[ WWII AU ] a ghost story

[from_the_outside]

It's been almost two years since she's been home, and little by little, the grief has gotten easier to live with.

It hasn't gone away. But she's able to focus on her job, watch movies, chat with friends, sleep most nights. She still dreams about him, but the dreams are tinged with wistful longing and only sometimes does she wake up with tears on her cheeks. She can't have his picture out in this apartment, Kate's apartment, but it's safe in the mountain house, along with his last letter to her, and she has a scan on her phone to look at when the long day is over and she's in bed, the stars from the lamp he'd given her filling her dark room.

Steve has helped, more than she could ever explain, and she hopes she's helped him in return. Aside from a few deeply classified missions here and there, they haven't worked together all that much, but she still sees him almost every day. In the halls, she's undercover as his mild-mannered neighbor, Kate, but in her secure apartment they can talk over anything, everything.

And it works. Every day is a little easier. They lean on each other when they need to, and they spend hours remembering and reminiscing about Bucky, talking shop, chatting about how Steve's fitting into the future. It's nice. She still misses Bucky, an ache that never really goes away, but they can both breathe through it, work through it, live through it.

She's on her way up from the basement laundry machines when she hears a familiar step in the hall, and has to smile to herself – first her own, then Kate's sweeter, more open one. "Hey, neighbor."

Comments

[from_the_outside]

Sharon stares. "Where have we been?" she manages, finally, forcing words through her shock. "What the hell were you playing at? We thought you were dead!"

[marvel_npc]

"You were supposed to," Hill puts in, unruffled.

"I damn near was," Fury points out. "Lacerated spinal column, cracked sternum, shattered collarbone, perforated liver, and one hell of a headache."

"Don't forget your collapsed lung," another voice puts in. It's a doctor, Steve thinks, or some kind of white-coated medic anyway.

Fury grunts and tries to push himself up a little in the bed. "Oh, let's not forget that. Otherwise, I'm good."

"Good?" Nat manages, though her shock. "They cut you open! Your heart stopped!"

[from_the_outside]

"Tetrodotoxin B," Fury tells them. "Slows the pulse to one beat a minute. Banner developed it for stress. Didn't work so great for him, but we found a use for it."

Nat looks like she wants to punch something. Steve, already in a state of shock from everything that happened at the boatyard, shakes his head. "Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell us?"

Hill shrugs. "Any attempt on the director's life had to look successful."

Nick, annoyingly, looks as though this makes perfect sense. "Can't kill you if you're already dead," he points out. "Besides, I wasn't sure who to trust.

[marvel_npc]

"Smart of you not to trust STRIKE, it turns out," Steve says. Rumlow had been standing right there watching when Fury had 'died', as he recalls. "But you could have trusted me, Nick."

"I did," Fury points out. "That's why I came to your apartment. But you're a bad liar, Rogers. We figured burdening you with trying to hide it would be a problem."

[from_the_outside]

"Can we talk about the specifics later?" Sharon asks, before striding over to grab the medic by the arm.

"Hey. We've got multiple GSWs here. Could you maybe go ahead and get those bullets out of Captain America so he can stop bleeding internally?"

[marvel_npc]

"Would it have killed you people to mention we had wounded?" the medic snaps, dropping the scan he was reading.

"It's fine, I'm probably healing around them already," Steve tries to reassure him. "Check Sharon over first, she's been through something of an ordeal."

[from_the_outside]

"I didn't get shot," Sharon says, a little of her Aunt Peggy's gimlet glint in her eye. She stares down the medic.

"Priority is Captain Rogers. And by 'priority,' I mean check him out right the hell now."

[marvel_npc]

Sam purses his lips in a silent whistle and leans carefully back against the wall, hands in his pockets. Nat lets out a breath of laughter. "I'd listen to her," she calls."

"Everyone can get in line," the medic says, sharply. "You first, Captain. Welcome to my clinic. Sit here."

Steve sighs and sits on the stool the man drags out from under what's clearly a makeshift work table, and pulls off his shirt.

"Nick, how much do you know about what's going on?"

[from_the_outside]

"Hill filled me in on our shooter," Fury says, dry. "I kind of figured Pierce has gone bad for myself."

Sharon parks herself next to Steve, keeping an eye on the medic as he starts to check him over. "You said SHIELD was compromised," she says – to Nick, despite not looking at him. "By who? Or what?"

[marvel_npc]

"That's what I was trying to find out when I sent Romanoff to collect intel from the Lemurian Star," Fury says. "Someone was spoofing my security access and locking me out of things. I needed information that couldn't be tampered with. But I didn't get a chance to tear it apart. I was kind of hoping the two of you might have."

