Chapter Text
It is 1945 and Peggy and Howard fight hard against Operation Overcast. Peggy maintains that it is a breach of trust to the public; to take in scientists that willingly worked with people like Johann Schmidt.
“You will bring the enemy into the fold. You will compromise our ideals for negligible benefits,” she says to a nameless council, words clipped. “There is no advantage to be had, here.”
Howard is charming and furious by turns, mercurial as only a Stark can be. “We don’t need their minds when we have our own,” he tries, and when that fails he rages against the powers that be, citing the crimes against humanity some of these men have committed, citing morality and good, questioning fiercely whether anyone has considered the costs of disclosing their own top-secret projects to formerly hostile scientists.
In the end, even with Colonel Phillips’ support, Peggy and Howard lose. They are overruled, told that their personal loyalties are clouding their judgment, told to sit down and take a figurative backseat.
Arnim Zola is one of the scientists recruited.
*
It is 1945 and the war is over and neither Steve Rogers’ nor Bucky Barnes’ bodies have been found despite Peggy and Howard’s best efforts.
*
It is 1946, and Peggy loses patience with the SSR after three months of paperwork and retrieves Zodiac on her own.
Howard hears, somehow. (He hears everything; Peggy swears he keeps cameras on her.)
The next day, he appoints her joint director of a new agency called SHIELD.
The name isn’t lost on her, and she walks out of the office, head held high.
*
It is 1946 and behind closed doors, Peggy and Howard both reluctantly come to the conclusion that Zola is better off under SHIELD supervision.
“Keep your friends close,” Howard says later that night, ebulliently, raising a glass.
Peggy knows it’s only a sham for the men surrounding them, that he has to be the charismatic Howard Stark they expect him to be, but she’ll play to his tune for tonight. “And your enemies closer,” she finishes for him, toasting him.
They lock gazes across the crowded bar, and Peggy catches the uncertainty in his eyes mirroring her own.
*
It is 1947, and he opens his eyes, and he does not know anything but there is pain and there is a light shining into his eyes and he is strapped to a table and something vaguely stirs in his mind; this is familiar and wrong and there’s a sick feeling in his stomach and for some reason he can’t stop picturing blond hair and blue eyes and a gentle smile and who is that man?
And then there are cunning eyes behind round glasses leaning over him, and he lashes out, or tries to; this is wrong, this is very very wrong, he has to get away from this man now, and then a needle is jabbed into his arm and he drifts away, fighting all the while.
The last thing he remembers is a summer night and a blood red moon and the blond haired man by his side.
(The next time he fully wakes up, he has a metal arm and a mission and a new name. And not much else.)
*
It is 1952, and a man who might be SSR grabs Howard Stark’s arm.
“Mr. Stark,” he says, and Howard looks at him impatiently; he has important shit to do; he doesn’t have time to chat with a g-suit who looks like he hasn’t stepped out from behind a desk in years.
“Yes,” Howard says shortly.
“Mr. Stark,” the man says again, and Howard fights the urge to roll his eyes, because he knows what he’s going to hear; he knows that this is just another mouthpiece that’s going to try to tell him to stop searching, and that is the one thing he cannot do. Sure enough, the man goes on some rehearsed speech about wasted resources and keeping the end goal in mind and something about knowing priorities, and Howard tunes him out. His mind is has a hundred, thousand, million other places to be.
He realizes, probably a few seconds too late, that the man has stopped talking and is looking at him expectantly.
“No,” Howard says, and flashes a smile at him, the one Peggy calls his deflecting asshole smile. “I know my priorities, and I know this organization’s, and most of the time, those two overlap. This time, they don’t, but these expeditions are funded personally, and manned by my employees. You have no say in this. I will not stop searching.”
(Twenty years later, Howard has a two year-old son with big, intelligent brown eyes, and he can’t see the child for the ghosts of his past. Howard, Peggy pleads with him, You need to stop. You need to let him go. Live your life. Look at your son.
