Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The thud of Jason’s footsteps echoes the pounding of his heart, and the rasp of his breath through his throat and down to his chilled lungs is painful, even to his enhanced body. His life is flashing, if not before his eyes, then on a picture screen in the back of his brain.

He’s two--his first memory--and waving goodbye to his mother, who in his mind’s eye wears net stockings and dark eyeshadow and not much other than that.

He’s five, and his sister is scooping him up in her arms, giving him Big Hugs and lots of kisses, squeezing away the hurt of her own passage, whispering pointless apologies in his ear.

And eleven; all knock-knees and too-small clothes, cowering under the glares of the bigger boys as he tries to hide his gangly growth with hunched shoulders and a weak cough that soon becomes too real.

Twelve, moving from the now-comforting children’s nursery to the scary ranks of the boys’ bunks.

He’s fifteen, seventeen, eighteen--getting into fights he can’t finish, waiting on the steps of the orphanage for the Good Humor truck to pass, asking pretty Drew Tanaka to dance because every other boy is too skittish to trust her slanted features as they throw slurs at her like marbles on the sidewalk.

He’s eighteen and three-quarters, and his knees are shaking as he forces a smile onto his stiff face and promises the recruitment officer that he is, indeed, twenty-one; and his knees are still shaking as they turn him away--once, twice, three times. He wanted so badly to do something good--it’s all that he ever wanted.

Now that it’s too late, he wonders if it was even worth it. The blood, the heroism, the war and the sacrifices and every dying face? Was that worth going through all of the treatments and experiments and humiliation, and becoming a painted figurehead at the forefront of an organization he’s not sure he wants to represent?

Probably not, but he’s done it now. As he speeds towards not-quite-certain death, the past blurs into nothing but ghosts spinning fairy tales, and he grips his fancy new shield in one hand and his rosary in the other, and his thoughts become one pulsating, vibrating, staying word that beats a staccato rhythm in time with his feet and his heart.

Nico, Nico, Nico.

That’s what this is about. That’s what this has always been about.

It he can’t rescue Nico, then all of the standing in front of patriotic banners, and singing to little babies while big-bulbed cameras flashed black-and-white pictures, waving at political rallies and elections stateside, all of that supposed morale-boosting is completely bogus. It means nothing. This is what he was built for. This is what he should have been doing all along. Everything else has been nothing but a distraction.

As he breaks out of the narrow, winding tunnel and enters the hollow belly of the mountain, the thump-thump-thumping in his ears is replaced by a more familiar sound; the whirring of rotor blades. Before him, a helicopter sits in the tight space, creating a whirlwind that whips his hair around like a tornado.

The aircraft is already lifting off the ground--Jason draws another burst of speed from his reserves(feels like it might be the last), and hurtles towards the craft, launching himself onto the vertical, flat tail and holding on, slinging his shield over his shoulder for safekeeping.

His feet scrabble for purchase, finding it in a small, auxiliary wing just before the copter’s clunky wheels part from the stone ground for good. The aircraft wobbles slightly as the pilot hurries to correct the weight imbalance, and turns in a semi-circle like a confused dog before beelining for the mouth of the cave. It shoots out of the side of the mountain before Jason can do much more than dig the reinforced pads of his gloves into the fabric covering the tail.

The weather hits him first, as they hurtle away from Mt. Kamen and towards the Arctic Sea--their altitude isn’t the highest he’s ever been at, even unprotected, but the wind that bites at his face is more severe than his days roaming through Siberia, hunting down Hydra bases. Ice chips slice into his skin, whipped around in the vaporous clouds that hang over the Urals like the world’s coldest blanket, and the blood freezes in the small cuts before it has a chance to clot. His hearing is nothing but a useless roar, and he can barely keep his eyes open.

Grappling his way into the helicopter is possibly the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, and it feels like years before his numb fingers catch on a raised steel panel. He digs the fingerpads of his gloves into the groove, using one hand to hold on to the copter while the other pulls uselessly at the door. He’s soaked to the skin, his suit doing little, if anything, to counteract the gale that engulfs him and the chopper in a world of wet, freezing grayness.

The door gives out after an eternity and flies open, immediately yanked from his grip by the winds that slam it against the far side of the helicopter. Jason can’t see inside from this angle; but, at this point, it doesn’t matter. He has to get inside before his veins ice over and he dies from the thinning oxygen.

He inches along the slick side of the craft, one boot remaining firmly--as firmly as it can be--placed on the navigation wing of the heli until both of his hands have a strong grip on either side of the door. He kicks off from the steel side, legs flying into the air for a stomach-lurching second before he manages to haul himself into the body, thanking God the entire time for super-soldier-serums and the laws of kinetic motion and, of course, good ole’ fashioned grit.

After the blinding brightness outside, it takes Jason’s eyes some time to get used to the gloomy interior. He braces himself in the doorframe, the wind biting at his back, and blinks rapidly, hoping to accelerate the adjustment. The baby suns in his vision recede slowly, giving him the scene in patches.

There’s Nico, seated behind the pilot’s chair with his hands tied. A cloth gag is bound tightly around his narrow face, and he’s still in his tattered combat uniform, the grayish green fabric nearly bleached of color. His skin is ashen, its healthy olive complexion sickly, with eggplant-purple circles lurking under his nearly black eyes. His eyebrows are raised.

Jason knows that look--hell, he’s caused that look before. It’s the face that Nico makes just before everything goes to pot; a sort of last-ditch, run-you-chucklewit kind of expression.

Then there’s the small matter of the bomb nestled in the very small space between Nico and where Jason is standing precariously at the very threshold of the helipit. There’s no mistaking it--he’s seen enough of these babies to know, even without the helpfully printed word German word on the side of its casing: BRISANT. Explosive. Jason takes a moment to appreciate the utter uselessness of a labeled bomb. Then he yanks his attention back to the situation.

Nico’s jerking his head back and forth, between Jason and the door, eyes widening to the point where he doesn’t look human anymore, just like a scared, trapped animal. But what does he expect Jason to do? Jump back out?

Jason, therefore, ignores him and rushes forwards. The pilot, finally aware of his presence, is yelling at him in German, which Jason is too distracted to properly understand. The gist of it is “get out of my helicopter” which, again, isn’t an option.

Jason removes the gag from Nico’s mouth, and the first thing out of his old friend’s lips is a string of Italian curses.

“You’re welcome,” Jason tells him. “It was nothing, just a short jog through an enemy war base and a ride on the outside of a helicopter in a snowstorm.”

“You idiot,” Nico hisses in English. “You shouldn’t have come after me!”

“Because you’re doing so well on your own,” Jason deadpans. “C’mon, buddy, I have this one. Just admit it.”

Nico scowls, massaging his wrists. “You think you’re so smart? This is a trap, chucklewit.”

A trap? Jason casts his mind back, tries to remember if the possibility of a trap crossed his mind. His thought process goes: Nico, Hydra base, helicopter, Nico. Nope, no mention of a trap. He supposes it might have been good for him to consider that--but he would have come anyway. He would have come under any circumstance.

“So, what? The bomb’s about to blow?” Jason asks. “Or the pilot is the Baron in disguise?” He pauses. “You’re not evil, are you?”

“Of course I’m not evil, you idiot,” Nico hisses, getting to his feet. “It’s--”

His words are cut off by the sudden motion of the pilot, who apparently just decided that he’d had enough of enemies bickering while he was trying to fly. He points a silver-barreled gun at Nico’s chest and says, in guttural German, “Both of you sit down. Now.”

The helicopter lurches violently.

Jason races forwards and tackles the man, moving too quickly for any ordinary human to react. His hands are around the man’s throat; his hands are breaking the man’s neck. The body slumps to the floor.

“That solves the problem,” Jason says, sliding into the pilot’s chair. “Now, Nico, tell me more about this trap. Specifically, when does the ‘trap’ part come into play?”

He waits for a reply, and gets none.

“Nico--” he begins, twisting around to see what’s got his best friend’s tongue. He doesn’t like the answer.

Behind him, the Skull himself holds Nico close, almost like a lover but horribly not, his clawed red hands at Nico’s throat. Next to them, the decoy bomb lies open and empty.

Bad guy hiding inside a bomb. Who would have thought?

Jason is out of his chair in a minute, not caring that the motion once more makes the copter lurch, and spin in graceless circles to lower and lower altitudes, propellers keeping it just aloft enough to still be wrenched around by the wind.

The Skull shoves Nico aside without a second thought as Jason barrels into him, attempting to snap his neck like the pilot’s. The technique doesn’t work on a being as horribly mutated as the Skull; the German does nothing but laugh maniacally, twisting out of Jason’s grip like a snake. He gets in a good punch as he does, and Jason stumbles back, his jaw stinging.

He swings at the Skull, misses, swings again, and connects. He can hear Nico panting behind him; the familiar words of the Hail Mary. The sound distracts him, and the Skull knocks him to the floor. The helicopter lists to that side.

“It’s over!” Jason shouts, wrestling with the enemy. “My squad is eliminating the last Hydra base as we speak! The war is over, bastard! There’s no reason to fight any longer.”

He throws the Skull off him, pinning him to the floor. He grapples for the man’s neck--no matter how mangled a body, it still needs oxygen--and hears a thud behind him. He glances over his shoulder to see Nico, pressed flat against the other side of the copter. The expression on his oldest friend’s face can’t be described as fear--it’s terrified. Nico is terrified.

Of Jason.

“You aren’t human,” Nico says in Italian. “What have they done to you?”

“Ihnen dasselbe,” the Skull hisses beneath Jason’s hands, syllables distorted to almost beyond Jason’s comprehension.

He takes advantage of the captain’s distraction and pushes him over, springing up and tackling Nico--Jason’s brain translates the words--and Nico’s eyes, his dark, dark eyes, fix onto Jason’s, locking together like two puzzle pieces created to fit together--and then both of them, the Skull and Nico, have disappeared, out into the whirling, icy whiteness with little more than a whip as their bodies are taken by the raging wind.

Jason’s scream isn’t words--it’s a roar, straight from the bottom of his lungs, infused with every memory and feeling, every thought and realization and “what’s eating you, bud?”, and when it finally morphs into something close to a word, it sounds like Nico, because, after all, that’s what this whole ordeal has been about.

That’s what this has always been about. Without Nico, none of it means anything. There’s no reason to fight.

Same to you.

Chapter Text

“This is Grace,” Jason says, fumbling to push the tiny button on the device lodged uncomfortably in his ear. Despite nearly two years of working as an agent of SHIELD, he’s yet to become used to the wacky technology they insist on using. Sure, a hands-free walkie-talkie sounds like a miracle--but in practice, he gets earaches and headaches and has a hard time dislodging the buildup of earwax the device causes. He misses the old days, where you didn’t have to talk to your superiors except by letter or--if you were extremely unlucky--radio. And even then, you went through an operator who censored one out of every three of your words.

Now he has SHIELD director Reyna A-Ramirez Arellano (known behind her back as Ra-Ra) barking orders straight into his ear, undermining his clearly better judgment on the most basic of missions, and deputy director Hazel Levesque making pointed remarks about his love life in the middle of a firefight, and sometimes--when he’s extremely lucky--wise guy Iron Man, giving him an endless supply of snark and bad advice. Which both of them would be better people without.

“Grace,” Levesque acknowledges him now, more subdued than usual. Jason doesn’t blame her--today is the anniversary of Agent Zhang’s death. They’re all more subdued than usual. “Orders are yellow. Proceed with caution.”

Next to him, Agent McLean rolls her eyes and clicks the safety back on her hand gun. She presses the comm in her ear, joining the conversation. “What’s going to attack us? These terrifying shipping crates?” She kicks one to prove her point, the toe of her reinforced steel boot bouncing harmlessly off of the wood planks.

Piper, Jason has learned, expresses her sadness with hostility and a lumberjack portion of sarcasm. She also hates being told to be careful.

“Is that back talk, Widow?” Levesque asks. Jason used to think she was easygoing; now he knows that she just chooses to hide her steel until it’s needed.

“No,” Piper says, scowling. She isn’t fond of her codename.

“Everything’s quiet on our front,” Jason interjects. He scans the warehouse, making sure his words are true. All he sees are crates, identical to the one Piper kicked, and more crates. At the back of the warehouse is a large folding door, the kind installed in the hanger back at base, obscured with--surprise, surprise--even more crates.

Jason remembers being amazed that a door could retract into a ceiling.

Nico would have found that neat, too.

He shakes the thought away--Nico’s been popping up in his head too often as of late--and half-turns on his heel, looking back the way they came. Still nothing. This is an empty warehouse.

He had his butt dragged out of bed at three in the morning to get dressed up in a pretty spandex suit and skulk around an empty warehouse.

“There’s nothing here,” he says, frustrated and doing his level best to not show it.

“All right, Levesque, start talking,” Piper orders, as Jason begins to poke around the crates in the hopes that his declaration will be proven wrong. His existence is basically meaningless without a civilian to rescue or a bomb to diffuse. He might as well take a job as a burger-flipper down at the nearest joint--er, restaurant.

Stupid, how cheap places are called restaurants now while you take your gal out for a fancy date at a bar. Not for the first time, Jason thinks that the world has turned itself ass-backwards while he slept. Percy would say that he just wasn’t with the times, but that never makes Jason feel better.

Even Piper, easily his closest friend, has no idea what he goes through, waking up every morning expecting to be one place before realizing that he’s in another; an alien and sometimes frightening world that simultaneously rejects and needs him. He doesn’t mind when there’s a crisis at hand, but times like now--when it’s been two years since the last major disaster and he’s chomping at the bit for even a simple so-called retcon like this--he feels burned out. Even his friends have taken to calling him Gramps, like he’s a geezer who’s time is up.

Jason pulls himself out of his sulk in time to hear Piper say, alarmed, “Director Ramirez is what?!”

The tone of her voice alerts him, and he quickly jumps back onto the line. “Say that again, Agent Levesque?” he requests.

“I said,” Levesque repeats, with a touch of asperity, “Executive Director Ramirez is officially missing, as of ten seconds ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” Piper asks angrily, spinning on her heel and dashing out of the warehouse. Jason sprints after her, too used to her abrupt exits to complain.
“Details,” he says briefly, aware of how crucial time can be in a--dare he call it this?--crisis situation.

He should probably be more worried about the director, but the adrenaline is freely flowing through his veins now, and he’s excited at the prospect of becoming useful again. Please let something exciting happen, he begs internally. Please.

“She left SHIELD three hours ago, shortly before you and Piper were deployed,” Hazel reports. “She had mentioned needing some rest, so none of us thought it was odd when she missed the daily noontime board meeting.”

Jason has contemplated missing the daily noontime board meeting before--unfortunately, he isn’t the director of an international intelligence and defense agency; he can get away with murder, but not shirking bureaucracy.

“Then what?” Piper demands, already halfway to their jet. The pilot, no doubt listening to the conversation through his own headset, has already started the engine.

“Then Agent Castellan attempted to contact her at her home address--which he has clearance to do,” Levesque adds pointedly, no doubt referencing the one nominal time during a national emergency that Jason broke down the door of Reyna’s Brooklyn apartment to warn her that her life was in danger. After the fiasco was over, the SHIELD board of administrators--collectively called the Directorate-- actually had the nerve to charge him with insubordination.

“Long story short, he found her apartment ransacked and a few mortally injured hostiles on the scene,” she goes on now, after a short pause in which Jason acknowledged his stupidity in not letting the director die horribly in a government coup. “She was officially declared missing less than ten seconds before I told you.”

“You still should have told us right away,” Piper gripes, boarding the jet, Jason on her heels.

“I’m sorry,” Hazel replies sweetly. “I was too busy listening to you whine about boredom.”

Piper scowls.

“You’re actually closer to New York than we are,” Hazel says. “Agent Nakamura will take you there now. Investigate as closely as you can, but don’t touch anything.”

Another barb at Jason--just because he once soiled a tiny, practically unnoticeable piece of DNA evidence that she needed to catch a serial killer. How was he supposed to know that people can use hairbrushes to find patterns of atoms that match other patterns of atoms unique to other people? In his day, it was all tracking dogs and legwork. “Report your findings back at 0700.”

Mercifully, she turns off the communication link after this edict, leaving Jason and Piper to ride to New York in silence.

“It’s probably a training exercise,” Piper says, but she doesn’t sound convinced. She slides into a seat by the nearest window.

“I’m sure,” Jason replies. He pats her shoulder reassuringly. “Everything is going to be fine, Piper. I promise.”

Piper stares at his hand until he removes it and retreats. Then she sighs, giving him the kind of look she usually reserves for the guys in her combat class when they’ve done something particularly unfortunate.

“Cap--Jason--can we talk?” she asks. She pushes a button on the arm of her chair, and a privacy panel slides up between the bay and the cockpit.

“Okay,” Jason says, somewhat warily, and sits down across from her. Piper looks serious. End-of-the-world serious, and he gets the feeling that it has nothing to do with Ramirez.

“It’s just that--” she’s twisting her hands together, wringing them, really, and it’s making him nervous. She doesn’t usually fidget. “--sometimes I’ve been getting these . . . um, vibes off of you . . . and I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea or anything . . .”

“Wrong idea about what?” Good Lord, he thinks. What has he done now? He can’t count the number of times his “antiquated” manners have offended people, rather than charmed them; Piper’s usually the one to graciously break the news that it’s no longer polite to call someone a Chink.

“Us,” she says significantly and then, in case he didn’t catch her drift, “You and me. Our relationship.”

Uh-oh.

Just uh-oh.

“Go on,” he says cautiously, hoping that he isn’t plunging into a metaphorical minefield.

“I just--I wanted to be clear,” Piper explains. “So that, later on the line, our partnership isn’t . . . compromised.”

“Okay.” He’s nodding like a moron, sincerely hoping that this conversation isn’t taking the direction he thinks it is. Because he really doesn’t want to have to explain to Piper that--

“I’m taken,” she blurts out, and winces. “Rats. That came out presumptuous. Like, super-presumptuous. I sounded like Percy just then. I wasn’t trying to. I just didn’t want you thinking that I was on the market. God. That was worse. I should stop talking now.”

“No, no,” Jason hastens to reassure her, as a wave of relief crashes over him. “I didn’t realize I was . . . what did you say? Giving out vibes?” He hadn’t meant to; and luckily, because it’s Piper, he doesn’t have to go into a whole explanation of why he wasn’t gunning for her, how he felt about the experience, what he was thinking from the moment he met her to now--Piper doesn’t work that way. Thankfully.

Piper breaks into a graceful smile. “Thanks. I just didn’t want--I mean, I wasn’t assuming that you--but I always like to cover my bases--”

“I know,” Jason cuts in, giving her a smile in return. “That’s just how you are.” And he’s very, very fortunate that’s how she is. “For the record, I think he’s a lucky son-of-a-gun.”

Which is clearly the wrong thing to say. He loses his momentary relief at once as her face darkens and she begins twisting her hands together again.

“I really didn’t want to have this conversation,” Piper admits. “But, in light of--of everything--friends shouldn’t keep secrets. So just, um, sit on your hands and try not to be too 1940s right now.” She takes a beat, and he wonders if she’s waiting for him to actually sit on his hands. Then she goes on. “You know, Jase, in this decade it isn’t a crime for people to be . . . different.”

“It isn’t a crime in my decade, either,” Jason says indignantly. “Our ancestors fought a war for equality--and so did I. I’m not racist, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“Not that kind of different,” Piper tells him. “I mean . . . about feelings and . . . about, uh--well, having feelings for another girl. Or guy.”

