next bit.”
Tony leaned forward and reached out to pull the cloth off of the bottle… of 1850 Chabanneau. Which he proceeded to uncork and pour expertly into glasses for all of them, giving Pepper the first one and Steve the second.
“There is a story about why this particular year and label means something to our favorite geriatric superhero, but we’d better wait for Peggy Carter to tell it because she’ll do it better than Cap does,” Tony went on as he passed out the rest of the glasses except one, an extra glass because everyone was now holding a snifter. It was the glass for absent companions, Steve realized, and he was touched by it because the absent companions were his. “But the part that isn’t witty and droll and involve very soggy Howling Commandos and a very pissed off Chester Phillips involves an identical bottle to this one being shared at the conclusion of the war by a small group of men and women who’d fought together in it. Who’d fought this battle we’re going to fight tomorrow.”
Tony held his snifter up. “So I propose a toast to Messieurs Barnes, Dernier, Dugan, Falsworth, Jones, and Morita, Miss Carter, Colonel Phillips, Doctor Abraham Erskine, without whom none of this would have been possible, and dear old Dad, among a cast of thousands. We aren’t the Commandos and didn’t expect to follow in their footsteps, but here we are, the Avengers, and may we do so with honor.”
The cognac burned going down, but in a good way.