Howard never does, and falls to the bottle more often than even their early days, and Peggy is angry with him. Steve would never have wanted this, she tells him, and watches helplessly as Tony grows and shows signs of being even brighter than his exceptionally bright father, watches as Howard refuses to see him.
It is this, that in the end, Peggy cannot forgive Howard for.)
*
It is 1968, and a New York senator (a presidential candidate, a man with a winning smile) is struck down by three slugs (untraceable, Soviet-make). A family curse, people mutter. Just their luck.
(Bad luck, a curse, a ghost, a masked man. Call him what you will. Call him the Winter Soldier.)
*
It is 1973, and Peggy and Howard have their worst fight in years.
“You have a wife and a son,” she spits at him. “And all you have time for are your World Expos. Steve would be disappointed in you.”
“I’m building the future,” Howard snaps. “And I’m building it for my son.”
“You haven’t given him a second look in a year,” Peggy says. “You are lying, you are lying to me and you are lying to Maria and you are lying to yourself!”
“You’ve given up on Steve,” Howard says, and his voice is cold, so cold. “You’ve forgotten.”
“And you’ve forgotten that you have responsibilities other than to Steve! He would have hated this,” she says, and she’s actually furious, and she slips in her control for a moment. “At least my children know I love them.”
And that was out of line, that was probably too far; her mother always said to never question the way another man raises his own children, but then again, her mother has always been a bit old-fashioned, and Peggy is decidedly not.
Howard’s eyes blaze, and she knows she’s hit a nerve.
“I love my son,” Howard says, all the fight suddenly gone from his stance.
“Then show it,” Peggy says, knowing that he won’t, knowing that Howard has no idea what to do with a precocious three year old child that looks at his father and shies away.
*
It is 1975, and a boy with dark hair and eyes that are old for his almost-five years runs up to Peggy with a brilliant smile.
She bends down to give him a hug.
“Aunt Peggy,” he says. “Look at what I built!” And he shows her a circuit board, and Peggy can’t find her words for a second, because Tony is so, so clever; he’s four years old and he speaks in perfect sentences and he’s just built a circuit board and he watches everything around him carefully, and he can’t help but think that his father doesn’t care about him.
*
It is 1978, and Howard cannot bear how his only child looks at him with wariness, and he throws all of his energy into utilizing an alternative energy source, throws himself even more into developing something he calls an arc reactor, and finally, finally makes a breakthrough.
(It’s the way of things, Peggy will think years later, that Howard never could save Tony in life, but does twice in death.)
*
It is 1982, and Peggy hears whispers about a man with a metal arm. She has heard them for years, but for the first time, she thinks that this might be important.
She calls Howard and asks him what he knows.
“Honestly, Peggy,” he says, “I haven’t looked into reports. You think it’s important?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m sure of it.”
“Okay,” Howard says. “You dig on your end, and I’ll dig on mine.”
She thanks him and hangs up, unable to shake her unease, but feeling better that both she and Howard will now be looking.
*
It is 1985, and Peggy comes face to face with the man people call the Winter Soldier.
Oh, I am dead, she thinks, as she sees the metal arm in her peripheral vision, as she goes for her gun, fast but not nearly fast enough.
He’s wearing a mask and all she can see is his eyes, and there’s something about them but she can’t place it.
He raises his rifle to his shoulder in an easy motion, and now, that is far too familiar, and Peggy knows why it’s familiar, but that doesn’t make any sense.
“I hear you’re a good shot,” Peggy says, keeping her voice light.
The man falters.
“I bet I’m better,” she says, and whips out her pistol.
Later at SHIELD, they’ll ask how she got away without a scratch, when the Winter Soldier never fails, never misses a hit.
“Everybody has off days,” is all Peggy says, but her mind is in overdrive, thinking of the way the Winter Soldier had stopped coming after her, thinking of how she should have emptied her gun into his head when she had the chance, of how she had instead hit his metal arm before sprinting to her car. How, judging from everything they know about the Winter Soldier, he should have followed her and completed the kill.