Jason cocks his head. “It isn’t a crime to have feelings, either.” This is it, he thinks. This is the part where she’s talking about one thing and he thinks it means another, but for the life of him he can’t see what she’s getting at.

Piper rolls her eyes, seeing his confusion, and mercifully takes pity on him. “God, you’re dense. I’m trying to tell you that I’m not seeing a guy, Grace. I’m seeing a girl. Like, romantically. I’m in love with her. Probably.”

At first, Jason is nonplussed. It takes longer than usual for the words to make sense in his brain, as if his neurons are being forced into a route they aren’t familiar with. He gapes at her, finally grasping the feeling behind the expression being floored. It isn’t that he’s entirely unused to the concept, more that he’s unused to it being applied to anything in his life.

“You’re queer?” The word comes out wrong, brings up memories of the boys who would mock him and Nico, and snippets of newspaper stories when he was a child about scandalous nightclubs in Chicago and, when he was older, horrific reports of German persecution. It doesn’t seem to fit when brought into the context of the current conversation, not when Piper is so obviously . . . feminine.

She winces now, a pained expression on her face. “I would be . . . careful . . . when you use that term,” she says. “Not everyone is cool with it. Although some people like it--it’s just complicated, okay? But because it’s you . . .”

Jason nods automatically, filing the info into the section of his mind used to remember What Not To Say. He should probably start keeping a physical list somewhere, right next to the collection of movies that Percy claims he has to see before he dies. He ignores the insinuation that he has no tact.

“You aren’t . . . scandalized?” Piper asks tentatively.

“It’s a little,” he searches for the right word this time, a word that she wouldn’t take the wrong way. “Nuts.”

No--that isn’t the right one. She winces again.

“Um, strange,” he corrects himself. “It’s . . . strange. To me, I mean, but I guess that’s my culture. Things like that aren’t exactly . . .” Talked about. Told to anyone. Accepted by the general public. “Common,” he settles for, folding his hands self-consciously in his lap.

Piper looks as uncomfortable as he feels. They really don’t do this chatting-about-feelings-and-personal-lives thing, so it’s more the conversation that feels nuts, rather than the topic. “Okay. Well. I’m really glad that you aren’t, um, judgy about it.”

He wrinkles his nose. He can’t say he’s mad crazy about the idea, but she has to know him better than that by now--he doesn’t like Percy’s ceaseless bragging, either, but he still puts up with it. “You’re my partner. My--hell, the closest thing I have to family. You should know I don’t work that way.”

“Yes, well,” Piper fidgets with her gun, a sure sign that she wants to venture back into non-personal territory. “I just know that religion is extremely important to you--I see you carrying around that rosary--” she breaks off, and shrugs. “Churches don’t have a habit of being kind to us.”

Jason’s hand automatically goes to the beads around his neck, under his hardened suit. Cue reminder of Nico. “I don’t carry this because I’m religious,” he says hurriedly. “I mean, I am, but . . a friend gave it to me. From before.” He doesn’t need to elaborate any more--he’s pretty sure that his expression is stone cold.

Piper’s face crumples into something close to remorse. “Oh--Jason, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Because he hasn’t told anyone. Because he doesn’t want to tell anyone, but he’s screwed up now, so he might as well. Briefly. “We grew up together, that’s all. I was there when he died.” He says the words without feeling, as if that might keep him from thinking of Nico. It doesn’t.

“I’m sorry,” Piper repeats. “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.” She twines her fingers around her knees, her flecked eyes studying him carefully. He doesn’t talk much about before, doesn’t share about his family, friends, or home; but neither does she. She’s the person he’s closest to in the world, but he doesn’t know where she lives. He didn’t even know she was seeing anyone, let alone another woman.

He feels a stab of loneliness, of missing true closeness; the kind that results after a lifetime of being with someone. He misses Nico, and the feeling is as tangible as the beads pressing against his skin.

“When I was ten,” he begins, and clears the rasp out of his throat before it betrays him. “When I was ten, the Great Depression hit. They didn’t call it a Depression at first--I barely remember my mother and sister talking about it, laughing it off like it was just a dry spell that would pass. But it stayed, and by the time I was in sixth grade, it was a Depression.

“Obviously there wasn’t a lot of money. Not for the workers, not for the unemployed, and not for some orphanage south of Bronx. That’s where I was by then--an orphanage.”

Piper mercifully doesn’t ask what happened to the mother and sister he just mentioned--it’s not relevant to the story, anyway. It’s been a long time since Jason thought of those women as family.

“It was in a pretty bad-off neighborhood; dirt poor, full up with mill workers and that sort. And there was this kid, he--” Jason stops. He doesn’t know how to get past this part, how to fully capture the moment he met Nico in just a few sentences that Piper will understand. “He was my brother,” he says finally. “In all the ways it counted, he was my brother.”

Nico hadn’t been big, but he was scrappy. He knew how to end the fights that Jason started; he’d always had Jason’s back, right up until they enlisted. Jason had safely lived in his friend’s shadow for years.

And he’d hated it.

Piper reaches across the center aisle, her hand outstretched in comfort. After a moment, Jason takes it.

“I can’t imagine losing my best friend,” she tells him. “And I’m sorry that you had to.”

The jet touches down in Central Park before they can get too maudlin, and Jason gratefully gets to his feet. He doesn’t want to think about Nico any longer--he just wants to see some action.

Piper shares the sentiment, ducking out of the jet and landing on the soft lawn. She turns to wait for him, her hands propped on her hips. She doesn’t mention the moment they just had, but her expression is softer than usual.

“Only SHIELD could get away with this,” Jason speculates as he exits the craft, and leaps down to stride confidently away from the jet, as if he’s just parked his Jeep there instead of a 4,000ft long piece of metal and plastic that does not blend in with the scenery.

They head into Brooklyn on foot, Jason leading Piper easily through his old territory. He used to get turned around in New York, still familiarizing himself with the changes made since 1939, but that was two years ago, and now he’s back to knowing the place like the back of his own hand. It helps that some things--the smell of hot dogs, the call of impatient residents, the crush and sweaty smell of the subway system--haven’t changed.

It takes them under twenty minutes to reach Director Ramirez’s apartment, probably because Jason takes less than conventional routes(the rooftop jumps being Piper’s least favorite) to avoid the crowds, which only get worse as the SHIELD jet draws more and more attention. He’s pretty sure they’re going to make the nightly news if Levesque doesn’t pull some strings, but he’s equally sure that she will pull those strings, because this is SHIELD and secrecy is its lifeblood.

Reyna lives on the top floor of a white stone apartment complex, where Jason has no doubt she pays a crazy amount of money for a very small space. The view is fantastic, but still. He’d take a cheap basement any day. Piper opens the door with a complex key code, and warns him not to tell Ramirez that she cracked it. Since Jason is still getting used to the idea of glorified calculators keeping things closed, he has no problem agreeing.

The main room is ransacked, Reyna’s white furniture cast about like a giant’s discarded playthings. There are a few bodies. It’s all very textbook; nothing interesting or spectacularly supernatural, like the time that an ancient god landed in Nevada and wreaked havoc in Area 51. Now that was a good weekend.

Jason leaves Piper behind and creeps down the narrow hallway, glancing into the empty bathroom before slowly advancing into the director’s bedroom. He raises his shield on instinct, though there’s no danger inside. Clearly, the conflict didn’t touch the place--the black-sheeted bed is neatly made, the half-open closet door revealing a clean, sparse rack of clothes that has no room for anyone to hide. A jacket lies over the foot of the bed, and there’s a brassiere sticking out from under Reyna’s pillow.

Embarrassed, Jason quickly backs out and turns around. “All clear,” he calls to Piper.

“Ditto,” she responds, using her gun to nudge over a fallen man under the coffee table. “These suckers are all dead. Ra-Ra obviously kicked up a fuss.”

Jason chuckles. He pities any enemy who gets on the wrong side of the Director. She didn’t get to where she is by asking people politely to leave her alone.

He circles the room slowly, letting his passably-keen observation skills take over. He usually trusts Piper more with these kinds of things, but he figures another pair of eyes can’t hurt. Plus, he needs to get his head out of the past; he isn’t living there anymore.

“There isn’t much,” he observes. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear these guys dropped where they were, and all the furniture was pushed around afterwards for effect.
Piper, now crouched next to a man just inside the door, frowns. “Not to be disgusting, but there should be more blood. And, like, wounds. I’m no expert, but . . .” She uses her gun again, this time to nudge the man’s arm away from his throat. “These bruises are sort of funny.”

“Funny how?” Jason comes to stand beside her, squinting down at the body. Bruises look like bruises to him.

“Well, let’s put it this way. When you punch a guy alive, his eye turns red, then purple, then black--if it’s really bad--then yellows out before fading to a lovely puce. When you punch a guy dead,” she gestures to the supposed strangle marks on the man’s neck, “his blood vessels react more slowly. Y’know, since his heart isn’t beating anymore and all. If he was really killed by these wounds, then they should be well on their way to black--but they aren’t. They’re barely out of the red stage, as if administered after he died.”

“You know a lot about this,” Jason says, a little nervously.

Piper shrugs. “I see lots of bruises. I get lots of bruises. I pick things up.”

“So he wasn’t strangled. What does that mean?” His job on these types of missions is to ask questions. Lots and lots of questions--which is fine, because he usually has lots of questions. His strengths lie more in the area of . . . well, strength.

“It means,” Piper straightens up, heading for the door as she speaks, “we need to get a team in here and figure out when, exactly, these men died. Because I’m fairly sure it wasn’t here, and it wasn’t this morning.” She ushers Jason out ahead of her.

He twists his head to ask her, “The bodies were planted? Why would someone do that?”

Piper just shrugs, lips tightly sealed. He reads the silence in her face, and faces forwards. If Piper has any theories, she’ll tell him when she’s ready. For now, they’d better report back to HQ before Hazel declares them missing as well.

Chapter Text

His memories start here: with the cold. The freezing, numbing, burning, biting cold that turns his flesh black and deadens his nerves. His sluggish brain asks him why he’s still alive, but the only answer is the silent scream of pain locked behind his sealed lips.

His vision goes in and out of focus. He hears clinical voices tonelessly discuss his injuries, sees white-masked doctors hover over him, shining lights and asking questions he’s too cold to answer. He hears a high-pitched whizz, and something like pain touches his arm to the very bone, but it’s hardly noticeable on top of the agony he’s already in.

These are his first weeks of life. Sometimes he’s conscious; sometimes he finds in hazy dreamscapes what he grasps for in real life. The dreams slip away from him the moment he wakes up, replaced by pain. So much pain. He doesn’t remember anything else. He doesn’t know anything else.

Slowly, he becomes more aware. He recognizes the eyes of the doctors who treat him. He identifies the color of his bedsheets and walls. In his head, he repeats back the language they speak to him in and compares it with his own, differentiating between the two. He categorizes--Italian, German, English.

Something’s missing. He’s not quite conscious of it yet.

He learns. He learns the whole world over again, how it works, why it works; it’s explained to him in detail by a man with pale hair.

“And what about me?” he asks, in the raspy language they taught him. “How do I work?”

The man smiles, and gleefully tells him his place.

Chapter Text

Facing the Directorate, Jason feels like he’s sitting outside of the principal’s office again, kicking his too-small shoes against the wooden leg of the worn bench, waiting for the inevitable rebukes. There are six pairs of eyes trained on him, and only one of them is even close to friendly.

Agent Bryce, who heads up the circle, speaks first. “Captain America, please step forwards.”

Jason still hates being called that.

He moves closer, staring straight into Bryce’s watery blue eyes. To the man’s left, the head of STRIKE, Leo Valdez, winks and propels a small whirligig into motion, apparently constructed from the contents of his numerous pockets.

“Report your findings,” Bryce says shortly, ignoring this. Although Jason’s never been able to put a finger on it, he’s always felt as though the senior agent doesn’t approve of him.

He squares his shoulders, like he’s back doing recitation in elementary school, and wishes he’d had time to change into something less red, white, and blue before meeting with the stone-faced Directorate. “Well, we headed into Brooklyn, to the Director’s apartment. The door was, uh, open, so Agent McLean and I took a gander inside--”

As he speaks, summarizing the events as concisely as possible, he senses Piper shifting behind him; fidgeting with her sleeves, going from foot to foot, scratching her elbow. Piper isn’t good with debriefings. When he brings up her comments on the dead bodies, both Agent Bryce and Levesque snap their gazes to her, making her even more restless.

Nobody interrupts him, however, until he winds down, adding an, “And then we came here,” as an afterthought.

“That’s everything?” Agent Levesque prompts.

He nods.

“No sign of a struggle--no dents in the walls, scrapes or tears in the furniture?” Valdez asks, disproving Jason’s notion that he wasn’t listening.

“The furniture was helter skelter, like you’d think, but otherwise no,” Jason replies. “It was as though the Director walked out on her own accord, and someone came back later and set up to look as though she’d been abducted.”

“That’s sufficient,” Agent Bryce says, dismissing him with a gesture.

“But--” Dr. Solace, head of the medical team, begins.

“We have the information we need,” Bryce interrupts him smoothly.

“At least let me examine the cadavers, in that case,” Solace says, grimacing. Jason hovers between the Directorate and Piper, halfway to the door. He can’t figure out if he has permission to leave or not.

“I don’t think that’s necessary. The Captain and the Widow both said there was nothing more they could determine from the scene.”

“They aren’t trained doctors!” Solace exclaims.

“Captain, you’re free to go,” Levesque cuts in, motioning for him to leave. “Widow, too.”

Relieved, Jason doesn’t hesitate to split. He isn’t eager to see the carnage to come, not with the notoriously temperamental Bryce squaring off against stubborn Dr. Solace.

He catches up with Piper a little ways down the hall, falling easily into step with her. “Y’know, I still can’t believe that seven people run SHIELD,” he says, by way of a conversation opener. “It’s so large.”

“Mm-hmm.” Piper shoots him a doubtful look. “They’re just the second-in-commands. You do know that.” It’s not a question--this is all material they covered on his first day.

Jason gives her what he hopes is a broad, convincing smile. “Just making chit-chat.”

“Since when?” She turns into the mess hall. “You hate chit-chat.”

True. He always manages to stumble over his own tongue. “Okay, you caught me. What’s the dope on Director Ramirez? Don’t think I don’t know you know something.” He frowns at the confusing sentence; it made better sense in his head.

Piper sighs, picking up a tray of rations from one side of the mess hall. Jason monkeys her actions, though the last thing his mind is on is eating. “I don’t know anything. It’s just a feeling. I’m not even sure it’s a correct feeling,” she tells him.

“If it’s yours, then it probably is,” he presses, following her to an empty table and sitting across from her. “You said yourself, you’ve done this a lot. You have the experience.”

Piper picks at her meal, frowning again. “Alright. Well . . . do you think there would be a reason for Director Ramirez to fake her own kidnapping?”

He lowers his fork, too surprised to bring it to his mouth. “What kind of reason?”

“I don’t know. I told you it was nothing.” She stirs her oatmeal lethargically. “This just reeks of something she would do.”

“I--” he stalls.

Piper waves her hand at him. “Forget it. The Directorate will figure it out. It’s not our job to be detectives, right?”

“Um, right,” he says uncertainly, and they change the subject to American Idol.

After breakfast, Jason excuses himself to the room they keep for him on the fifth floor. Piper’s theory runs around in his head like an overexcited hamster; he can’t help but keep coming back to the idea that this is more than a straightforwards kidnapping.

It’s the Director, of course, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t expect it to be cut-and-dry. Reyna excels at living, working, and creating the gray areas she loves to prattle on about.

He goes back to bed, exhausted from his early start and the weight of the unanswered questions. Piper’s right--he’s just going to have to take SHIELD’s lead on this one, because he hasn’t got a clue.

He dreams, of course--he always dreams. He’s used to the nightmares about falling, the remembered cold making him shiver himself awake without fail; he’s used to the paralyzation and the panic and the confusing, dizzying swirl of black water. He’s dreamed it so many times, it’s impossible to completely leave behind the memory of his death, so that to this day it feels as though the nightmare that began that day on the helicopter never really stopped.

This nightmare features him and Nico, cruising out over the Arctic Sea. There’s no Skull this time, no dead pilot, no screeching wind or staticky, broken radio. Just two boys completely out of their pay grade.

“Friends shouldn’t keep secrets. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Piper’s words, in Nico’s voice. Jason heard somewhere that the memory of a sound is the first thing to go; but here, right now, the sound of Nico’s voice is clear and perfect and sweet.

“It’s not a crime to be different.”

I know that, Jason wants to say, but they’re falling, for Pete’s sake, falling through the air and now is not the time to have this conversation because they never had this conversation, no matter how much Jason thought about it.

“We have to go,” he says, rising to his feet, but Nico’s glued to his rosary beads and not listening.

“We have to go,” Jason repeats, more insistently, yanking on Nico’s arm. If they can just make it to the door of the helicopter, he thinks, they’ll be safe. There’s a SHIELD jet waiting outside to pick them up. This is reasonable to his dreaming mind, because Jason lives in a world now where SHIELD, like Big Brother, is always watching to keep him safe. SHIELD won’t let him plunge to another icy sleep. He’s too valuable an asset.

“We’re going to die.”

Nico doesn’t even look up from his beads as he says it, his fingers moving slowly over each one. He’s done with his Hail Marys, moving on to his assent of faith, but his lips, which somehow seem more clearly defined than the rest of his face, just mouth the words.

Jason pulls frantically at his friend, feeling the helicopter’s rotors stop spinning. NO! he wants to scream. I don’t want it like this! I don’t want to die.

Nico’s wrists are bony-thin, the way they were before he enlisted in the army and the army stole him from Jason and stole Jason from humanity, but his hands are the certain hands that Jason remembers, clamping around his arms with inarguable strength.

“It’s okay.”

Jason’s panic fades to a faint pulse in the back of his mind, the urgency of the situation stripped away. It’s just a dream, he thinks distantly. Just a silly dream, nothing to be alarmed about.

“It’s not a crime to feel different.”

Nico pushes him backwards, and one of them stumbles, and Jason is suddenly on his back, staring up at the smooth gray metal of the ceiling. Are the tops of helicopters called ceilings? And then Nico’s body presses into his, hot and close and oh.

Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?

The heat floods from Nico’s body to Jason’s in one electric jolt, and he stretches his head upwards to accept the other boy’s kiss with abandon. Nico’s hands travel down his sides, across his stomach, resting flat on his abdomen as Jason strains up, rolling his hips under the restraint. He wants more--the wanting opens up a gaping pit in his stomach, a hungry and fiery urge that is impossible to control, and Nico dances his tongue over Jason’s lips with urgency, sucking his mouth open, one of his hands pressing too hard into the back of Jason’s neck.

“We’re going to die.”

Nico says it, but he doesn’t really say it because he’s still kissing Jason, and what does dying matter? Jason is so happy, he can’t remember being happy like this before, and all he can think of is how badly he wishes it wasn’t a dream, and he prays, prays, prays he won’t--

--lunge awake, body throwing itself into a sitting position as adrenaline shoots itself into his bloodstream, spurred on by his mind’s wave of panic. His mouth is wide open with the memory of his scream still ringing in his ears; his heart thuds disturbingly quickly, feeling about to crash through his rib cage.