Steve hisses in a quiet breath and reaches for Sharon's hand. There's no way to soften this blow, but he can at least give her something to hold on to. "HYDRA," he says, succinctly. "SHIELD's been infiltrated by HYDRA. There's no doubt."

[from_the_outside]

Sharon stares at him, barely able to feel his fingers on her hand.

"No," she says, blank. She can feel the slow seep of horror rising like bile, but it's all very distant. "HYDRA? But they're, they're gone. You ended them. Decades ago."

[marvel_npc]

Behind them, Nat murmurs, "It was Operation Paperclip. That's where it started. After the war, SHIELD recruited scientists with strategic value. And among them--"

Steve cuts her off there. "Arnim Zola." The wave of bitterness that washes over him threatens to drown him, but he makes himself hold on. "He told us himself. He was still alive, sort of, his mind uploaded into some kind of computer bank in a compound at Lehigh. He wrote some kind of algorithm for Project Insight, something that's going to help HYDRA reach its ultimate goal somehow. HYDRA's been working to undermine SHIELD since the beginning."

[from_the_outside]

Zola.

She feels like she's going to be sick. Slowly, carefully, she sinks to her knees to look up into Steve's face, holding onto his hand. For a moment, it's like they're the only two people in the room. "Steve," she murmurs. "Zola?"

Zola, who had tortured and changed Bucky, whose trauma had lasted for months upon months – and now, apparently, decades upon decades.

[marvel_npc]

The look in his eyes is bleak, the set of his jaw tight. He knows what she's thinking; he's been thinking it too, ever since he had a second to start putting the pieces together, looking back at the horrific string of images the scientist had played for them.

"Zola," he confirms, low and steady. "It was him."

[from_the_outside]

Did Aunt Peggy know? Did she agree to this, for some impossible reason?

Her throat works, and she squeezes Steve's hands as everything she ever knew crumbles around her. She blinks, then looks over her shoulder at Hill and Fury. "Do we know their plan?"

[marvel_npc]

"I figured out it had something to do with Insight, but this is the first I've heard of any algorithm," Fury tells them. "We need to find out what it does."

"Sitwell might know something," Nat offers. Her gaze is shuttered, her expression thoughtful. "He was on that ship."

"Then we've got to talk to him," Steve says. "I can--"

"You're not going anywhere," the medic snaps.

"Besides," Sam puts in, "you'd be recognized in a flat second if you tried to get anywhere near him."

[from_the_outside]

"I'll talk to him."

Sharon's voice is grim. She squeezes Steve's fingers, then lets go and stands up, looking around at the others. "I was reporting to him at the Triskelion when they kicked off the manhunt. He'll want to meet with me if I say I have intel."

[marvel_npc]

"You can't do it alone," Steve argues. "You've already been - they might suspect, you can't--"

"She won't be alone," Sam interrupts, easily. "I'll fly backup."

"And I'll go along too," Nat says. Her smile is artificially bright, but there's something real about it all the same. "It's been a while since we got to play together."

[from_the_outside]

"Sounds good to me."

She looks back at Steve, and her expression gentles, despite the pressure she can feel building inside her chest. "See, Steve? It'll be fine."

[marvel_npc]

He searches her face. "You're sure?" he presses. She'll know exactly why he's asking.

[from_the_outside]

For a moment, she just breathes, very evenly. With Aunt Peggy so sick, there's no one on this planet who knows her better than Steve does. These days, she thinks he might be her best friend.

So he knows. And she knows, because all of this has hit both of them in their most vulnerable of spots. "I've had a shit day," she says, softly. "Let me go take it out on Sitwell."

[marvel_npc]

He searches her face again, and reluctantly has to concede. "Okay," he murmurs. "But be careful."

"Do I get a say in this?" Fury asks, eyebrows raised.

"No," Nat says, without missing a beat. "You're dead, remember?"

[from_the_outside]

"It's like we can still hear his voice," she tells Nat, and is gratified when Fury rolls his eye at her.

Sharon turns back to Steve, glancing pointedly at his injuries. "Just get better, okay?"

[marvel_npc]

"It'll be healed by the time you're back," he promises.

"You know I'm going to have to do surgery here, right?" the medic - or, well, maybe he's a surgeon, Steve realizes - points out. "Minor surgery, anyway."

Steve gives him a look over his own shoulder. "Don't worry her."

Nat swallows a laugh.

[from_the_outside]

"You have bullets in you," she points out.

Bullets that were put in him by his own best friend, who he – they – thought was dead. For a moment, the world sways around her, until she forces herself back into control. "I'm already worried."