How he didn’t.
*
It is 1985, and he returns to base and his head is pounding and he’s failed in his objective for the very first time and his arm isn’t functioning correctly because there are four bullets in it (but none in his flesh) and he knows that woman.
“Mission report,” one of his handlers says.
“The woman,” he says desperately. “Who is she?”
“Mission report,” his handler says again, voice hardening.
But he can’t stop thinking about that woman, her crisp accent, her steady hands on her pistol.
“Mission report,” his handler repeats, and his voice takes on a dangerous edge.
Something clicks in his mind, and he remembers, he remembers her, Peggy Carter, whose smile was so sharp it could cut diamonds, who could outshoot him, who got this look in her eyes when she saw Steve—
Steve.
Bucky surges out of the chair he’s sitting in and grabs his handler by the throat, but the man gestures with one hand and suddenly there’s a burst of pain, and he’s forgotten about the wires attached to his arm, and the electricity courses through him.
The last thing Bucky hears before blackness overtakes him is his handler’s voice. “Completely unstable. Wipe him, put him back on ice.”
*
It is 1986, and Howard barely makes it to his son’s graduation.
“Congratulations,” he says to Tony awkwardly.
“Thanks, Pop,” Tony says, the sarcasm thinly veiled. “Is Aunt Peggy here?”
Peggy had been standing back, giving them a moment, and she’s sorry for Howard for a moment, but he’s reaping what he sowed, so she steps forward and says warmly, “Of course I am.”
Tony brightens when he sees her, and Peggy smiles, remembering that same grin on a four year old showing her a circuit board.
She hugs him, whispers her congratulations, and then lets him go greet his mother and Howard’s business partner, Stane.
She sees that frantic kinetic energy that Howard often has brimming in Tony, and she sees how people are drawn to Tony, even as he keeps them at arm’s length, even if they hate him, and she sees that they do.
He’s too young and too bright and he’s got that Stark arrogance on top of a defensiveness in the form of vitriolic sarcasm that’s all his own.
He could have done with a father, Peggy thinks.
*
It is 1991, and the Winter Soldier walks again.
Howard and Maria Stark die in a flaming car.
*
It is 1991, and Peggy hears rumors that the Winter Soldier is back, and she stands at Howard’s grave and allows herself to cry.
She and Howard were complicated, but they were allies even when they weren’t friends, and they depended on each other after the war in a way that few people could understand.
She leaves a bouquet of yellow flowers—bearded crepis—before she goes.
*
It is 1995 and the Winter Soldier is ordered to train a new generation of assassins.
None in the group are particularly memorable, except one woman with red hair and a deadly smile.
There are whispers about her; that her body and looks bely her age, that she’s already an accomplished assassin, that she’s supernaturally fast and strong.
The Winter Soldier doesn’t think much of it, although he knows she’s far and away the best in her class.
Then they spar, and this woman almost has him flat on his back in two seconds; if he didn’t have his arm and the pure muscle memory driven in by hours (and hours, and hours) of nonstop training, he might have lost to her. He doesn’t lose, but it is a close thing. (They would have thrown him back into the training sims, would have re-attached the corrective wristlets that shock him when he makes a wrong move, a superfluous motion, anything that isn’t what they want.)
“What is your name?” he asks later, when they are sitting against the wall watching the others fight.
“Natalia,” she says, and her perfect lips curve into a smile.
*
It is 1997, and in a rare moment when both of them are between missions, they stop for a talk.
“Why are we doing this? Why are we doing their dirty work?” She looks into his eyes. She always does; never shies away.
“We certainly make a pair,” he tells her, and it’s true. The Widow and the Soldier, the most effective assassins the world has ever seen. Or not seen, as it were.
Natalia doesn’t repeat herself, but lets him draw her into a languid kiss.