He almost darts out of bed to run, to run anywhere, to run anywhere so long as he can escape his own mind. Not being in his mind sounds appealing right now. He’s torn between horror and disbelief, as the uncomfortable tightness in his lower regions serves to remind him that yes, he did just have that kind of dream. About a man. About Nico.

It takes several long seconds before he’s anywhere close to sane again. The figurative pit of hissing snakes in his stomach tell him that he can’t put this off much longer, and in desperation he throws himself into denial as he stumbles to the bathroom to relieve himself and splash ice cold water on his sweating face.

What was that?

What on earth was that?

He stares at his reflection in the mirror, which looks haggard and less than amused. His blond hair sticks out in thirty different directions, and he’s still in his uniform. The red, white, and blue shield on his chest looks like it’s mocking him, reminding him that he’s supposed to represent the American Dream, or something monkey-faced like that. Good soldiers don’t wake up, sweaty and bothered and hard, after dreaming about their old--male--friends.

Jason’s a lot of things, but he was never a good soldier. Nico used to tell him he had too much heart and not enough head, and that was why he got into so much trouble.

He dries his face and leaves the bathroom, staring dispassionately at his unmade bed.

While other boys were chasing skirts and bragging about the automobiles they’d buy once they saved up enough money from their jobs mowing lawns or working at the drug store, Jason was drawing cartoons on the backs of can labels and dreaming of being the muscled, heroic soldiers he doodled. He was watching Nico cook in the kitchen of their matchbox apartment and carefully detailing their expenses in a red ledger; every free cent the both of them had went to Jason’s doctors and medications.

So he always felt like he had too much going on to become preoccupied with girls. He was happy enough with Nico, and the newspaper gig, and the moldy three-room that was the best two sixteen-year-old boys could swing. He’d entered the super-soldier program to be a hero, but it didn’t take long for him to realize that the most he wanted out of life was to do his duty and then retire home, living with Nico in Brooklyn until they both died. Gals hadn’t factored into the equation, except as a vague idea that maybe he’d have a wife in that distant future time.

But that doesn’t make him . . . that way, the way that Piper is. Because, surely, he would have been aware of it before now if he was queer.

Missing Nico is making him nuts, he decides. Being displaced in time and robbed of his closest family stirs up feelings of loneliness, which his subconscious mind misinterprets as longing. He never felt this way about Nico when they were together; he’s just projecting his desires onto the most convenient source.

Yes. That sounds passably reasonable. He might be able to convince himself, so long as he gets moving and stops thinking about Nico so damn much. Because Nico is gone, so it doesn’t really matter how Jason feels.

He thrusts his fingers through his hair, smoothing it down, and leaves his room. He’ll track down Piper and, maybe, tell her about the dream. Piper will know exactly what to tell him, and they’ll both get to feel warm and fuzzy about sharing feelings twice in less than twenty-four hours, and Jason will have an accomplice in rationalizing away some very incriminating circumstances, and then they can talk about the Director at length and if Jason is particularly lucky, something will go horribly wrong and they’ll end up fighting zombies in Antarctica again.

The hallways are a lot busier than they were earlier this morning, and he finds himself chanting “excuse me, pardon me” the entire trip to the elevator. Five years isn’t enough time to get used to a bulkier body, and he can’t count the number of instances he accidentally knocked over someone smaller just because he wasn’t paying attention.
Some intern stops him for an autograph, and he’s reminded strongly of Frank. He shakes the man’s hand and tells him to stay away from Asgardians.

Jason’s been impressed with the elevators in the Triskelion since his first day. Elevators in his time were small, cramped things that were operated by gloomy-faced men who reminded him of Charon, the ancient guide to the Underworld. They rattled and shook and sometimes seized up for no reason, and they always aggravated his asthma. But SHIELD’s elevators are made of glass, giving a beautiful view of the Potomac River to its passengers.

“Hold the door!” someone calls, and Jason starts, half-turning. It takes him too long to process the request, but Agent Leo Valdez catches the sensor before the doors can close fully anyway.

He slides in, and Jason sheepishly mutters, “Sorry.”

Valdez shrugs. “S’fine. What floor?”

“Ground level.”

The agent pushes a few buttons, and the doors close again. Jason laces his fingers in front of him, unable to shake the feeling he just committed a social faux pas.

Valdez glances at him. “It’s like moving to a foreign country,” he comments.

“What?” Jason cocks his head, confused.

“Everyone has all these subconscious social cues, and customs you know nothing about,” Leo explains. “You understand what’s going on, but you still feel like an outsider because you miss all of the little details. I moved here when I was nineteen--I can understand what you’re going through, a bit.”

“Oh. Right,” Jason says. “Yeah, that’s exactly how it feels. But at least I didn’t have to learn a whole new language, right?”

Leo laughs. “I moved here from Canada, man. I’ve been bilingual since I was six.”

As if Jason didn’t already feel bad enough. “Sorry.”

Valdez catches his eye, and for a second it looks as though he’s about to say something. He opens his mouth, a frown creasing his sharp features. His fingers dance over the taser at his hip. “Y’know, Cap,” he begins.

The elevator judders to a halt, and the doors slide open. Leo clams up at once.

Jason doesn’t know why, but the back of his neck breaks out in a cold sweat as Agent Bryce and his second, Nakamura, board the elevator. They’re dressed casually, in jogging clothes as though they just came from the third-floor gym, but this is the fourth and they aren’t even sweaty.

Bryce jerks his head in a nod and Nakamura hits the ground floor button. Leo moves over to accommodate them. The three exchange a chorus of “mornings”.

It’s probably nothing. Jason’s still strung out from his dream and the Director’s disappearance and the anniversary of Zhang’s death. As Percy once put it, he’s got a thousand worry-shaped monsters beating trails through his head and he can only chase down so many of them. Unwarranted paranoia is part of the gig.

“Shame about the Director,” Bryce says, once they’re moving again. “You’re sure you didn’t notice anything else about the scene, Cap? No discarded weapons, no witnesses?”

Jason shifts uncomfortably, unable to shake the feeling that Bryce is fishing for something. For one thing, he’s already been dismissed by the Directorate--they shouldn’t be questioning him further without notice. For another, he just plain doesn’t trust the cold way the agent looks at him, like he’s a big, dumb goon who can’t be expected to follow a conversation.

“It was pretty clean,” he fences. “But I’m no expert. I’d have more experienced agents look at the scene.”

Nakamura snorts, muttering something about Jason thinking he knows better than the leader of SHIELD.

“No, he’s right,” Bryce says. “We’re sending Forensics to the apartment now. I was just hoping to get your insight, Grace. Maybe something you missed?”

Jason shrugs.

“In that big, big building?” Bryce presses. “There were no witnesses? None? You don’t find that . . . strange?”

“The whole thing was strange,” Jason says, and feels Leo move at his back. The man is shifting position, worming his way into Jason’s blindspot.

His intuition pings again. He might be a big, dumb goon, but he’s a big, dumb goon who’s been jumped more times than he can count. The boys who cornered him in the alleys before he had Nico to watch his back--the soldiers who’d had enough of him pestering them at the recruitment offices--not to mention the number of sticky situations he’d gotten into since taking the serum and becoming everyone’s worst enemy--they all had the same look in their eye, the same too-subtle ways of moving and talking.

He doesn’t know why, but these men are planning on attacking him.

“I’m just saying,” Bryce comments, “how suspicious that looks to the rest of us. You and Widow go off on a rabbit trail, the Director goes missing, and BAM. The two of you just happen to be the first ones on the scene after she disappears.” He shrugs. “I’d watch my back, if I were you. You never know who might come to the wrong conclusion. Or,” he glances at Jason, “the right one.”

Jason tenses, ready to swing at Bryce. Before he can, Valdez clamps something hard around his wrists. They feel an awful lot like handcuffs, but Jason can break through cuffs like they’re made of spun sugar. These restraints have no give to them.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jason declares, and Bryce slams the emergency stop on the elevator. They screech to a halt between floors.

“The security of SHIELD is not a joke, Captain,” Bryce snaps. “You and the Widow are known mavericks.”

“Just come quietly,” Valdez begs from behind him. “We’ll do right by you, Cap. I’m sure there’s a way to peacefully--”

Jason doesn’t wait for him to finish; he yanks his arms to the side, locking one elbow as he bends the other and drives it into the other man’s gut.

He kicks out, his boot connecting with Agent Nakamura’s ribcage, and internally curses. He was aiming for the stomach.

Bryce pulls his taser out, leveling it at Jason’s pelvis. “The more you fight, the worse you look,” he growls.

“You mean, the worse you look,” Jason cracks, driving his shoulder into Bryce’s arm. He ducks under the man’s guard, trying to free his hands and disarm the agent at the same time. Multitasking turns out to not be his strong suit. He manages to knock the taser away, but Bryce gets him by the scruff of the neck and hauls him into the elevator doors, denting them.

His wrists stick to the door at once, and something clicks in his brain. Magnetic cuffs; definitely Leo’s doing.

He braces his arms, keeping one still while sliding the other upwards. The motion effectively splits the magnets apart, but still pins both his arms to the metal door.

For crying out loud.

Before he can try anything else, Bryce socks him in the jaw. Jason can’t count the number of times he’s been sucker punched. Doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

He knees Bryce in the groin, which is far less effective than he’d hoped, and attempts to kick the man’s legs out from under him. He sees Valdez scrambling to his feet, pulling an ominous-looking silver rod out from under his shirt.

Using his trapped arms as leverage, Jason kicks off from the floor and swings both feet at Bryce’s chest, driving him backwards into Valdez. It shouldn’t work. It he didn’t have ten pints of enhanced blood running through his system, it never would have.

“Three of you for one of me?” Jason pants. “Not sure if I’m impressed by your confidence or hurt that you think so little of me.”

Clenching the muscles of his right arm, he yanks it free with herculean strength, certain he’s about to pull his arm out of its socket as he does so. As soon as he gets it, though, the cuff falls off.

Nakamura tries to stop him--but “tries” is as far as he gets. Jason backhands him into the wall and uses both hands to tug his left arm free.

He cracks his knuckles, facing the three agents. Nakamura is slumped on the floor, metaphorical birdies tweeting around his head. He doesn’t look like he’s going to get up soon.

Bryce is rolling off of Valdez, a murderous look on his face. He doesn’t look nearly as knocked around as Jason would like, but Leo is out stone cold. Must have hit his head on the way down.

Bryce draws the silver rod from Leo’s hand. “You talk a big game,” he declares, “but I’ve seen every trick you’ve got. You aren’t a SHIELD agent, Grace. You don’t stand a chance against me.”

“Now, where have I heard that before?” Jason muses. “Oh, right. From every fellow who thought he could turn me into a punching bag.”

He clenches his hands into fists, squaring his shoulders for Bryce’s attack. “Guess where those clowns are now.”

“Cut the chitchat,” Bryce growls, lunging forwards, baton outstretched like a sword. “The heroic act doesn’t work on me.”

Jason ducks before the rod comes in contact with his skin. It whizzes by his ear, and he feels the unmistakable shiver of electricity.

A taser and a nightstick, all in one. Nice.

He grabs Bryce’s wrist before the man can retreat and twists it, spinning him onto his back. Striding forwards, he seizes the man by the collar of his Run Like The Wind t-shirt and throws him into the elevator roof. Bryce hits the floor with an audible thud and goes limp.

“The heroic act works just fine,” Jason mutters.

He steps over Bryce’s body, squinting at the elevator control panel. He tries pushing the emergency stop button again, but it doesn’t propel the lift back into motion. He didn’t expect it to, but it was worth a try.

There’s a comm system installed above the keypad, but Jason gets the feeling that he won’t like the kind of help that comes if he pings anyone.

That just leaves the easy way down.

He nudges the unconscious Valdez aside and peers down at the ground below. It looks awfully far. He’s no wuss, but he’s not too crazy about heights, either. Whether he’s jumping or falling, careening through the air never fails to remind him of his fatal plunge into the Arctic. There has to be a better way. He turns back to the dented elevator doors and strongarms them open.

The floor is at his shoulder-level, with just enough room for him to wriggle out, but before he can, a team of STRIKE agents pour out from around the corner like a swarm of hornets. Bryce must have alerted them, or else he’s being watched over the security cameras that are peppered throughout the Triskelion like the latest decorating trend.

He quickly slides the door shut. Plan A it is.

Pulling his reinforced hood over his face for protection, he raises his elbow and backs up to the far side of the elevator, praying that today isn’t the day his penchant for stupid stunts gets him killed. Agent Valdez groans, speeding his retreat.

He sprints towards the wall in front of him, using his elbow as the pressure point that shatters the glass. His Kevlar-tough suit keeps his skin from being shredded, but his joint still absorbs the force of the blow, and no amount of hardened latex can keep him from plummeting towards the ground at a frightening speed.

I wish I could fly, he thinks wistfully, just before slamming into the pavement.

That would be really cool.

Chapter Text

Jason isn’t dead.

This alone is enough to surprise him as he jerks awake, eyes flying wide open, taking in the incongruous scene before him. He’s in his bedroom; not his quarters at the Triskelion, but his bedroom in his New York city apartment.

Tracking down the apartment he’d grown up in was the first non-violent thing he’d done after thawing out; he’d bought the deserted, condemned building and used his forty-plus years of retirement money to fix it up. His bedroom looks exactly the same as it did when he kissed it goodbye in 1941; Percy teased him relentlessly about it, but Jason didn’t--and doesn’t--care. There’s nothing more relaxing than coming home to a safe, familiar place.

Usually.

Except the last thing he remembers is plunging towards the ground outside of the Triskelion in D.C., and typically, it’s a bad sign when he wakes up to a major change in location.

He slowly sits up, groaning as the blood rushes from his head, leaving his temples throbbing. He feels like he just went three rounds with a brick wall, and the wall won.

A rustling sound alerts him to someone’s presence, and within seconds Agent McLean is standing in his open doorway, a mug of coffee in one hand and a bottle of aspirin in the other. She looks the same as she always does--black everything, handgun strapped to her waist, hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Jason wastes a good ten seconds wondering if she ever wears anything else, his brain conjuring up images of her in fuzzy slippers and gray sweats. He cracks a smile.

“I don’t know why you’re so amused,” Piper says dryly, handing him the coffee and cracking open the aspirin bottle. “But I’m not going to ask. You’re obviously an idiot. You do know you can’t fly, right?”

Jason swallows his first bitter sip and holds out his hand for a pill. “I had a plan. Really.”

“Did it involve taking a nosedive out of the third floor and nearly squashing me like a pancake?” she wants to know. “Because the weather report this morning said nothing about a hailstorm of super-soldiers.”

“I was attacked,” Jason defends himself. “STRIKE--”

“I know, I know,” she interrupts. “I’m just--what’s that phrase you like to use? Busting your chops?”

He downs the two aspirin she places in his palm, knowing they aren’t going to do jack and taking them anyway. It’s nice to pretend that ordinary medicine might work on him. “How did I get here?” he asks. “And how do you know what happened?”

“I carried you,” Piper explains, as if that should be obvious. “I’m glad you don’t have a concussion, by the way, though I’m not sure how you managed to avoid it. Hard head, I guess. Not very surprising.”

“You carried me four flights of stairs by yourself?” he asks, disbelieving. Not to brag, or anything, but . . . he’s pretty strong. Very muscular. And Piper, while tough as nails and scary in her own right, is still just a gal.

“She possibly had help,” a new voice says, and Annabeth peers over Piper’s shoulder, her face covered with a disapproving look and a pair of reflective sunglasses. She toasts him with her orange juice. “You need to cut back on the Baby Ruths, Cap. There’s no way all of that weight is muscle.”

“Hawkeye,” Jason grins, hauling himself to his feet. “How’s it going?”

“Terrible,” she gripes, disappearing from view, her voice floating into the kitchen. “I was up before noon and your Moka-pot coffee sucks.”

Jason frowns. “I like my Moka pot.” It reminds him of childhood.

Piper moves aside, and he limps his way after Hawkeye, stretching the stiffness out of his joints. His elbow, in particular, hurts like hell.

“So, we must be in real trouble if you called in the merc,” Jason observes, cracking his neck.

Annabeth scowls at him. “I’m not a mercenary, I’ve told you that a thousand times. I’m a--”

“Professional marksman, we know,” Piper completes, and rolls her eyes. “We’ve heard it a thousand times, Annie. But you kill people for money, end of story.”

“At least I’m paid,” the archer mutters. “You just do it for kicks.”

“As much as I love hearing you two bickering,” Jason breaks in, “can we go back to something more relevant? Such as, perhaps, the fact that SHIELD thinks I kidnapped the Director?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Reyna says, and Jason nearly jumps out of his skin.

“By Jo--” he begins, and then cuts himself off quickly, remembering the last time he used that exclamation in front of Piper. She was calling him “Gramps” for weeks. “Reyna!”

The Director of SHIELD is slumped in his favorite--only--easy chair, dressed in ill-fitting jeans and Annabeth’s purple Yankees hat. She looks exhausted, but she still manages to crack a grin when their eyes meet.

“Hydra wants SHIELD to think you kidnapped me,” she corrects. “Or, in a better scenario, killed.”

“What are you doing here?” Jason demands. “Wait, better question--what happened this morning?”

Annabeth pulls out a chair from his kitchen table and straddles it, setting her juice glass in front of her. “What didn’thappen this morning?” she mutters crankily.

Jason is used to her bad moods, but even for Annabeth, this is grumpy. She reminds him of that sarcastic cat Percy’s obsessed with.

“We were attacked,” Reyna says grimly. “Someone tried to kill me, and Annabeth helped me fake my disappearance to buy me some time. But this guy is good--it won’t take him long to catch on. I’ve got to--” she breaks off, violently coughing into her hand. The spasm lasts long enough for Jason to be starting for the cupboards to get her a glass of water.

She waves him off.

“I’m fine,” she rasps.

Jason’s an expert on coughs--he’s had all of them, at one time or another--and he’s pretty sure she isn’t “fine”, but she goes on before he can argue.

“I’ve got to tell you a few things,” she completes. “About SHIELD.”

Piper folds her arms, coming to stand next to Jason. “You’re going to like this, Cap,” she whispers. “The game’s afoot.”

He shoots her a puzzled look.

Reyna beckons him over, ignoring Piper. She fumbles in the pocket of her overcoat and pulls out a small, flat stick of plastic. Jason recognizes the shape; Percy explained it to him once as a portable file cabinet.

“This USB is a failsafe for all of SHIELD’s systems,” Reyna tells him. “You might need it.”

“A failsafe?” Jason accepts the storage device hesitantly. “Why?"

The Director straightens up in the chair, the motion clearly a great effort for her. Nevertheless, she holds her head high as she tells him, “Because Hydra has infiltrated SHIELD.”

Jason’s first instinct is disbelief. He’s always been given the impression that SHIELD is just that--an impenetrable shield, protecting the public from bad, scary organizations like Hydra. Hearing that it’s been compromised is like being told that the Red Skull is now the President. He just doesn’t find it possible.

“You don’t believe me?” she asks dryly, her sole gray eye fixed on his face. “You think I don’t know my own organization? There isn’t anything that happens in SHIELD that I don’t know about. I’m telling you, we have a breach. We’ve had a breach for years now.”

“And . . . you didn’t do anything about it?” This is probably the least plausible part of her claim. Reyna isn’t known for inaction. More the opposite, really.

She shrugs. “It wasn’t a problem before."

Jason raises his eyebrows, and glances at Piper and Annabeth to make sure they’re hearing the same thing. Annabeth gives him a wry smile.

“Anything you have to say about that,” she informs him, “I probably already did.”

Reyna chuckles, a raspy sound that invokes another round of coughs. This time, she allows Jason to leap up and get her water.

“Hawkeye gave me quite the earful,” she says, after downing half the glass. “And I won’t say I didn’t deserve it. But the truth is, it was useful for us to have Hydra agents in our ranks. In a way, they were our best assets--they think like the enemy.”

“Because they are the enemy,” Annabeth says dryly.

Jason doesn’t say anything at first. It’s hard to decide what he wants to ask first, in the face of such mind-blowing stupidity. “What were you thinking?” he finally demands.

Reyna doesn’t answer him. “Obviously, once they decided to make their move, they became liabilities rather than assets,” she goes on. “And this morning, they did just that.”

“We’re pretty sure that the plan was to kill Reyna and frame you and Piper,” Annabeth puts in. “Effectively killing three of SHIELD’s most powerful birds with one stone.”

“Who are you calling a bird?” Piper mutters.

“With us out of the way, SHIELD would be open to complete Hydra takeover,” Reyna says.

“And you didn’t think that, maybe, this would be a problem somewhere down the line?” Jason asks incredulously. “You know, when you allowed Hydra agents into the agency they were founded to take down?"

The Director tilts her chin, leveling him with an impassive stare. “I had my reasons. In this game, Grace, it’s all about thinking six moves ahead, not reacting impulsively or charging ahead without a strategy. We’re in a long war, and the winner is the side that knows how to use every piece to their advantage.”

There’s something fundamentally wrong with that concept, and Jason knows it, but he can’t articulate exactly what offends him about it so he keeps quiet.

“This morning’s attempt was only the first,” she goes on. “Like I said, my would-be assassin is good. He’ll be back, and I can’t guarantee he won’t succeed.”

Annabeth makes a noise of protest.

“You did well,” Reyna tells her. “I’m not belittling your accomplishment--you saved my life.”

Annabeth sits back, satisfied. Piper, for reasons Jason can only guess, looks disgruntled.

“But you’re going to help Widow and the Cap take down Hydra,” the Director instructs.

“You can’t--” Annabeth begins.

“No way--” Jason says at the same time.

“If Hydra’s after your life, then we aren’t going anywhere without you,” Piper says over the both of them. “Even if you order us, ma’am, your safety comes first.”

“I’m injured, obviously,” Reyna says. “Pretty badly, for all of Annabeth’s efforts. I’m only going to be a distraction. I’m not going to just roll over and die for this guy, but I’m also not going to be the reason you three can’t do your job.”

“I’m not SHIELD,” Annabeth points out. “Not anymore--you can’t order me around.”

Reyna sighs.

“I can ask you very nicely,” she replies, sounding more like a sweet gal than the leader of an international intelligence agency. He wonders exactly what Annabeth said to warrant that. “And you’ll listen because you know I expect you to act like an adult rather than a spoiled child.”

Annabeth pushes up her sunglasses to show Reyna the face she’s pulling.

“So, what is it that you want us to do?” Jason breaks in.

Reyna is quiet for a second, and Jason witnesses an expression he never thought would cross her face: regret.

“I . . . possibly have made a serious mistake,” she admits.

Annabeth mimes a heart attack. Piper cuffs her on the ear.

“It starts with Project Insight,” Reyna begins.

She’s interrupted by the unsettlingly conventional sound of Jason’s doorbell ringing, and the three of them exchange startled looks.

“Someone order a pizza?” Annabeth mutters.

Jason motions for everyone to stay quiet, and moves to the door, slouching to squint through the peephole. Standing on the other side, mostly obscured by the layers of dirt on the lens that Jason keeps forgetting to clean, is a figure in black.

Jason presses his palm to the doorknob. “Who is it?”

“UPS,” is the muffled, unconvincing reply.

“Been feeding your mail-order habit?” Piper cracks.

Annabeth unslings her ever-present bow from her shoulder and notches an arrow, and Jason backs away from the door, missing his shield.

He points towards his bedroom, hoping they understand--the only other exit is through there, the narrow window above his bed that overlooks a dirty alley that, so far, is the only thing that hasn’t drastically changed since 1940.

He isn’t even thinking as he ushers them into the room, taking up the rear; and clearly, neither are Piper and Annabeth.

Pop. Pop, pop, pop.

Firecrackers; not. Jason knows better at once. He ducks, pulling Annabeth down with him--Piper’s already on the floor with the Director. Jason looks up, staring at his open window in horror. He didn’t consider the possibility they were being herded.

This is a trap, chucklewit,Nico says in his head, and Jason swears under his breath. The guy couldn't have mentioned that earlier, huh? No, heaven forbid that Jason's delusions be useful.

He crawls around Annabeth, who’s aiming her bow at the window, waiting for more shots, and joins Piper at Reyna’s side.

Piper catches his eye and shakes her head.

“She went in first,” she whispers. “What the hell kind of idiots are we?”

Reyna coughs, her eyelids fluttering for a scant second before her eye closes again. Piper brushes the Director’s dark hair back, revealing the eyepatch Reyna usually keeps covered. “She needs medical attention now,” she says.

“Right,” Jason says grimly. “You take care of that--I’ll take care of the sniper.”

“The door--” Annabeth starts.

“Then cover it!” he barks, vaulting for the window.

His boots land firmly on the fire escape, and he scans the area quickly. The next building over is close enough to jump to, and the window directly across from Jason’s is cracked.

Textbook.

Too textbook? Jason knows his weak point is doing exactly what Reyna told him not to, jumping into action without thinking. Not to mention, he just got the Director shot because he wasn’t using his brain. He gives himself half a second to consider the possibility Reyna’s shooter is trying to mislead him before he springs off the fire escape and latches onto the corresponding window.

It might be backwards, but his philosophy doesn’t include spending more than a few seconds on any given decision. Maybe he’s running half-cocked in the wrong direction, but at least he’s running. At least he’s doing something. And at least he’s not thinking about Nico.

He goes headfirst through the window, rolling easily into a somersault that brings him to his feet.

Empty room; no furniture, no tools, nothing but the water-stained walls. No sign of an attacker, but Jason can hear footsteps thudding down the hall.

He whips out of the room in pursuit of the noise, and the steps speed up to a run. He breaks into a hallway, turns a corner, and catches the flash of a heel going up the flight of stairs at the end of the corridor.

Would yelling “stop” help?

He strains his muscles, urging them to go faster. He pounds up the stairs two at a time, chasing a black-suited back, slowly but definitely closing the distance. Just as he thinks he’s going to make it, they break out onto the roof.

The assassin glances over his shoulder, and Jason catches a glimpse of a face, half covered by a black mask and mostly obscured by the man’s upraised arm, which glitters strangely in the late afternoon sun.

It’s made of metal, Jason realizes in shock. It isn’t real. He’s so preoccupied with the revelation, which should be the least shocking thing that happened to him today, that it looks like the sniper is snatched away by the wind in front of his distracted eyes.

He snaps his head up to see the man holding on to the underside of a small fighter jet, already zipping away at a speed Jason can’t match.

A fighter jet. In Brooklyn.

Jason curses in frustration, resisting the urge to shake his fist at the retreating black blob. He stands at the very edge of the roof, his whole body straining after the craft.

“Jason!”

It’s Piper, leaning out his bedroom window, waving him down. “It’s bad!” she yells. “We need to move.”

Jason crouches and lowers his legs over the edge, dropping down so that he’s hanging by his arms. Piper grabs his ankles, and he drags himself back into his apartment. It’s not, by far, the most graceful maneuver they’ve performed, but it gets him back inside faster than running through the building again.

Annabeth is crouched by Reyna’s body, her face as gray as if she was the one who was shot.

“So, so, so stupid,” she mutters angrily, over and over.

Piper puts a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Annie,” she says encouragingly. “The Director is going to be fine.”

She sends Jason a look that clearly says, Your move, fearless leader.

“We need to go somewhere safer,” he declares. “Is there anywhere close by that we can hole up in?”

Before Piper can answer, though, Jason’s front door bangs open. Like angry hornets coming out a nest, a dozen STRIKE agents swarm the apartment, their identical guns raised and pointed at the small group.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he groans.

Chapter Text

They used to call him der Soldat, the Soldier; back when he was working under--he fights to remember the name, struggles, gives up--his first handler. So that’s what he thinks of himself as: the Soldier. Capitalized, singular. He’s mastered six major languages, can get by in Mandarin, Hindi, and most of the African tongues, thinks in English and dreams in German. When his masters want someone dead, truly dead, guaranteed dead within twenty-four hours of the notion popping into their heads, he’s the one they bring in.

But he hasn’t got a name, like normal people have names, and his only impression of his face is the hazy, distorted glimpse of features he gets when he raises his left arm. He knows weapons like he imagines most people know the names of their relatives, or dinner recipes, or phone numbers. He remembers targets instead of his past and execution techniques instead of his birthday, and sometimes, despite his best efforts, he loses control of his body.

Badly.

He hates it, because it makes him sloppy and emotional and his mind feels like a plate of slippery scrambled eggs, throwing hard, burned bits of flashbacks into his consciousness.

He remembers pain, fear, freezing--a cold voice, a desperate howl--remembers being hungry to the point of starving, feverish and small and aching.

And other things, too; a high-pitched laugh that goes on and on like a windup doll, the clutch of his hands--both of them flesh--around himself, the gasp of a man underneath him. The murky impressions, all that’s left of his ragged memories, leap out at him while he’s not in control. He’s worried they might get the better of him, one day.

But his handlers enjoy this state of his. They claim it makes him better, more dangerous; more susceptible to orders. They don’t say it directly to his face, of course, but he hears things. And he remembers things, the things he did when he was even less himself than usual.

At the end of the day, he supposes it doesn’t matter what his mental state is, as long as the mission gets done. The mission is the only thing that’s important.

The mission, the man with the pale hair explained to him once, is his reason for existence. Without it, there’s no Soldier. There’s no anybody, just a pretty corpse walking around, ticking down the days until he dies.

Chapter Text

The STRIKE team, led by Agent Valdez, streams into Jason’s apartment like a river, and before he can so much as slide into a ready stance, Widow and Hawkeye have sprung into action. They don’t perform the way that Jason and Piper do, with practiced ease and a rigid battle pattern, but they move with a single-minded unity that he’s never managed to achieve with the Widow.

Piper flows out of his bedroom, going low and taking out three agents in a blink; she sweeps the feet out from under one, shoves the next into one of Jason’s end tables, and heel-palms the last when he tries to jump her. Annabeth is at her back, sticking arrows into anyone stupid enough to attack.

Valdez ignores the living room brawl, beelining straight for Jason and whipping out two unpleasant-looking pieces of steel shaped like razor blades. His face is downright murderous.

The planes of the blades dance with the same blue charge that his rod had earlier, and he swings one at Jason like a sword. Jason ducks, only to be caught upside the head with the second blade.

“That’s for this morning,” Leo declares, as what feels like a couple hundred volts of electricity spark through Jason’s body.

A normal human would be--well, Jason isn’t sure what a normal human would be, but his body, resilient as it is, jerks with a sudden fit of spasms and he crumples to the floor, barely a yard from the Director’s form. Widow has backed up to stand over them both, which is good because Jason’s muscles have decided not to take any calls from his frantic brain, and he’s feeling distinctly scrambled. There’s no pain, though, and that worries him.

His fingers are twitching of their own accord, and his limbs tingle as though a million caffeine-fueled ants are using his bloodstream as a jive floor.

It takes too long--seven precious seconds--to recover the use of his body. The pain trickles in like feeling back to a numb leg, and he grits his teeth against it as it builds, crests, and then settles to a manageable level.

By the time he’s mobile again, there are three STRIKE agents left--two, Jason corrects his mental analysis as Annabeth uses the sight of her bow to cut off the air supply of one of the officers, pinning him against the wall until he passes out from lack of oxygen.

Piper draws her gun for the first time during the fight and offhandedly shoots the second agent in the leg, her face spelling more annoyance than aggression; then it’s only Valdez.

Jason gets up slowly, his joints rusted and slow. His usefulness in this battle was zip, he thinks ruefully. He swallows, throat oddly dry, and stretches out his aching limbs. The girls check their own wounds, unhurried with only one measly STRIKE agent left.

Which is, of course, a mistake.

Valdez moves more quickly than Jason thought possible, sweeping Piper’s feet out from under her. The assassin falls for the first time in Jason’s memory; meanwhile Valdez is ducking under the range of Hawkeye’s bow and chucking a small, blinking device at the archer.

He slides into Jason, whose knees are still shaky, and the two of them tumble to the floor in a heap as the blinking object attaches itself to Annabeth’s recurve bow, flashes rapidly for half a second, and then lets out a high-pitched BEEP.

The bow simply and completely falls apart. Hawkeye stares in shock as her beloved weapon goes to pieces in her hands, the parts dropping around her feet like dead flies until all that is left is the useless hand grip. Her gaze travels to Piper for help, her expression similar to a child whose favorite toy was just stolen.

Jason extricates himself from Valdez, and the two of them circle each other like cowboys in a bad western. Piper is gathering the pieces of Annabeth’s bow, apparently not at all concerned with the fight going on behind her, muttering quiet, soothing things to the shell-shocked archer. Jason’s fairly concerned; the man took down all three of them in less than a minute. This isn’t someone Jason particularly wants to fight.

Reyna starts to cough. It’s a wet, throaty sound, and Annabeth abandons her fallen weapon at once to jump to the Director’s side. Piper drops to her knees, pulling Reyna up to prevent anything from flowing back into her lungs. She and Annabeth murmur back and forth in quiet, urgent voices.

Agent Valdez’s gaze travels to the girls and, by extent, Reyna. He freezes. “Holy mother,” he gasps, his hands lowering at once. “Es que . . . is that the Director?”

“Yes, it’s the Director,” Piper snaps, shooting him a glare.

“But--but she was declared dead over an hour ago. We’re supposed to bring you and the Cap in for her murder.” Leo looks from Piper to Jason, and the dumbfounded look on his face would be comical if not for the circumstances.

“She’s clearly not dead,” Annabeth says sharply. “But she will be if we continue this ridiculous fight.” She fixes Leo with a stern look. “Since we’re innocent, you’re on our side now, right?”

“I--um--uh--” Leo stutters.

Jason cracks his knuckles.

“If you didn’t kill her--which, I mean, you obviously didn’t---” Leo stammers out. “Yeah. Sure. I mean, yes ma’am.”

“Alright then.” Annabeth straightens up, hoisting the Director in her arms. “We’re going to need your ride.”

The STRIKE jet is parked on the roof, which Jason is pretty sure should be impossible. It’s a cute little thing, the same kind of eight-seater that he and Piper traveled on this morning, with pullout beds for napping in style or laying out badly injured superior officers. Annabeth disappears into the bathroom and comes back with a white plastic first aid kit; Jason almost laughs when he sees it.

“How useful is that going to be?” he asks.

She shrugs, her face tense. “Better than nothing,” she says.

Piper shoots her an annoyed look, but before Jason can figure out why, Leo calls from the pilot’s seat, “Where am I going?”

Annabeth sets the first aid kit down on Reyna’s cot and ducks into the copilot’s chair. “We’re going to Valhalla,” she announces. “It’s the closest secret base, and I’m pretty sure we can get Levesque there without drawing any attention.”

“Hazel?” Piper asks doubtfully. “The goody-two-shoes pencil pusher? Hazel-the-Frank-died-and-now-I’m-no-fun-pencil-pusher?”

“Hazel-the-only-agent-Reyna-trusts-pencil-pusher,” Annabeth snaps.

Ouch. Jason doesn’t need to see the hurt look on Piper’s face to know that one must have stung.

Leo clears his throat. “Alright. Super-secret base named after scary Viking afterlife--here we come,” he declares, flexing his fingers in a showboaty way.

Jason crouches next to Reyna as the jet takes off, using his body as a brace to stable her bed. Piper thanks him in an undertone.

“You want to talk about you and Hawkeye?” he whispers back. “What’s going on there?”

She shakes her head, stone faced.

“I hate to ask,” Leo begins. “Seeing as I just joined our merry band of brothers and all, but could someone please explain to me what’s going on?”

In brief sentences, Annabeth sums up the assassination attempt, the Hydra takeover, and the second attack.

“It was pretty stupid of that guy to run away,” Piper says. “Don’t most assassins stick around to make sure the target is dead?”

“Stupid, or maybe just arrogant,” Annabeth says. “When I was fighting him, I didn’t get a good look, but I think there was a red star on his arm.”

“There was,” Jason remembers suddenly. “I saw it just before he took off from the roof.”

This means more to Piper and Annabeth then it does to him; they exchange grim looks, earlier tension forgotten.

“What? What is it?” Leo asks. “There’s something else I don’t know?”

“He’s a myth,” Piper insists to Annabeth. “Nothing more than a legend senior officers use to score free drinks.”

“A legend put three bullets into our Director,” Annabeth replies. “And dodged my arrows--all of them.”

“So, you missed,” Piper says.

“I don’t miss,” Annabeth snaps.

Leo groans. “Will someone please tell me what you two are talking about?”

“Me, too,” Jason puts in.

“The Winter Soldier,” Piper and Annabeth chorus.

“Piper thinks he’s a fairy tale,” Annabeth says.

“And Annabeth thinks she’s fought him,” Piper rolls her eyes. “But I’m telling you, Annie, anyone can put on a black mask and walk around with a star on their arm. That doesn’t make him the Winter Soldier.”

“Who is the Winter Soldier?” Leo demands. “Seriously, this is getting hilariously underexplained. He sounds bad. Is he bad?”

“He’s good,” Annabeth corrects. “The best, really--a Hydra assassin who’s worked for just about every terrorist organization out there. He’s something of an underworld legend; supposedly, he’s never failed in killing his targets.”

“And according to every Tom, Dick, and Harry you ask, he’s immortal,” Piper sighs.

“Immortal?” Jason doesn’t like the sound of that. At all.

“Stories have been circulating since the early 1950s--around the time of SHIELD’s birth,” Piper explains. “Every few years, a fresh tale will crop up; someone with an ex-lover who had a friend who faced him, or something. There’s never anything concrete. He’s a ghost.”

“I didn’t chase down a ghost,” he tells her. “A flesh and blood man hunted down the Director, and I don’t care if he’s the Winter whatever. He’s going to pay.”

“Hear, hear,” Annabeth commends him.

Piper glares at both of them. “While you two are busy taking out an eye for an eye, Reyna is dying and SHIELD is burning,” she complains. “Our primary concern is getting the Director stable so she can explain to us what the plan is--and what Project Insight is.”

“My primary concern is always the Director,” Annabeth says indignantly.

Piper grimaces. “I know.” She draws out the syllables, making the words sound like they mean more than their surface presents. Jason’s gaze darts between the two of them, once more trying to figure out the dynamic there.

“Um, so someone’s going to need to tell me where this Valhalla place is,” Leo cuts in. “Because I may be the shit and all, but I don’t read minds.”

“Get out.” Annabeth sounds disgusted. “I’ll pilot. You make sure Piper doesn’t try to jump me for treason or something.”

“I’m not jumping you for anything,” Piper mutters rebelliously. “I certainly don’t want to.”

It doesn’t sound like a barb to Jason’s ears, but Annabeth flinches. Leo scoots out of the pilot’s chair.