(It is not permitted, what they are doing. Neither of them much care.)
(The question she had asked echoes in his mind for hours. The seed has been planted.)
*
It is 1998, and with every kill he completes, he wonders why he is doing this.
After one mission, he is questioned by his handlers on why he did not follow orders precisely. He cannot, does not answer; he just stares at them silently (as Natalia would have done) and they leave him in a pitch black room for seven days with no human contact and they keep him awake the entire time with stimulants and it is the worst thing he can remember them doing to him, which is saying something. He thinks he is going to go mad.
The next time he is sent out, he follows his orders.
*
It is 1998, and Peggy cannot decide if she trusts Director Nicholas J. Fury.
Peggy doesn’t really trust very many people, though, not anymore. She hadn’t wholly trusted Pierce when he was director, but the world hadn’t ended and he had run a tight ship. Fury runs an even tighter one, and if anything, is even more careful than she herself is.
She doesn’t know if she trusts him, but she definitely respects him.
She wants to believe that SHIELD is in (relatively) good hands, but maybe that is the wishful thinking of an old woman.
*
It is 1999, and in another stolen moment (after a disciplinary session; he had gone off grid for a week and paid dearly for it), he embraces her, sighs into her red, red hair. Says, “You need to leave.”
She, who weaves lies with every breath, has never been anything but honest with him. “I know.”
“Go well,” he says.
The kiss that follows is urgent; this may be (probably will be) the last time they will have each other, at least like this.
*
It is 1999, and Natalia Romanova holds a gun with steady hands to a man using a bow, of all things. But his arrow is set to the string and pointed at her right eye, and when he says, “I never miss,” she believes him.
“I don’t either,” she says in clipped English.
“Well,” drawls the man. For all his relaxed tone, the arrow to her eye never wavers. “What a pair we are.”
(Natalia thinks of another man saying nearly the same thing, and for a fleeting moment considers returning. In the end, she is too selfish, if that is the right word. Her sense of self-preservation has always been strong, and in the end, Natalia Alianovna Romanova will always save herself.)
“I can kill you,” Natalia says slowly. This man doesn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation.
“You can,” he agrees. “And it looks like I can kill you. Again, what a pair.”
“Who are you?” She thinks she knows; a man who uses a bow and arrow to kill is not exactly inconspicuous, and if it is who she thinks he is, he works for an organization that wants her dead. That she might want to work for.
“You can call me Hawkeye,” the man says, still far too cheerful for the situation. “And I’ve been sent to kill you, but I don’t think I will.”
“Why not?” Natalia demands, and her finger is still on the trigger.
“Because you had the chance to kill me at least four times today. Maybe five. You made me last night.”
“Seven times,” Natalia says.
The man… Hawkeye. He whistles admiringly. “You are the best,” he says. “Any chance you’d consider defecting? Great benefits over here. Top-notch health insurance. Dental’s mediocre, but all things considered, pretty good. Come to the dark side, or whatever?”
Natalia cocks her head. “At arrowpoint?”
Hawkeye seems to have an internal battle with himself, although it’s possible that he’s listening to whoever’s talking into his earpiece. And then he appears to make a decision and lowers his bow. “Not at arrowpoint,” he says. “No promises about my handler, although, come to think about it, he definitely uses guns, but he’ll back me on this. On you.”
(Unbeknownst to Natalia, Phillip J. Coulson is tearing a new one into Clint Barton’s ear.)
Natalia slowly lowers her gun.
Hawkeye smiles, a shit-eating grin if she’s ever seen one.
*
It is 1999, and he is strapped to a chair. He braces himself.
“Where is the Black Widow?”
The Winter Soldier does not respond, and an electrical shock pulses through him. (He’s had worse. He’s almost disappointed; they don’t seem to be trying at all.)
“Where is she?”
He gazes at them steadily, doesn’t speak. He hopes Natalia got away. The electricity is stronger this time, and lasts long enough that he is panting afterwards. “I don’t know where she is,” he tells them, partly truthfully.