“I can see this group is a barrel of laughs,” he comments, coming to sit near Jason.

Jason shakes his head. “We’re usually more together than this.”

Valdez hums disbelievingly. “If you say so, bro.”

Piper goes into the bathroom.

Jason reaches over and presses the back of his hand to Reyna’s forehead, which is clammy. His medical knowledge is limited to opening Band-Aids and applying ice packs; neither of which will help with bullet wounds.

“She isn’t bleeding, that’s good,” Leo volunteers. “Means that the bullets are stopping up the holes they made.”

It’s hard to tell, since Reyna’s clothes are dark, but Jason’s pretty sure there’s some blood. He touches her side gently to check.

“I think she is bleeding,” he says.

Leo kneels next to him and takes the first aid kit down from the cot, resting it on the floor to open. “Yeah, but notice there isn’t blood gushing or spurting out like in the movies? That’s because a) there isn’t a direct opening between one of her major arteries and her skin and b) it’s very rare for people to bleed like that. If she was, that would be bad. She’d be dead in seconds. But she’s not, so it’s likely she’ll hold on. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll help you put a few patches on to keep her from, uh, leaking.”

“You know a lot about it,” Jason says.

Leo shrugs. “Long story involving a Canadian research facility and a questionably moral team of biologists. I’ll tell you sometime when I’m not up to my elbows in gauze and Director blood.”

While he was talking, he quickly and efficiently wrapped up Reyna’s sides, encasing all three wounds in one band of gauze.

He pats it fondly. “Tight enough to act as a tourniquet, loose enough she can breathe. My girl taught me well.”

“We’re zeroing in on Valhalla,” Annabeth calls over her shoulder. “Tell Piper to stop sulking and get out here to call off the attack drones.”

Leo glances at Jason in alarm. “Attack drones?”

“Just do it!” Annabeth barks, so forcefully that Leo actually cringes.

Jason scrambles to his feet and pounds on the bathroom door. “Piper! Drones!”

Piper slides open the door, a distinctly annoyed look on her face. Muttering darkly, she picks her way past Leo and reaches over Annabeth’s shoulder to grab the radio from the control panel. “Valhalla, this is Black Widow, over,” she says into it. “Call off the sharks.”

She tosses the radio back onto the dash and stalks into the bathroom again, slamming the door.

Jason watches through the windshield as Annabeth lowers the jet onto a patch of grass, setting down in a field that looks completely like every other field Jason’s ever seen.
He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing at first when the grass begins to get closer and the treeline surrounding the field appears to rise into the air. It looks like they’re sinking into the ground; and as the field is revealed to be nothing but a shallow cover to a bunker, he guesses that’s exactly what they’re doing.

“Underground base,” Leo says, and whistles. “I’m impressed. You?”

“Very,” Jason admits.

He feels an acute sense of relief when he sees Agent Levesque standing a safe distance away from the jet, obviously waiting for their arrival. She’ll know how to help Reyna. She’ll know what to do about SHIELD.

“You’re all late,” she begins, as they file out of the jet. Her irate expression turns into one of panic when she sees Jason, bringing up the rear with Reyna’s limp form. “Oh my God, what happened?”

She rushes forwards without waiting for an answer, cradling the Director’s face in her hand. She looks stricken; Jason can’t blame her. Reyna means a lot to all of them.

“This day is cursed,” Hazel mumbles, and Jason’s stomach clenches. Zhang. Of course.

“Prepping the med bay,” Annabeth declares, heading for a door at the far end of the hangar. Jason follows her, emerging into a sleek, glass-partitioned base that reminds him a lot of Percy’s lab; all open spaces and sleek white floors, with computer and TV screens everywhere. In the center of the room is a glass room with three hospital meds and a tangle of equipment Jason vaguely recognizes but has no idea how to use.

A few SHIELD agents mill around, typing on laptops or holding conversations in midair with unseen companions. When they see Jason come in with the Director, all six of them drop what they’re doing and gravitate to his side.

“It’s okay,” Hazel says from behind him, when he balks. “They can be trusted. Reyna already confided her fears of a leak in me--and I guessed when she turned up missing that it was almost time to act.”

Jason reluctantly surrenders Reyna over to the strongest-looking of the agents, firmly instructing him not to drop her. Then he turns to Hazel. “You just . . . guessed?” he asks skeptically.

Hazel gives him a knowing look. “It’s expected that you’d feel . . . mistrustful . . . after today,” she says. “But do you really think I’d work for Hydra? After what they did to--” she chokes up, says the name anyway, “Frank?”

Jason shakes his head. He can’t imagine it, anymore than he can imagine being able to work with the Skull if the monster appeared in front of him now. There are some actions that can never be forgiven.

“Alright then.” Hazel snaps her fingers. “Debriefing time.”

Chapter Text

Hazel gathers them around a table that looks so much like the board room back in the Triskelion, Jason isn’t altogether sure she didn’t have it shipped here. She walks around the table, giving each of them a small packet of papers.

“You compiled a handout?” Piper asks in disbelief, lifting the first sheet of paper to peer at the ones underneath. “Exactly how far in advance did you know this was coming?”

“I prepared three different handouts based on the most likely outcomes,” Hazel explains briskly, setting the leftover stack of papers down at the head of the table. “This one seemed to be the most appropriate for the situation.”

Jason picks up his handout. The first page is emblazoned with the Hydra symbol and the words : SO EVERYONE IS EVIL--WHAT NOW?

Leo leans over to him, frowning as he flips through the stapled pages. “Is this normal?” he asks in an undertone. He stops at a pictograph of five different flight patterns for the average Iron Man suit and shakes his head, answering his own question. “No. This can’t be normal.”

“Quick question,” Annabeth says, and flips her packet around, showing the page to everyone around the table. “Is this something I really have to worry about right now?”

Jason scans the sheet. Annabeth’s packet warns her that extended bow use may lead to arthritis.

“Because that’s Hydra’s evil plan,” the archer goes on sarcastically. “Defeating me through slow, degenerative processes.” She rips out the paper, balls it up, and throws it in Hazel’s direction.

Hazel is unfazed. “You’ll find that each of the packets are personalized for your particular skill set--except you,” she frowns at Leo. “I gave you Iron Man’s. I thought for sure that Jason would go running to him for help like he always does.”

“When did I--no,” Jason declares. “Just no. Name one time I asked Percy for help. One.”

“That isn’t really the issue here,” Leo says. “The issue is that this pamphlet is under the impression that I am capable of withstanding Mach’s number air travel in nothing but my britches--which I am not.” He waves it at her pointedly. “This is completely useless to me.”

“That makes two of us,” Annabeth says, throwing down her own leaflet. “I know how to shoot my own bow. I don’t need this illustrated tutorial.” She says the last two words like they’re coated in slime and poisonous.

“Mine lists ‘killer cleavage’ as a secret weapon,” Piper complains. “What am I supposed to do, swing my boobs at the enemy?”

“If you’re all done griping,” Hazel rebukes, arching her eyebrows.

The table falls silent, once again amazing Jason at the power of a woman who stands five foot two in heels.

“Reyna alerted me to the Hydra threat just before you were dug out of the ice, Cap,” she continues, looking around at their attentive faces with satisfaction. “Since then, I’ve been gathering as much information as I can without letting them know what we know.”

Jason clears his throat. “What do we know, exactly?”

“Other than how to use the toilet without taking off a metal bodysuit,” Leo adds, wrinkling his nose.

Hazel bites her lip. “Not much,” she admits. “I was hoping that the four of you would have some ideas.”

“When you say ‘gathering information’,” Annabeth begins, leaning forwards in her chair to take a serious interest in the meeting for the first time, “does that mean you have the identities of potential or confirmed Hydra agents?”

“Well, yes,” Hazel says. “But there are too many for you to reasonably hunt down without months--or years, most likely--to do it. And even if you could, I don’t remember their names.”

“You don’t remember the names of the people likely to stab you in the back?” the archer asks incredulously. “Not even one?”

“I had a lot going on,” Hazel defends herself. “I’d like to see how sharp you are if something were to happen to Piper.”

Annabeth’s entire body goes still. Her eyes might as well be twin lumps of granite. She clenches the edge of the table with one, white-knuckled hand.

“What was that?” she asks, deadly soft.

Leo thumps the table with his fist. “Uh, let’s focus, people,” he says. “Levesque, you aren’t stupid--you put the info on the Hydra agents somewhere, right?”

“I didn’t,” Hazel shakes her head. “The Director did. She had a USB of all the data I gathered on Hydra.”

Jason jumps in at once, eager to be useful. “Is it this?” he asks, drawing the device Reyna gave him out of his belt, where he absentmindedly stuck it before chasing after the Winter Soldier.

Hazel looks at it and shrugs. “I don’t know,” she confesses. “They all look the same to me. We’d have to open it up and see.”

“There are a dozen computers in here,” Jason says. “That’ll only take a few minutes.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Leo breaks in. “Slow down, cowboy. We don’t know what that thing is, and Ra-Ra isn’t in any condition to tell us.”

“She said what it is,” Jason tells him impatiently. “A failsafe. She must have been referring to the information on it.”

“Or she could have been referring to the virus,” Leo says. Taking in Jason’s blank look, he prods, “The virus? The one that Percy Jackson designed to take out all of SHIELD’s systems? You know, that virus?”

“I’ve . . . never heard of that,” Jason says slowly.

“It’s a little more complicated than Valdez is making it sound,” Piper says. She keeps sending glances in Annabeth’s direction, but the other girl isn’t looking her way. “We didn’t explain it to you because we didn’t want you to be overwhelmed. It’s really not anything we have to be concerned about--and it’s definitely not something Reyna would just be carrying around in her pocket.”

“Actually, it sounds exactly like something she’d carry in her pocket,” Leo disagrees. “We’re talking about the same Director, right? My point is, her description of that USB leaves a lot of wiggle room as to what’s actually on it. It could be a bunch of harmless files. Or it could be a nasty virus that takes out all of the computers on this base--which I’m guessing nobody wants.”

He looks around, as if waiting for someone to stand up and declare that’s precisely what they want. Unsurprisingly, no one does.

“Okay then,” he concedes. “The USB stays out of our ports.”

“What about in another computer?” Piper asks. “If it isn’t connected to SHIELD, then the virus won’t take effect.”

“You’d need a pretty isolated computer,” Leo says. “SHIELD is everywhere, even on private laptops . . . not that people know that. I mean, we’re talking a fresh-out-of-the-box system that’s never connected to the Internet.”

“We can do that,” Piper declares. She looks like she’s about to say something more, but an agent comes along and takes Hazel by the shoulder, interrupting their meeting.

“It’s the Director,” he says, and Hazel rushes away.

Jason and the others watch her from where they’re sitting, the glass room and everyone inside it clearly visible. Reyna is laid out on a cot, stripped down to the tank top and underwear she had on under her baggy clothes. Without them to hide her injuries, Jason can see she’s a lot worse off than he guessed, even before the bullets.

She doesn’t move, which shouldn’t be so scary. Reyna spends a lot of time not moving; she’s the least fidgety person Jason knows. She’s always given him the impression of a rock--steady, unable to be dislodged from its position, and undeniably there. Her presence has been the only constant thing since he woke up.

Around her, three or four men in surgical scrubs bustle around, busy with tasks Jason doesn’t understand the purpose of. One lifts Reyna’s head before setting it back down. Another taps out a needle. One man circles her body with his fingers held out in a picture frame, as if he’s taking an imaginary shot of the moment.

Hazel comes in, bypassing the box of gloves and scrubs at the entrance, waving away the agent who tries to bring a set to her. She goes to Reyna’s side, pressing her palm to the other woman’s forehead.

Jason can see her lips moving, and the other agents’ heads turning her way, but he can’t hear what she’s saying, nor can he hear their replies. But whatever it is, it makes Hazel’s face crumple like a squashed cereal box. She shakes her head vehemently, backing away from Reyna’s body.

Then she looks to Jason, and he knows. He reflexively stands, Piper mirroring his actions. She reaches across the table to seize his arm. “Cap--” she starts, three shades of panic in her voice.

Annabeth is out of her chair fast enough to send it clattering to the floor, her boots slamming irreverently across the white tiles as she tears towards the Director. Jason’s watched her run before; controlled, every motion planned and designed to increase her speed, getting her precisely where she wants to go, whether it’s the other side of the crosswalk or the end of the obstacle course. This is not that run.

She crashes into an agent, shoves them impatiently out of the way; clumsily swerves to avoid a table, going too wide and almost losing her balance. She stumbles into the glass room, hitting the doorframe with both hands to slow herself before using them to launch her inside. Jason catches a glimpse of her face as she rounds the Director’s bed: there’s no sign of the composed, near-rigid expression that usually habituates her face.

Piper’s grip on his arm is tight, though that doesn’t unduly bother him.

There’s a huge difference, he thinks. A huge difference between being told over comm that the Director is missing and seeing her die right before him--just like there’s a huge difference between hearing all of his friends and relatives have passed away while he was sleeping and seeing Nico torn out of that cockpit, inches from his outstretched hand.

And, God help him, he’s thinking of Nico, of velvet eyes and snapping, snatching wind and being grateful that he wouldn’t have to live much longer than the sum of his entire world.

Jason wrenches his mind away from the memory. That was then. This is different.

But it’s no less sad, watching Hazel pull a sheet over Reyna’s body, her face pained. He bows his head out of respect, and Piper drops her hand from his arm, hugging her own body. Leo, still sitting, ducks his head down, looking like he wants to be anywhere else.

Jason doesn’t blame him. He feels like he’s intruding on a personal ceremony as Hazel and Annabeth tuck the sheet into the sides of the bed, moving in tandem as if this is something they practiced. He doesn’t know a whole lot about Annabeth’s history--and he knows even less about Hazel’s--but the two of them and the Director have always been close, their words and actions betraying years of connection. This might as well be a family gathering.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Piper echoes his thoughts. “Annie--” She clenches her jaw.

The indomitable Piper looks like she might be about to cry.

Jason circles the table and wraps her in a bear hug, something he normally would never consider doing. The Day-to-Day Piper he’s used to would throw him across the room for even trying. But this Piper does nothing but rest her head against his chest for a brief second before shoving him away.

“I’m okay,” she insists. “We just don’t have a lot of time. Something tells me that it won’t take long for Hydra to hear about this--and once they do, I doubt there’s a power on earth that could stop them from overtaking SHIELD.”

“We’re leaving?” Leo asks. “Now?”

“We?” Piper slants him a look. “Who said that you were invited?”

“Piper,” Jason warns. “We need him.”

“No, we--” she hesitates, looking between him and Leo. “Okay, fine,” she admits. “We probably do.”

Jason hands the USB to Leo. “Hang on to this,” he instructs.

Leo holds it between two fingers, like it’s hot. “You’re . . . giving me the failsafe? The potentially viral and highly classified and probably-shouldn’t-even-exist failsafe that Reyna entrusted to only you?”

Jason shrugs. “You seem like a good guy. I trust you.”

Leo looks dumbfounded. Piper, though her face is still a shade paler than Jason would like, manages to roll her eyes.

“He’s like that,” she says dryly. “It’s--what do you call it, Cap?”

“Intuition,” he replies. “It never fails.” It’s really the inner Nico in his head, bludgeoning him with common sense and insulting him in two languages, but he doesn’t need to share that. They already think he’s off his rocker.

“Is that a 1940s thing?” Leo wants to know.

“It’s a Jason thing. I’ve asked,” Piper says. “So are we ready to find a--what are we looking for, Valdez?”

“This is why you need me,” he mutters. “We need a non-internet--hold the phone.” He snaps his fingers, grinning. “I’ve had an idea.”

He gets up from the table and heads for the jet; nonplussed, Jason and Piper follow him.

Chapter Text

Sometimes--

Sometimes he thinks he’s on the very edge of knowing something that’s impossible for him to know, sometimes he thinks he might be able to grasp it if he strains hard enough, and sometimes he gets tired of trying and just lives.

It’s a nice, simple way to live.

He knows he had a before--there was a time when he was born, and was a child, and was a teenager, and was a man. But he doesn’t remember it and he doesn’t miss it.
He sleeps. He eats. He kills. And when he’s done, he lies down in a pretty plastic chamber and inhales ice and chemicals and his vision goes hazy and then he’s blinking himself awake and everyone’s wearing new hairstyles and funny pants.

Normal people don’t live like this. He knows that.

But the man with the pale hair, the one who told him everything he needed to know about the world, flipped some kind of switch in his brain so now he doesn’t care. He is, he does, that’s it.

“You won’t end like the others,” the man with pale hair explained once. “You did not begin like them, so you will not end like them.”

And then he subjected the Soldier to so much--to experiments and treatments and decades of murders and conspiracies and girls with tawny hair and many, many other things that he never fully recalls--and then the man went away and someone else took his place.

That man was the last person to really talk to him.

He talks to himself, in his head. He reminds himself to keep his hands steady, his target his primary focus. He challenges himself to track faster, kill cleaner, become the best because what else is there?

This is his purpose.

And maybe he had other things once, but this is what he has right now, and mostly when he talks to himself he winds up telling himself that he doesn’t feel one way or another about it because he doesn’t feel at all.

He believes himself, mostly.

Chapter Text

Leo babbles a lot of techy jargon that Jason doesn’t understand, his fingers flying across the dashboard of the SHIELD jet.

Piper translates.

“He shut off the Internet connection of the jet’s computers,” she says. “It’s basically useless now, but we can upload the USB into its drive without activating any potential viruses. And even if we do trigger a virus, it will be contained to this one machine. Right, Leo?”

The former STRIKE agent shrugs. “More or less right, with the exception that you’re pretty much wrong, but that’s fine. All you need to know is that I’m a genius and--woo hoo!” he crows suddenly, throwing his hands in the air. Jason doesn’t get the hoopla, but Leo seems pretty excited. “Where is your Jackson now?” he asks tauntingly. “Who’s the bomb?”

“What?” Piper demands. “What are you doing?”

“I just--you know what, nevermind,” Leo says. “It’s way over your head. Let me just--” he jimmies the USB into a port on the dashboard. Seconds later, a file window opens on the navigation screen.

Piper slides into the copilot’s seat, Jason hovering over her shoulder. She tentatively selects one of the files.

“Bam. List of Hydra agents,” Leo says. “Try another one.”

The next one is labeled Winter_Soldier_jpg. When Piper expands it, the only thing that comes up is a blurry, black-and-white photo from what looks like a traffic cam. A black-clad figure is chasing a car that Jason recognizes as one of Reyna’s. The time/date stamp in the corner puts the scene at this morning.

“Cool, or what?” Leo asks. “This has to be the drive that Hazel was talking about--the one with all of the info they’ve gathered on Hydra. Do you know what we can do with this?” He doesn’t wait for them to answer. “Everything. We can do everything with this.”

Piper highlights a file named “Octavian”.

“What’s this?” she asks. “Why don’t I like the look of this?”

Jason’s stomach clenches at the name. There’s no way it can be the same one, and yet--“Open it up,” he orders, leaning further over Piper’s shoulder.

“We should change your name to ‘Captain Bossy-Pants’,” she gripes, which Jason ignores because a)unproductive and b)he knows she’s just working through her grief in her own way; namely, by pretending she doesn’t have any.

Jason, meanwhile, subscribes to the school of Keeping Working Until the Feelings Don’t. It serves him pretty well.