“He’s protecting the bitch,” a man in a suit jacket says. “Put him back in the tank.”
The Winter Soldier strains against his cuffs, manages to pull free with his left arm, gets in a few good blows before someone jabs a syringe into his thigh. It’s a paralytic, and that’s just cruel, he thinks, that they’d keep him conscious and fully aware as they prep him to go back into cryo.
He’s trying to fight the paralytic; drugs move through his system quickly. But just as he begins to regain control, they lock him into place in the tank, and he wants to scream, but then again, he learned long ago that it doesn’t do any good, and then everything is cold and black and empty.
*
It is 2002, and Peggy is getting on in years but her mind is as sharp as it ever was, and as it turns out, she can still hold her own in a shouting match against a United States Army General. Good to know, she thinks, as she coldly regards a fuming Thaddeus Ross.
“We were at war, General,” Peggy says, “And might I remind you that all participants in Project Rebirth were fully aware of the implications of their actions, including all scientists and researchers. Your disinclination to grant full disclosure to the men and women working on the Bio Force Enhancement Project is irresponsible and immoral, and frankly unbecoming an officer of your rank.”
“Ma’am,” Ross says, and oh, this man is trouble, arrogant and self-assured and foolish. “With all due respect, this country is at war, and I intend to defend it to the best of my ability.”
“Your men and women deserve to know why exactly they are conducting this research,” Peggy snaps.
“Agent Carter,” Ross says. “Are you entirely certain that your personal history isn’t what is holding you back from fully endorsing this project?”
And God, Peggy is sick and tired of having her near-romantic involvement with Steve thrown into her face at every turn for over fifty years. “My history with Captain Rogers,” she says evenly, “Has absolutely nothing with my desire for you to be transparent about your goals for this project.”
(It would be a lie to say that, four years later, Peggy doesn’t experience a certain amount of smugness after reading reports of the Hulk incident. A good person would never be smug when so much has been destroyed, but then again, she never claimed she was a good person.)
*
It is 2010, and Peggy is trying to stay away from SHIELD business, she really is. She’s done her work, and she’s done it well, and she deserves to rest. (That’s what her niece keeps telling her, anyway.)
But Tony has gone missing, and Peggy knows he’s a grown man and she knows it’s been years since he’s let her protect him, but when she closes her eyes she sees the four year old proudly showing her the circuit board he built, the six year old who built an engine from spare parts in the workshop, the fifteen year old on the phone with her, telling her how shitty everyone at MIT is.
She picks up her phone and calls Fury. “Director,” she says.
“Agent Carter,” Fury says. “What can I do for you?”
“Stark,” she says. “Look for him. Call it a personal favor.”
Fury agrees.
(Three months later, when Tony emerges from the desert with a magnet in his chest and a haunted look in the eyes, Peggy sits at Howard’s grave. She doesn’t visit terribly often, but it seems right. “He’s going to make it,” she says surely.
When a vigilante in a metal suit appears in Afghanistan, Peggy knows with a certainty that it is Tony, and she knows that his will be a long and hard road. But it will be a road, and that is more than she could have said before.)
*
It is 2011 and the Winter Soldier’s eyes are blank when he takes his orders.
They’re blank as he reports to his handlers, and they’re blank as he receives his next mission.
“We’ve stabilized the asset,” a man in a white coat says triumphantly one day as the Winter Soldier is sitting in a chair getting his arm worked on.
He wonders if he should be upset, but he can’t work up the energy.
*
It is 2012, and a Russian oil team discovers the Valkyrie.
The SHIELD team that shortly follows discovers a shield, and a man with it.
Frozen.
Cryogenically preserved.
In another country entirely, the Winter Soldier is being prepped to go back into the tank.
Fate has a sense of humor, and sometimes it’s a little twisted.
As warmth creeps back into Steven Rogers, James Buchanan Barnes slips into an ever deeper winter.