The file isn’t long; it briefly summarizes Hazel’s attempts to trace the digital communications between ‘officer X’ and ‘Hydra base Z’.

“For a tell-all,” Leo complains, “this is awfully vague.”

It’s the end of the report that interests Jason, though. Hazel’s final conclusion is that she’s been sent on a rabbit trail, since the identity of the operator of ‘Hydra base Z’ is purported to be Octavian.

“Why does that name sound familiar?” Leo asks.

Jason grips the back of Piper’s chair. “That’s the man who experimented on me,” he says. “He headed the supersoldier program in the U.S., then turned around and gave all of our research to the Germans. He’s solely responsible for the Red Skull’s existence . . . and mine.”

“But he’s dead,” Piper says. “At least, that was what the Skull told us last year.”

“Oh, sure, trust the bad guy,” Leo says sarcastically. “I mean, he has no reason for lying to us, right?”

“Octavian was ancient when I knew him,” Jason puts in. “Whether the Skull actually killed him or not, old age would have done the job by now.”

“Apparently not,” Leo says. “Unless this ‘Octavian’ is a catfish.”

Piper looks at Jason, long enough that he feels a little embarrassed about it. Her eyes flick over his face, his body language, and whatever she sees there, it leads her to this conclusion: “We have to find this base.”

She reaches out, touching Jason’s hand briefly with hers. “You won’t be at your best if you’re worrying about this, Grace. Trust me--ghosts are the worst enemies, even if they only live in your head.”

“Sure, find the base,” Leo mutters. “No problem, I’ll just Google ‘known Hydra bases’ and see what comes up.”

Piper gives him an annoyed look, and he flexes his fingers.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I’ll disconnect the USB and go back into SHIELD’s mainframe. There’s bound to be some record of Hazel’s search on the system, I’ll start there. But it’ll take me a while. I’m an engineer, not a technophile.”

“You’ve been doing well so far,” Piper observes.

“I watch a lot of TV. You guys want to, I don’t know, go somewhere else? This is going to be boring.” Without giving them another glance, Leo goes back to the dashboard and starts closing the windows they opened.

Piper gestures for Jason to follow her out of the jet. “We should check in with the others,” she says, all business.

Jason, worried, catches her by the shoulder. “Are you okay?” He’s used to the idea of compartmentalizing, but she’s acting like nothing has changed, when everything has. That’s usually not a good sign.

She shrugs out of his grasp. “People die, Jason. It happens all the time.”

“Yeah . . . but . . .” he flounders, struggling with the vague notion that he should be coercing Piper into talking about her feelings. After this morning, he guesses, he thinks they should be close enough for that.

Evidently, Piper does not see it that way. “I’m going to look for Annie,” she says, heading away from the jet. “You should let Hazel know what’s going on.”

Jason watches her go, the reluctant words still stuck on his tongue. He has to admit, he doesn’t know how to help Piper. He barely knows how to help himself.

Looking around, he sees that they’ve already taken the Director’s body out of the medical room. The only person in there is Hazel.

“SHIELD is nothing if not efficient,” she says as he makes his way inside. She’s sitting on the white bed, her fingers clasped tightly around its sheets. Her short legs dangle over the edge like a child’s, unable to reach the ground.

Jason sits next to her. “They don’t waste time,” he offers.

She shrugs.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t really know . . . I don’t know what to say. This is just . . .” he hesitates.

Hazel ignores the silence, picking at the sheets with one hand. “Do you know what Reyna said, when we first found you?” she asks. “Everyone else was going, ‘I can’t believe it’, and ‘how is this even possible’, and that sort of thing, but Reyna? She walked up to you, where you were just lying there, slowly melting, and she put her hand on the ice block. She looked at you for so long, I was sure that her hand was going to freeze and fall off.”

She bites her lip. “And then she said, ‘thank God’.”

Jason hasn’t cried, not once, since waking up; but now he feels the beginnings of tears prickling in the backs of his eyes. He wasn’t even aware he could still cry.

“She thought I was a hero,” he says, and shakes his head. “Goodness only knows why.”

“Because you are,” Hazel replies, like it should be obvious.

“I’m superfluous,” he says. “You have Percy, and Piper, and Annabeth now. You have an army of Asgardians hovering somewhere above Nevada, ready to dive to Earth’s rescue at Magnus’s call. Sometimes I wonder why I’m even still alive.”

She releases her death grip on the sheets and takes his hand. “Jason, I say this in the most loving of ways--you need to get over yourself.”

“Hazel,” he says, startled.

“What?” she demands. “Do you think you have the market on self-pity? Do you think that any of us wake up in the morning and think, gee, what the heck is Grace still doing here? Here’s a hint--the answer is no. Don’t you remember what Reyna used to say? What she’d say if she was here now?

He shakes his head.

“The world needs Captain America,” she says.

Jason chokes back a laugh. Hazel’s right--the phrase was Reyna’s catchall. She would say that the world needs him, and then she would scowl and fix him with her one steely eye and command him to pull himself up by his bootstraps, soldier, because I didn’t thaw you out to sit around and angst.

“You know I’m right,” Hazel says fiercely. “You’re a good soldier, Jason, and a good leader--it’s hard to find both of those things in one person. But you are, and being irrelevant isn’t what’s got you all tangled up in knots.”

He eyes her nervously. “It isn’t?”

She smiles ruefully. “Of course it isn’t. You think I don’t know that heartbroken look on your face? I see it in the mirror every day.”

Jason feels a pang of guilt. Here he is, whining about feelings, while Hazel’s experiencing the worst day of her life all over again.

“I’m sorry--” he starts, and she holds up her hand, cutting him off.

“Don’t,” she says. “I got the cards, the letters, the flowers. Percy’s got me in Prada shoes for the rest of my life, and Piper actually calls me to chat. I know you’re all sorry, just like I know it isn’t your fault, any of you.”

“But still,” Jason sighs. “It hurts to lose someone you love.”

Hazel laughs, a sharp, bitter sound. “That’s a universal truth, Jason. We’ve all had losses--it’s the cost of war. Expecting other people to feel sorry for us because of it is ridiculous.”

The cost of war. The words remind him of Reyna’s declaration--it’s a long war they’re in, and someone has to think of the bigger picture. Jason wonders if, now that Reyna’s gone, the task will fall to Hazel. He can’t imagine such a big job resting on such small shoulders, but if anyone could pull it off, it would be her.

“My point is, if you want to be mopey because you feel like you don’t belong in this century, by all means, go ahead,” Hazel goes on. “You’ve earned a little sulk time after what you’ve been through. But if you’re actually mourning something--someone--else, then don’t hide it behind what you think people expect you to be upset about.”

“Piper told you about Nico,” Jason guesses.

Hazel shrugs. “Annabeth, actually. It might be the end of the world as we know it, but SHIELD is still SHIELD; people gossip.”

She takes in his expression, and sighs, taking his hand in both of hers. “Jason, listen. When . . . when I lost Frank, I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. I didn’t want to. And that’s normal, that’s just a part of grieving, but that’s me. I don’t have the interests of the whole world to consider. You--well, I’m sorry, but you do. You have to get through that, and the first step is to acknowledge what’s happening.”

Jason considers her words. He’s never heard Hazel sound so heartfelt, let alone prosy. She’s always been more of a just-the-facts-jack type of gal.

“I keep running,” he says. “I started, oh, seventy years ago, in a Hydra base. I started running after Nico, and I feel like I never really stopped because I haven’t caught him yet. I haven’t--I need to catch him. Except he’s dead, so I can’t, but if I stop it’s like I’m giving up on him . . .”

He trails off. He can’t quite explain the need he has to hold on to Nico. He doesn’t want to think about it. If he thinks about it, if he makes it real, he’ll be breaking years of habit. He’ll be messing up the whole imperfect coping mechanism he’s constructed.

“You want to stay exactly the same as you were when you knew him,” Hazel says gently. “I know that. It’s not an abnormal response. But--Jason, they aren’t coming back. Not your family, and not Frank, and not your friend. We can try to keep ourselves in emotional stasis forever, and maybe succeed, but what would the point in that be? You thawed out, Cap. But it takes more than that to say you’re really alive.”

Jason drops his hand, shaken by the words. Hazel slides off the cot, and turns for a parting remark.

“Do yourself a favor. When this is all over, when you and Widow have tricked and punched Hydra back into whatever dark hole they crawled from, slow down. Your body’s in the twenty-first century--give your heart the chance to catch up.”

Chapter Text

Jason’s certain that someone is playing a prank on him when he steps out of the jet.

It took Leo less than an hour to wrangle a location for the transmissions, which was suspicious to begin with, and now--

Now this.

“Everything okay?” Piper asks, jumping down after him and giving Leo a thumbs-up. The engineer acknowledges the gesture and slides the door closed, rippling the aircraft into stealth mode. To anyone on the outside, it now looks as though Jason and Piper are standing alone in the copse.

“This is . . .” Jason begins, but then shakes his head, words failing him. All he can think of is that it’ll be awfully hard to follow Hazel’s advice and move into the present if his past keeps jumping out at him like this.

The small, drab building in front of him is eerily familiar; here in the shadow of a stand of trees, sheltered from the highway half a mile away, he might as well be in 1942, his knees shaking like nobody’s business and his muscles burning like fire.

“Cap?” Piper taps him on the shoulder. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s me,” he says shakily. “I’m the ghost.”

She looks nonplussed. Well, he didn’t expect her to understand anyway.

He clears his throat, drawing on some of that good ole’ grit that he’s pretty sure he runs on these days, and says more steadily, “I trained in this base. This place made me . . . well, me. Captain America.”

Piper raises her eyebrows. “Do you believe in coincidences?”

Jason clenches his fists. “Not a bit.”

They move closer, past old spirals of barbed wire and the littered debris of a couple decades of use. The base is clearly still in use as a training field, if the rows of stuffed dummies and innocent-looking obstacle course are anything to go by. Jason remembers running laps around this copse until he felt like he was going to heave his lungs up with every gasping breath; but he also remembers getting stronger, building muscle the way he never could before.

The door is the same concrete slab it was before, the only change being the numeric keypad stuck to the side. The electric lock is old by SHIELD standards, but jarringly modern against the WW2 construct. Piper deftly reaches over and punches in a few combinations before landing on the right one. When Jason shoots her an inquisitive look, she just shrugs.

“I know stuff,” she says.

Typical Piper. Sometimes he thinks she holds more secrets than the Director herself.

He goes in first, encouraging the door open with his shoulder, wishing he’d thought to grab one of Piper’s Glocks before tearing out of the jet. He doesn’t know whether or not he’ll need to be armed--but that’s the point. He has no idea what’s ahead, and he’d rather be prepared. There’s no sign of anyone inside. The room is full of lockers and benches, the walls lined with pictures. The black-and-white face of the first director of SHIELD beams down at Jason from the far wall, and he goes over at once to pay his respects.

“Reyna says that you two had a . . . thing,” Piper offers, coming to stand beside him.

Jason reaches up to touch the glass, feeling a smile sliding, unbidden, onto his face. “Nah. It wasn’t like that.”

Cal, in that oversized army jacket that she loved, grins permanently back at him. Her hair, a silvery white in the photo, is twisted into a no-nonsense bun; he’s disturbed to find that he can no longer remember its precise shade. It isn’t important, really, but it still saddens him. Slowly, like this, he’ll begin to forget everything about those early days and his old life.

“She was a pistol,” he says. “That’s what we used to call girls like you.” He glances at Piper and grins. “Pistols, spitfires, that kind of thing. Little bombs, about to go off at any second.”

“Flattering,” she replies dryly. “It’s no wonder you couldn’t get laid.”

“I could,” he says indignantly. “I just . . . had other things on my mind.” Like Nico. But he’s better off not mentioning that. “Anyway, Cal was always too much into the war to be interested. It was like she had every piece of her life planned out, and she hadn’t left any room in it for a lover.”

“Like Reyna,” Piper says, soft for a second. He can almost see the sadness in her, now, but it quickly peters away. “Like all of us, right?”

Jason drops his hand from Cal’s picture. He wants to believe that Piper is wrong, but he’s seen the evidence. Even Hazel and Frank, who had managed to overcome the hazards of the job and go steady for an entire year, had been ripped apart, and looking at Hazel now, he sometimes wonders if it would have been better if she’d never agreed to go out with Zhang.

“What about Annabeth?” he asks.

For some strange reason, the expression that flickers across her face is the closest thing he’s ever seen to fear on Piper. “What about her?” she asks.

“She got out,” Jason replies, and Piper loses the panicked look.

“She got out of SHIELD, yeah, but look where she is now,” she says. “Basically doing the same thing, just for money instead of honor. You don’t quit this kind of life, Jase. It’s like the Mafia--there is no ‘get out’.”

On that cheery note, she begins to snoop through the lockers. “I don’t see any computers here,” she says.

“Naw, this is the soldiers’ kip,” Jason tells her. “At least, it was. It looks like Cal converted it into a briefing room of sorts--anyway, the interesting stuff was always kept downstairs.”

Piper pivots on her heel, taking in the entire room. “I don’t see a door,” she observes.

Jason smirks. “You think SHIELD invented covert ops?”

He scans the lockers, the stenciled numbers on each dull gray door. Was Cal’s twenty-three or twenty-four? His memory fails him, but as he examines them closer, he notices that one of them is already ajar.

He eases it open, and falls into another time warp. The locker is full of Cal’s things, left carelessly there as if she just stepped out this morning; a cueball helmet, shiny and untouched by age, a stack of messy files with labels in her hurried scrawl, yellowed newspaper clippings detailing the Jackson expo in the World’s Fair, the loss of Captain America to the Arctic, V-E Day, V-J Day. Her jacket still hangs on its peg.

Jason takes it down, the soft fabric crumpling easily under his hands. Something stiff in one of the pockets gets his attention, and he takes out the offending object; a photograph with her handwriting on the back: For the Captain!

He flips the photo over, and grins again. Nico and the Howling Commandos wave at the camera, their upraised and outspread hands a clear mockery of the Nazi salute.

Nico’s face, as always, tugs at his heart, but he slides the picture back into its place and reaches into the locker, fumbling around until he finds the hidden catch that he’s looking for. This is neither the time nor place for fond memories.

“Jason,” Piper begins, probably about to ask what he’s doing.

He pushes against the locker, and it swings back like a door, revealing a narrow passage just wide enough for him to squeeze through sideways. Piper reluctantly follows him.

Down, down; Jason doesn’t remember the basement being this deep, but maybe Cal or one of the other Directors had it modified. Whatever’s down here now, he doubts it’s what it used to be--a laboratory funded by Percy’s father, with the sole intent of creating a superman.

The passage widens, automatic lights flicking on as Jason and Piper venture into a room much larger than the one upstairs. Piper whistles. “Okay,” she admits. “I’m impressed.”

In front of them, an enormous computer console looms like a dark, slightly dated fortress, a good six or seven screens branching out from a motherboard the size of Jason’s torso.

Piper sits down at the sole desk chair, examining the assembly before her. “But still, this system is ancient,” she groans. “I think they might take floppy disks.”

“What are those?” Jason asks, and Piper just shakes her head.

“Never mind. My point is, this is the computer that’s been sending Hydra orders? I don’t think it can connect to Facebook, let alone--”

The computer screen directly in front of her flickers. Startled, Jason grabs her shoulder, cutting her off. “Did you see that?” he asks, more panicked than he’d ever admit.

“Yeah.” Piper reaches forwards and jabs a round button in the corner of the monitor. The screen lights up, showing a stream of 1s and 0s parading by like obedient soldiers. A sound like an army of irate mice begins chittering, making its way straight to Jason’s nerves.

Piper punches a few keys and frowns. “This thing isn’t working,” she observes. “Like, at all.”

As if responding to her words, the numbers stop scrolling, reverse direction, and then disappear completely. In their place springs up a pixelated face. Piper pulls back, her arms raised instinctively.
“Holy crap, that wasn’t me,” she blurts out.

Jason leans over her shoulder. “Hello?” he tries.

“Jason, this isn’t Blofis,” Piper tells him. “You can’t talk to computers from, like, the 90s and expect them to--”

“Hello,” the pixel face says. Well, its lips move and the automated, emotionless word comes from a set of external speakers mounted on either side of the monitor. “Who do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

It’s hard to tell, between the glitches in the sound and the tinny audio quality, but Jason thinks that the computer might be speaking with a German accent.

“I’m Mr. Marley, and he’s Mr. Scrooge,” Piper says. “Who are you?”

“The ghost of Christmas past,” the computer responds. Its speech is jerky and stilted, but Jason would still bet there’s a sarcastic tone to its voice. “My facial recognition scans identify you as: The Black Widow, Agent 5-5-2-8 and: Captain America, Agent 0-0-1. Your attempt at evasive humor is amusing, but not successful.”

“It has a sense of humor,” Piper mutters. Out of the two of them, she looks more surprised--all technology is mind-blowing to Jason, whether it’s from 1990 or 2012. He doesn’t make a distinction between the two.

“I am called Octavian,” the computer goes on. “I gather you would like to hear my story.”

“Not particularly,” Piper goes, jamming the power button again. Nothing happens. She looks at Jason, who shrugs.

“This isn’t the Octavian I remember,” he whispers to her. “I think someone built a computer simulating him.” At least, he hopes so. The real Octavian was a pain in the ass.

“I have control over all systems,” Octavian says. Jason’s pretty sure the thing sounds pleased. “You cannot shut me off.”

“Wonderful,” Piper says, to both of their statements. “Look, can we just skip to the part where you explain your evil plan? You’ve been sending commands to one of our agents--why?”

“Your agent?” the computer repeats back. “No, Widow. My agent. Hydra’s agent. You are all Hydra’s agents.”

“Funny, we probably should have changed our logo then,” Piper says lightly.

“You can joke,” Octavian declares. “But you cannot change the facts. SHIELD has been working for Hydra since its very formation.”

“Riiiiight,” she drawls. “We’ll just take your word for that.”

“You want proof,” Octavian states. “Then I will show you. I will tell you. In 1945 . . . after Captain America had a great fall,” it pauses. A tinny chant filters in from one of the auxiliary speakers: humpty dumpty sat on the wall, humpty dumpty had a great fall.

A series of images flashes up on one of the screens next to Octavian’s, showing various events; some that Jason recognize, others that he actually remembers, and some that are totally foreign.

Piper’s birth certificate. A metallic arm, encased in a felt-lined case. News clips of September 11, 2001. And December 16, 2001; a car crash. Percy’s father, grinning, announcing his acceptance of a Nobel Peace Prize. Random images, seemingly unconnected--but, if Octavian is to be believed, they all are.

“1945.” The slideshow stops, freezes on a grainy microfiche capture of a newspaper. The headline reads WAR WON, CAP LOST; beneath it is a truly horrible picture of Jason and Nico, barefoot and dirty and hardly older than fourteen and thirteen, respectively, sitting on the front step of the orphanage. “Let us rewind a few years. You tumbled into the sea, Captain, along with the Red Skull and your esteemed comrade, Nico di Angelo.”

“I remember what happened,” Jason says, through gritted teeth. This asshole saying Nico’s name is grating on his nerves. “I was there.”

“You believed that you had won,” Octavian goes on. “But the true fight had just begun. Over the next decade, as the first Director of SHIELD began to form the organization you know today, a new order formed with it. Your beloved SHIELD was built on the ashes of Hydra; and inside its ranks, the ashes of Hydra remained.”

“He’s waxing poetic,” Piper mutters to Jason. “I’m sitting in a World War Two army base listening to a 1990s computer simulate a German scientist and wax poetic. This is so not how I expected my day to go.”

“It is our true nature,” Octavian says, ignoring her--if a program can really ignore a person. “Cut off one head, and three more grow in its place. You cut off our Skull, Captain, but all you did was make room for his wiser and stronger heirs.”

“I beat you before,” Jason says. “I’ll beat you again.”

“Still, you do not understand,” the computer says. “How can you beat an enemy you cannot see? An enemy who has no face, no country, no leader--an enemy who lives, like a parasite, in the structure of the shield you hope to fight it with? Our mistake was to try to change the world by force. When they perceive their morals being tested, humanity will rise up with their greatest defenses. No--Hydra’s true form can only be in the mind, in the hearts of the nation. We realized that the only way we could win would be to persuade people to change themselves. And look how well that has worked.”

He runs through more images, headlines, video clips. It’s nothing Jason hasn’t seen before; Communist Asian countries, terrorist Middle East countries, that guy who sold FBI secrets on Ebay.

“Moralities have disintegrated,” Octavian says. “Loyalties have become muddy and weak. The powers of the world are weak, and SHIELD is the only constant. Your legacy has become a compass, Captain--and your legacy is riddled with your enemies. How, I wonder, will you survive it? Knowing that what you died for was in vain?”

“You don’t know what I died for,” Jason replies, his whole body tense. He’s heard a couple dozen long-winded bad guy speeches, but this one is somehow more galling than all the others. “You couldn’t possibly hope to understand it.”

“Nico di Angelo,” Octavian says, and the uneasy feeling in the pit of Jason’s stomach solidifies into dread.

“What about him?” he asks tightly. “Why do you keep mentioning him--what the hell does Nico have to do with any of this?”

“Everything.”

Nico’s face. They used to take one picture, after a fellow enlisted, so they’d have something to send home to his family if he didn’t make it. This must be Nico’s; Jason’s never seen it before. Jason didn’t live long enough after Nico died to see it.

“1945,” Octavian says. Jason’s beginning to think the thing has a glitch, it keeps returning to that year. “Hydra combed the sea for the Red Skull’s body, for the secrets it held. What they found was infinitely more valuable.”

Jason leans forwards with the next scene change, his heart wrenched in five different directions as strange, blurry photographs of a dark-haired boy jump onto the screen. He’s fighting against restraints, being injected with some strange fluid, throwing his head back--

The last image makes him gasp. The young man is unmistakably Nico.

“You experimented on him?!” he roars, forgetting that whatever happened was years past now, and beyond being relevant.

“I improved him,” Octavian says smugly. It’s pretty obvious, the smug. Jason’s almost convinced this is, impossibly, the mad scientist himself, the computer double is so accurate. “He was dying. We revived him. Could not save all of him, I am afraid.The arm had to go--a large part of his brain, too. Total amnesia, could not be helped.”

Nico with something glinting silver at his side, Nico with his face buried in an oxygen mask, Nico with his teeth pulled back in a snarl. Jason’s horrified and outraged at what he’s learning, but he soaks in the pictures nontheless because it’s the closest to seeing Nico again than he’ll ever get.

For the second time today, he thinks he might cry.

“You ruined him,” he says, his voice barely restraining its anger. “You took everything from him--even a dignified death. How could you?!”

“They’re bad guys, Jason,” Piper murmurs. Maybe she senses his growing fury. Or maybe she can just tell he’s mad by the dents he’s leaving in the back of her chair. “It’s what they do. But we need to know how to stop Hydra now, not relive what they did in the past.”

“Ruined him?” Octavian, surpassing all previous levels of creepy, lets out a mechanical chuckle. “I did not ruin him, Captain. I made him better. Faster. Stronger. Just like I did to you.”

“You--you gave him the serum--” Jason chokes out.

If only--he hadn’t crashed that plane--had thought for a second--had been able to figure out another way--if he’d been smart like Percy, like Zhang, like Piper, even--he could have been reunited with Nico in a matter of months, because Nico didn’t die.

Nico didn’t die.

He snaps the back off the chair Piper’s in, and she shoots him an alarmed look. “Cap--”

“What happened to him?” Jason demands of Octavian, ignoring her. “Tell me what happened to Nico di Angelo.”

“You mean to ask me, how did he eventually die?” Octavian asks. "This 'undignified death' you spoke of?"

Jason doesn’t reply to that, which is fine because Octavian doesn't give him the chance.

“Well, Captain, he did not,” the computer says. “I hate to inform you that your righteous anger is misplaced, but Nico di Angelo is alive to this day. I believe you met him already--the one they call the Winter Soldier?”

Chapter Text

all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put humpty together again.

Jason is--

And Nico is--

Alive.

And everything Jason is thinking and feeling and reacting to refuses to stay in that neat little box he tucked it in, and now is the absolute worst time to have a breakdown but he thinks that must be what this is.

Nico.

Alive. And the Winter Soldier, who killed Reyna, who Jason was mere yards away from this afternoon, who Jason could have caught if he was seconds faster, pounds lighter, weights stronger.

How is he supposed to feel about this?

He wishes someone would tell him. It would make everything a lot easier on him, being told what to do, because that was his role as a toy soldier; line up, shiny shoes, stiff collar, smile for the camera, and march march march. Be a good boy.

He’s not good; he’s just . . . wound up.

And--

Nico.

The name is a chant in his mind, so that he’s aware of little else. In his memory, he sees Nico fourteen and skinny, twelve and daring, sixteen and confident. He sees Nico’s hands, always one of his first memories, helping him up the torturous stairs to their apartment.

The pink corner of his mouth, the bony bend in his elbow, the outline of his ribs under his white nightshirt; Jason remembers all of these things as clearly as if it were yesterday. They’re the pieces he clung onto, for fear of losing anything else of Nico.

But now those memories are being shoved aside, replaced by Reyna’s body stretched out on a white bed, Annabeth’s tight, ashen face, Piper’s hand on her Glock.

Yes, Nico’s alive. But he’s doing all of these terrible things and Jason can’t begin to understand why.

The pain finally comes, more intense than he expected, a physical ache that’s even worse than the eight minutes Jason had to live while Nico was dead, on that helicopter decades ago.

He can feel himself slowing down, the teeth of what he’s running from nipping at his heels. In his head, Hazel says and Nico says and Piper says and the monster says: you can’t run forever. it’s not a crime for people to be . . . different. i love you, fratello.

It's gonna catch him. It's about to catch him.

Chapter Text

The man wearing an American flag is his next target.

The Soldier watches hundreds of videos about him--news footage and security cameras and a talk show interview that lasts ten minutes and only serves to teach him that this man is not good with technology, as detailed by his excruciatingly long story about failing to work a cell phone.

Pointless trash.

And if he rewinds the tape a bit, watches the recording again to study the man’s smile and the way he leans forwards as if he and his host are conspirators, there’s no way to prove it. He’s just being thorough.

The news stories show the man performing a wide range of acts, with only the theme of “reckless, unselfish, and stupid displays of heroism” connecting them. His behavior is unexplainable. His motives are unclear. The Soldier can’t figure out what the man gains from them--but, from his broad smile as he lowers a child into her mother’s arms, he obviously feels he gains something.

It’s baffling.

But everyone has a purpose, right? Maybe at some time, someone sat this man down and explained to him, like someone explained to the Soldier, exactly what his role is and how to fulfill it. Maybe there’s no reward in it, no reason, no incentive. He’s just doing what needs to be done.

The Soldier pauses the video, reaching out to the TV screen with his flesh hand. The screen is warm under his palm, and his hand completely covers the frozen figure.

That’s good, he thinks. His job, after all, is to make this man go away.

Chapter Text

“--get down!”

Jason comes around as Piper screams at him, tackles him like she’s a football player (which she is definitely not), and manages to knock him to the ground out of surprise alone.

BOOM.

He sees the explosion over her shoulder; the sudden billow of orange flame, the shards of melted plastic flying towards them in a maelstrom of projectiles. The heat slam into him like a yard arm, and his body reacts before his mind can catch up, flipping himself and Piper over so that it’s his enhanced, quicker-healing body sheltering hers.

He has no idea what’s going on; he supposes that’s what he gets for zoning out.

The heat sears into his back, his uniform fluttering like so much tissue paper, shrapnel ripping gashes along the length of his shoulderblades. He mutters every swear word in existence under his breath, and Piper buries her face in the front of his uniform, far less resistant to the heat and dust than he.

He doesn’t wait for things to quiet down. Once the initial blast is over, he’s on his feet, yanking Piper to hers, only knowing that he isn’t keen on staying in a place after it proves explosive.

They bolt for the door.

“SHIELD,” Piper pants, edging back through the narrow corridor they came. “Someone activated Octavian’s self-destruct protocol--he halted mid-rant, so it couldn’t have been him.”

“Someone knew we were here,” Jason says, squeezing after her. “One of the Hydra agents within SHIELD--maybe the one Octavian’s been communicating with?”

They tear out of the base, not liking the sound of rumbling that comes from it as they go, Jason’s back burning like fire as he absently slings Cal’s jacket over his
shoulders--they hit the grass--the second explosion blasts through the base, sending the front door hurtling scant inches over Piper’s head.

“This is officially the worst day ever,” she groans as they sprint back to the jet, hopefully clear of the danger zone.

Leo spins out of the pilot’s chair as soon as they enter. If he noticed the explosions, he hides it well. “Guess what I found out,” he declares.

“Nico’s alive,” Jason blurts out. The words practically jump from him, as if he was dying to say them aloud--and, he realizes, he was.

Leo frowns. “Uh, no. That’s not it. Who the hell is Nico?”

“He’s an old friend,” Piper says, shooting Jason a worried look. “We were hoping to exorcize those ghosts, Cap, not dreg them up again.”

“Okay, okay,” Leo says, waving his hands around. “Maybe that’s important, I don’t know. But you guys are really going to want to hear this.”

“What?” she demands.

“I sifted through the files that Reyna gave us,” he says. “The man that Octavian was basically ordering around for the past decade? It’s Bryce. From the Directorate. Explains a lot, huh?”

Jason has to admit, that news might take precedence over the Nico situation.

“You know who else is on the list? Rodriguez,” Leo declares. “Also Nakamura and--get this--Agent Castellan. Y’know, that guy who nobly died in the line of duty during the Samira attacks two years ago?” He snorts. “Not so noble, it turns out. He took out a hit on Jackson’s parents in ‘91, shut down their SHIELD research and delayed their weapons development by an entire decade.”

Jason doesn’t remember Castellan, but Piper’s face tightens, and she crosses her arms over her chest.

“Please,” she says quietly, “neither of you tell Percy about this.”

“What?” Jason asks.

“I’ve never met the guy, but isn’t that . . .” Leo begins, perplexed. “I mean, kinda underhanded? Not telling someone their parents--”

“Just trust me, okay?” Piper demands. “I know Percy, I’ve known him longer than either of you, and he would not take the news well. And since Castellan’s already dead, there’s really no point in inviting all of that trouble in. Okay?”

“Fine,” Leo surrenders. “Washing my hands of the matter.” He holds his hands up in demonstration.

Piper looks at Jason, who just shrugs. This is another example of Piper’s way of doing things; all secrets and no feelings. Maybe on another day he’d fight her about it.

But today: Nico. Nico, Nico, Nico.

She reads his thoughts on his face, which mustn’t be that difficult to do since he’s never made much of an effort to hide them, even when he probably ought to. “Cap, we don’t know that it’s really him. This could be a trick, or a trap--a ruse intended to mess with your head.”

“I know that,” he replies automatically, but inside, he’s already rearranging his thoughts, shaking up his reality again to configure it into a world that holds Nico once more. Piper’s words bring a few twinges of doubt, reminding him he shouldn’t jump to any conclusions, but the truth is, he doesn’t care if this is a lie.

Nico being alive gives him a reason to be himself again.

Leo flexes his fingers. “For anyone who still cares about the mission,” he puts in, “Bryce is representing the Directorate in D.C. tomorrow morning. We could corner him then and get a little more info on Hydra’s current plans.”

“In the most heavily guarded seventy square miles of the country?” Piper asks archly. “Sure, that sounds like a piece of cake.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Leo points out. “We have to know the extent of the enemy before we can face them, right?”

Piper scrunches up her nose. “Ugh. You have a point.”

Leo grins. “Hey, I’m not just a pretty face. So now that’s sorted, what happened in the base? Besides a whole soap opera?”

Piper sums up the events while Jason goes through the jet, pulling down the travel beds as he goes. The body of the aircraft is puny, compared to most of SHIELD’s transportation, but the cabin is still the approximate size of a luxury airliner. It doesn’t take long for him to reach a point where he can’t hear Leo and Piper anymore, which is good. He already knows what went on in the base--listening to it again might drive him insane.

Nico.

Alive.

His mind keeps returning to the fact, worrying at it like he’s good for nothing else, nipping at the pieces of his psyche that want to stay in happy, dark ignorance. He’s so preoccupied with not thinking about the things that he’s suppressed, he finds himself just staring at the last bed in the row, completely at a loss for what to do next.

“Hey, bro, beds are for sleeping, y’know?” Leo prods, coming over. “And I know it’s only--” he looks at his watch, “--six in the evening, but you’re going to want to catch some zzzs at some point.”

“Not right now,” Jason decides. He glances down the rows of seats at Piper, who’s settled back into the copilot’s chair. “Hey, Widow?” he calls. “Are we camping here tonight?”

“With the spontaneous exploding base behind us?” she responds snarkily. “Yeah. Sounds cozy.”

“Then I’m going for a walk,” he says.

She throws something tiny and plastic at him, and he catches it out of reflex. “Take a comm with you,” she instructs. “Just in case. I’d tell you to take your shield, but apparently you forgot it back at the Triskelion.”

“It’s been a long day,” he complains. “You can’t expect me to remember everything.”

Leo observes the two of them, looking as engaged in their verbal exchange as any sports match. “I’ll go with Grace,” he volunteers. “I could use a little air.”

Piper just waves her fingers at them. She’s pulled up a game of Spider Solitaire on the dashboard and is engaged in beating EyeoftheHawk’s high score.

“You didn’t have to come,” Jason says, once they’re outside.

Leo kicks at the grass. “Translation: you didn’t want me to come.”

Jason doesn’t argue with that. “I wanted to be alone,” he says. “I don’t think that’s outrageous.” He wasn’t lying when he said it’s been a long day--he could use some time to clear his head.

The other man runs his hands through curly hair, not exactly contradicting Jason, but not looking like he agrees, either. “Piper says you have a lot of trouble letting go,” he observes.

“Wh--I do not!” Jason denies.

“What’s that you have there?” Leo asks, gesturing to Jason’s hands. “Something you forgot you were holding on to?”

Jason looks down at the jacket in his grip, honestly shocked that it’s still there. “I picked this up at the base,” he says, giving it a once-over. It’s a good, sturdy jacket, with the logo of the Howling Commandos on the back of it. “It reminds me of a friend.”

“The same friend who’s miraculously alive?” Leo wants to know. “Nico, was it?”

Hearing his name in someone else’s voice is startling. Jason didn’t think there was another soul alive who’d ever say Nico’s name again; unless they were referring to a pop singer or a One Piece character. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, not after the day he’s had, but it is. It’s a whopping big deal.

Instead of acknowledging or in any way justifying that, Jason tentatively lifts his arms and slips on the jacket.

Leo makes a noise of protest. “You’ve still got a lot of wounds, there,” he objects. “We need to treat those, not cover them up.”

“I’ll be fine in a few hours,” Jason fibs. He flexes his shoulders, just barely keeping himself from shuddering. “See? Fine.”

Leo shakes his head in mock despair. “So this is your shtick, am I right? Being the big damn hero? Always the noble and true?”

Jason thumps the symbol on his chest, which is as obnoxiously red, white, and blue as ever. “This stands for something. And I stand for it.”

They stare at each other for a beat before Leo starts laughing. He chuckles, a bow smile stretching his thin lips, and looks at Jason like he might look at a friend, at someone he really likes.

“You’re interesting,” he declares. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about Jason Grace, but honestly? I thought they were just stories. I thought, nobody can actually be like that. It’s too . . . cartoony. But, hell if you aren’t larger than life itself.”

Jason hopes that’s a compliment.

“I know your personal life isn’t any of my business,” Leo says. “But . . . well, I like you, I guess. I know what it's like to lose someone you love. And yeah, maybe you hold on to things too long, but at least you have something to hold on to. It’s better than having nothing at all.” He shrugs. “That’s my two cents, anyway.”

“Thanks.” Jason sits on the ground, the motion making something rustle in his pocket. He reaches inside and pulls out the photo he absently stuck in there back in the base.

Leo cranes his neck to see. “What’s that?”

“The Howling Commandos.” Jason’s lips tug into a smile without his consent. “Back in the war, there was this special ops group of soldiers--troublemakers, mostly, but punks who were so good at what they did that Uncle Sam couldn’t afford to be rid of them. My old pal, Nico, he was the head . . . until he got captured. Then I took over for a while.” He shakes his head. “It took me seven months to find him. I tore through every damn Hydra base in the country. And still . . .”

He stalls. He hates thinking about that time, hates thinking that if only he’d spent less time furthering wartime propaganda, he might have been able to get over there sooner and prevent Nico from being captured in the first place.

He clears his throat. “Anyway, these guys were like family. This must have been taken while I was still stateside; I don’t remember a photographer in my days. It had gotten too bad for civilians by then.”

He passes the photo over to Leo, who gives it a cursory glance before giving it back. “They look like bums, no offense.”

Jason laughs. The sound surprises them both. “There are no showers in foxholes.”

He runs his finger down the line of faces, and stops at Nico’s thin, familiar one. “This is him. Nico.”

Leo looks, and whistles. “I’m no poof, but he’s pretty good-looking. Uh, that’s what you called them, right? Poofs?”

“What?” Jason looks over at him, perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

Leo cocks an eyebrow. “Okay, here in the twenty-first century, we have this thing called gaydar,” he explains. “And your ‘old pal’ Nico? He’s setting mine off.”

Jason’s had a long day. He’s been chased, beaten, evaded, and shouted at. Nearly every understanding he has of the world has been challenged--but he knows one thing is as true as it always has been, as it’s been since this morning with Piper, and that is: “Nico was not gay.”

Leo doesn’t look convinced.

“I grew up with him,” Jason insists. “I would know if he was a homosexual.”

He ignores the tiny sliver of doubt. That’s just his own wishful--nope. No. Not going there. Not thinking those things, not remembering those dreams, not deviating from the star-spangled path of All-American Goodness.

He gets to his feet, pocketing the picture. The sun has started to set while he and Leo talked, and it’s getting chilly. “I’m going to get some sleep,” he says. “Like you said, I need it.”

Leo scrambles to a stand, his typically cheerful face darkening into a frown. “Hey, Cap--” he starts.

“I’ll see you in the jet,” Jason cuts him off, and climbs back inside.

NO, he firmly tells his subconscious. Settle back down.

Chapter Text

Jason zips up Cal’s jacket, wishing it did a better job of hiding his tattered, unmistakably patriot blue uniform, and pulls Annabeth’s ball cap down lower over his eyes. He was lucky enough to find the thing wedged in one of the jet’s seats, but all it will take is one strong wind and he’ll be outed.

He’s jumpy in the crowd, flinching every time someone brushes by or bumps into him, convinced that he’s about to be swarmed by Hydra or SHIELD or both or some new terror.

“Steady,” Piper warns in his ear, and his eyes automatically jump to the rooftop he knows she’s stationed herself on. “And don’t look this way!” she scolds.

“Don’t let her throw you,” Leo cautions. He’s hovering by a newspaper stand nearby, pretending to down a chili dog. “I’ve heard her bark is worse than her bite.”

“I was the one who told you that,” Jason mutters, but hearing them soothes his nerves. He’s not looking forwards to apprehending an undercover Hydra agent in plain sight, on the steps of the Hart Senate Building with approximately six hundred witnesses and a distinct lack of a vibranium shield, but at least he has backup.

“I see him,” Piper declares, seconds before Jason spots Bryce coming out of the building. The man looks around, adjusts his suit tie, and jogs down the steps. His hair, slicked back, shines in the morning sun. He looks like every other executive taking a fifteen minute break from work, except Jason’s seen him in a bulletproof vest and murderous, so he knows better.

Jason goes over the plan in his mind one last time, quick and simple, and strides up to Bryce, clasping the man on the shoulder. Bryce starts, and Jason tightens his grip, angling his head so that his face is visible, but only to Bryce.

“Hi,” he grins. “I think it’s time we have a chat, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you want,” Bryce says tightly, “but I can assure you, SHIELD--”

“Is probably the last thing on your mind,” Jason interrupts. “Now look to your right. See that guy over there, eating a hotdog?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Leo give a two-fingered wave.

“He’s armed. I’m not going to tell you how--I’ll leave that up to your imagination. And you remember my friend, the Black Widow, right? She’s around here somewhere. You can’t see her, but don’t worry. She can see you just fine.” Jason releases Bryce’s collar, and slings an arm around his shoulders. “You don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell against the three of us, so I wouldn’t fight me if I were you.”

“You’ve gone insane,” Bryce declares. “Captain, let SHIELD help you--”

Jason grips the back of the man’s neck. “Hydra, Bryce. We know you’re working for them. Tell us their plan and I’ll reconsider snapping your spine in the next five minutes.” He looks around, chuckling like Bryce just said something particularly clever.

“I think he’s right,” Piper says. “You’re giving off distinctly unstable vibes right now.”

He ignores her. “I’m not hearing a lot of talking, Bryce.”

“You’re in over your head,” Bryce mutters. “You think I’m the guy to be frightened of? Hydra is bigger than you realize, Grace. We’re everywhere. And there’s no way that--”
“He’s not listening,” Jason declares. “Leo, I think you should give him a little incentive.”

He hears Leo snicker. “You aren’t going to be sorry about this, boss,” the STRIKE agent cackles, and launches into the air.

Jason’s seen a lot of wacky things in his life--between Percy’s tin can suit, the Red Skull’s mangled physiology, and, of course, the legendary gods over Nevada--but he has to admit that Leo still managed to take his breath away back at the base. Of all the things for the guy to be packing under his ratty green jacket, wings would have been the last on Jason’s list.

The mechanical structure unfolds from Leo’s back like--well, like wings spreading on a bird--the solar panels glinting as they extend. Jason had been skeptical that something so clunky would work, but he should have known better. After all, Leo’s been working on this for eight years.

“I am the super-sized mcshizzle,” Leo crows, loud enough that Jason doesn’t need an earpiece to hear him. Just about every head in the street cranes up, disbelieving, to see the man with the winged jetpack soaring over a Senate building.

He does a perfunctory circle, like a bird of prey getting ready to dive, and swoops down, seizing Bryce from Jason’s grasp. Jason has to duck as one of Leo’s razor-thin wing blades almost takes off his head; the draft knocks off his cap and rustles his hair.

“Woo hoo!” Leo shouts, reminding Jason uncannily of Percy. He doesn’t seem bothered by the wriggling Hydra agent in his grasp.

Jason sprints into the Senate building, ignoring the startled receptionist and astonished PR crew as he dashes through the lobby and into the fire stairwell. He tears up the staircase, hearing a few half-hearted shouts behind him and one shocked, “Wasn’t that Captain America?”.

Four flights later, and he’s bursting out the maintenance door in time to see Leo drop Bryce, not too gently but from a survivable height, onto the concrete roof. Jason stalks over and seizes Bryce by the collar before he can stand on his own.

“Ready to talk now?” he asks.

“Y-y-y-” Bryce stutters.

“He’s ready,” Leo confirms, perching on the roof ledge and looking entirely too comfortable with the position. His body is taut, ready to fly off again if needed.

Jason can really see the benefits of this wing-pack business.

“Okay, let’s start with the beginning,” Jason tells Bryce. “The Winter Soldier kills the Director. Then what?”

“Th-then we would be free to launch Project Insight,” Bryce stammers out.

The phrase twinges something in Jason’s memory. Right before the Soldier had attacked, Reyna had said she had to tell him about Project Insight. “What is that?” he snarls.

Bryce smiles. “You know? I don’t really feel like talking after all.”

“You aren’t in a position to decide that!” Jason exclaims, shaking Bryce violently.

“Cap--” Leo warns.

“Jason, look down,” Piper commands, cutting him off. The urgency in her voice is enough to get Jason to drop Bryce and cross to the edge of the roof. Down on the street, he sees that the efficient commotion of a D.C. morning has turned into panicked, disorderly hysteria.

“What’s going on?” he demands.

“Your friend is causing trouble,” she tells him. “And I’m going to shoot him in three seconds if you don’t get down there.”

Jason whirls on Bryce. “You--” he accuses, only to find he’s talking to an empty roof. He shoots Leo an accusatory look.

Instead of replying, Leo flips off the roof edge and dives into the air, careening for the ground below.

Jason has to take the stairs.

Chapter Text

If the screaming is anything to go by, Jason’s in for a real treat as he clatters out the fire exit and rounds the Hart Building. Leo’s already on the ground, jetpack tucked back under his jacket, screaming directions at the mob like that will help. Maybe half of the terrified people listen to him, fleeing away from the building and down the less-packed C Street--everyone else is charging in all directions, so long as it’s away from what Jason’s running towards.

With a machine gun pointed dramatically at the sky in his right hand and a pistol in his left, the Winter Soldier that Jason chased down in Brooklyn stands in the middle of the street. Cars swerve to avoid him, narrowly missing pedestrians, slamming into road blocks and lamp posts, horns blaring. Every few seconds, he levels his Sig Sauer at a civilian, his shot glancing off the side of their shoe or knocking a newspaper out of their hand. The tactic brilliantly achieves two goals: 1. inspiring the crowds to disappear even faster, therefore leaving plenty of room for a cowboy-style showdown, and 2. inspiring Jason to push his body past the limit of reasonable speed, with the sole mission of stopping all of this reckless shooting.

It takes no more than a few seconds to travel from the building’s back exit to the corner of 2nd and Constitution, but it’s long enough for Jason to go through a spectrum of emotions, beginning with panicked and running through just about every other one from there. He’s conflicted, nerve-wracked, elated, anguished, uncertain--all in the space of a blink.

If it’s Nico, what’s he going to do?

It it’s not Nico, what’s he going to do?

“I have sights on him,” Piper tells him. “I’m taking a head shot.”

“NO!” he barks, louder than he meant, far more emotional than he should. If this is Nico--even if he’s brainwashed, if this is Nico--

Piper curses, and a volley of shots pepper the pavement where the Soldier had been standing, until Jason’s shout tipped him off. “Why did you do that?” she roars in his ear.

Jason, praying she doesn’t decide to shoot him, too, tears the comm link out of his ear and tosses it to the side, still pelting towards the Winter Soldier.

When the Soldier whips to face his direction, he realizes a serious flaw in his defenses; his shield, which has always ensured he never worry about piddling things like bullets, is miles away. And unlike Magnus’s hammer, it doesn’t have the magical ability to fly back into his hand.

He skids behind the nearest overturned car for cover. His opponent isn’t dumb enough to shoot at him anyway, but when he reaches up to angle the side mirror to see the Soldier’s approach, he narrowly misses losing a few fingers.

Okay, Grace, he tells himself. This is the part where you come up with a plan.

But Jason? Not really a plan type of fellow.

He rips off the car’s passenger door and throws it up as a makeshift shield, peeking around it to see that the Winter Soldier is still coming closer, ignoring the straggling few pedestrians, gaze intent on Jason alone. He holsters the Sig and raises his M4A1 to his shoulder, lining Jason up in his sights.

Jason ducks behind the car door, grimacing as the bullets hammer his faulty protection, leaving dents on his side of the door. He won’t last long this way.

This is usually the part of the battle where either Piper or Percy swoops in to save his ass, or he does something incredibly dumb that would get any normal human being killed. He pauses a moment to make absolute sure that Iron Man isn’t about to dive in with his handy laser beams--and, of course, he doesn’t because it’s Percy and that would be actually helpful and not just annoying--and then tosses his shield to the side, committing himself to the path of moronically reckless heroism, which is practically his religion by now.

“Stop!” he yells, throwing his arms to each side like the messiah of his newly created cult. “I don’t want to fight you!”

The Soldier pauses, not startled, but taken a little aback. His gun lowers fractionally, giving Jason a better opening than he could have hoped for.

Gritting his teeth and wishing Octavian had thought to make him bulletproof, Jason leaps over the car, diving towards the Soldier to wrench the gun out of his hands, sending them both tumbling to the pavement. He fights for control of the weapon as the Soldier grabs his arm in a tight, superhuman grip.

“Weren’t--strong enough--like that--” Jason pants out. “They just--had to give you--a freaking metal arm--”

The body writhing under him is strong; not really a surprise since Jason has no trouble believing this man is a super-soldier, it’s just the Nico part he’s a little fuzzy on; a snake’s nest of muscles he doesn’t remember his friend having, contouring and flexing in ways that Nico’s body didn’t. In between the violent bucking and thrashing as the Soldier tries to throw him--when did this turn into a bull fight?--Jason tells himself that the frame is all wrong, that the serum doesn’t change bone structure, and no, his memories aren’t fogged by years on ice at all. He can trust his instinct that this isn’t Nico, even if the instinct is nothing but poorly concealed desire.

The Winter Soldier catches him in the jaw, the first opponent in years to send him spinning, Popeye-style. Jason involuntarily lets out a howl of pain as he skids on his back across the pavement, agitating his already wounded back. Sure, his skin looks less like the incendiary surface of Mars than it did yesterday, but it’s nowhere close to healed. And now he has a matching jaw fracture to go with it; he works his mouth for a second, nudging the socked area with his tongue and swallowing the urge to spit blood and what feels like a tooth out onto the street.

He gets to his feet, fractionally slower than usual, and the Soldier draws his pistol out of his belt. Jason hears the pop-pop-pop like a barrage of firecrackers; he moves out of blind terror, rather than any remembered training. Something his commander told him comes back with surprising clarity, as if he just heard the words a second ago: “If someone’s shooting at you, lad, there isn’t a strategy in the world that can save you. You just gotta run, and pray, pray, pray. Not much else you can do.”

He dives to the side, overshooting his own legspan and falling into a somersault that gives the Soldier enough time to re-aim. He seriously misses his shield--for about the eleventh time--as he kicks out, hoping to sweep the assassin’s legs out from under him.

It’s like hitting a pair of trees, and the shock of it nearly does Jason in. The Soldier stares down at him impassively, and Jason is as good as dropped.

The man takes advantage of his hesitation and knees him to the ground, planting one foot on his chest and thrusting the Sig into his face.

Jason wheezes. He’s a teenager again, withered up like a dying apple tree and completely helpless, taking a beating the only thing he’s good at. He’s gone up against some powerful forces, and been terrified of more than a few of them, but he’s never felt like this; like he might not have a chance at winning.

Because there’s no Nico to come tearing in and save him from the bigger bully, and there’s no Reyna to call in the cavalry and he threw his comm away so he can’t even ask Piper for help--it’s just him, and this man, who can keep him down with a single boot.

He flails his limbs like a beetle stuck on its back, unable to reach any part of the Soldier. He grabs the assassin’s ankle, attempting to wrench it off him, but without leverage, and with that steel toe cutting into his windpipe, his chances are slim; especially with the neat, round hole of the pistol’s barrel staring him straight in the eye.

“Nico--” he chokes out.

But it isn’t Nico, by now he’s sure. Because there’s no way he’d be less than six feet from his former best friend and not know it. There’s no way that he’d be able to scrutinize those coal black eyes, and furrowed thin brows, and long, shaggy hair and find no trace of Nico whatsoever in them, unless the man standing here isn’t, in fact, Nico.

The overwhelming and sickeningly familiar feeling of not being able to breathe is quickly taking precedence in his mind over the identity of the Winter Soldier. Because if the man isn’t Nico, then Jason really couldn’t be fussed as to who he is--the sick bastard is going down, provided he doesn’t send Jason to the farm first.

The constriction in his chest--the pressure on his lungs--he used to live this way. It’s been a while, but he hasn’t forgotten the feeling of waking up, drowning on dry land, of Nico’s cool hands soothing his sweaty forehead, of the wet clothes piled on his chest, supposed to help but only making things worse. He hasn’t forgotten the days when he would have to pause halfway up the stairs to the apartment, or stay indoors for two months during hay season.

It’s a relief to know that he isn’t as far from how he used to be as he thought; that the power behind the strength he has doesn’t come from any chemical compound or training program. It’s always been in him--he just needed the right vessel to release it.

And he isn’t going to let this shadow copy ruse of a soldier win, by Jove.

(Yeah, Piper, he thinks defiantly. I said it.)

He seizes the Winter Soldier’s ankle again, not trying to throw the man off anymore, just . . . gripping. He squeezes as hard as he can, feeling the tear of leather, the hard bone beneath, and digs his nails in. He’s never tested the limit of his strength--he can confidently toss a man across a room or pull a car from the side of the road--but what he can break? He has no idea. He’s about to find out.

The Soldier pulls the trigger of his gun--it happens so quickly, Jason doesn’t register it happened until after the fact, when the man is repeatedly clicking the trigger and then tossing the Sig Sauer away in disgust. No bullets.

Jason can’t help himself--he grins, twisting his shoulders to unseat the man’s foothold and yanking his leg to the side at the same time.The Soldier falls, and Jason abruptly has the upper hand.

He seizes the front of the assassin’s bulletproof vest, draws his fist back, and whales him in the face--an eye for an eye, he remembers Piper says, and bites back a manic laugh. Maybe he has gone a little crazy. Can anyone blame him?

“You screwed my head around,” he snarls, pounding the Soldier again, and again, not giving him a chance to recover. “Let me return the favor.”

The Soldier lashes out, his prosthetic arm meeting Jason’s next punch in a block that feels like it breaks Jason’s knuckles. The strength behind it is incredible--Jason would be impressed if he wasn’t about to be toast.

They shove away from each other in unison, Jason tripping back over the abandoned car door, one hand going to the ground for balance. The Soldier, crouched on one knee, rips the mask away from his face and spits out blood, thick hair hanging over his face in waves. Jason hears him cough dully.

Leo crashes into the assassin from the left, his silvery wings glinting as they slash through the air. Jason raises his arm to shield from the resulting wind, swearing loudly.

“Where the hell were you?” he demands.

“You’re welcome,” Leo tosses over his shoulder, attempting to whip the Winter Soldier into a nearby building. Unfortunately, his passenger is a little clingier than Bryce, refusing to be thrown. Both of their bodies buck from the struggle, Leo pinwheeling wildly as he tries to stay aloft.

Jason springs to his feet and leaps into the air, latching onto the Soldier’s legs.

“Whoa, whoa, toooooo much weight!” Leo howls, dipping close to the ground. He reaches over his shoulder and switches off the jetpack somehow, his wings snapping back into the metal case. Jason can’t begin to fathom how the device works--all he knows is that he’s falling, again.

Falling.

He slams into the ground before he can do much more than register the word, the Winter Soldier heavy on top of him. He blindly grapples for the other man’s throat, or arm, or anything to keep him from rolling away, but the assassin breaks free and somersaults to his feet.

Jason rises to a crouch, head snapping up to be ready for the assassin’s next move.

And then he just . . . shuts down.

His mind still works, yes, but the signals it keeps sending to his body--move, dagnabit, move--aren’t going through.

Because Nico--

Because Jason, because Jason couldn’t save him--

And Nico--

But it’s not possible, he already decided it--

Doesn’t change the fact that Nico--

--is staring back at him, blank-faced, body tense, an arm and a soul less than when he was snatched out of a helicopter cockpit in front of Jason’s eyes. It’s Nico. It’s absolutely Nico. To hell with the body and the hair and all of the petty reasons Jason cobbled together to convince himself it couldn’t be Nico; there’s no explaining away that face. There’s no pretending that the face he knows better than his own, that he grew up never more than a few feet away from, isn’t the same face that the Winter Soldier wears.

It’s an eternity before his body works again, before he can part his swollen jaw and lick his chapped lips and croak, in a voice thick with pain and confusion and unbearable heartbreak, “Nico.”

Confusion flits over Nico’s face, his posture slackening. He wipes a trail of blood from the corner of his mouth with the pad of his palm, and a couple thousand volts of electricity jolt through Jason’s heart. The gesture is so human, so Nico, that he’s sure his old friend is about to reappear in this warlike guise.

Instead, Nico says, not quite tonelessly, “Who?”

Jason doesn’t know what a broken heart feels like. But it sounds a lot like that word, and it looks a lot like Piper vaulting over Leo’s collapsed body to ambush the Soldier, seizing his shoulders and flipping over his head in an attempt to throw him. He grabs her waist while she’s still suspended in the air, twisting his body to hurtle her into a nearby car.

Jason wills his body into action.

His body refuses.

No shield, no Reyna, and Nico. Just . . . Nico. The past forty-eight hours have been rough, but the past three minutes have shut him down completely. Everything he has screams it out: NO.

Not this. Anything in the vast, limitless multiverse but this.

“Cap!” Piper yells. “A little help?”

His concrete head shifts on its roughly jointed neck, eyeing her like an alien lifeform. Help? Yes--help. He has to save the day.

Right.

He’ll get on that.

Nico and Piper’s spat filters through his brain as a series of motion entirely unconnected to him. He notes Leo, rising from the ground, and observes the two-on-one match dispassionately.

He doesn’t move until Piper jostles his shoulder, tearing past him. Running? Piper, running from a fight?

“Get your ass in gear, bro!” Leo shouts, swooping overhead. “The suits have shown up!”

Confused, Jason tears his eyes from Nico to see a squad of STRIKE agents charging up the street.

Well. That’s not really good, is it?

Jason looks back at Nico, who isn’t chasing Leo and Piper, isn’t attacking him, isn’t doing anything except stare right back, as motionless as Jason himself.

His mouth moves, and it’s only because Jason knows it so well that he can pick out the word rolling out of it--who?

And, Jason thinks, the Soldier isn’t asking who Nico is anymore. He’s asking who he is.

Chapter Text

That man’s face is burned into his mind.

The Soldier can’t remember how to make himself breakfast most days, doesn’t have a prayer in hell of recounting a childhood memory or even what happened last week; he does what he’s told, believes what he’s told, and that’s enough. But this broken brain of his, which allows names and dates to sift through its holes to be lost forever, seizes onto that face and refuses to let go.

“Who was he?” he asks his handler, who is in a bad mood. This handler, unlike the Soldier’s first, is always in a bad mood.

“Your target,” the handler replies impatiently, straightening the lapels of his suit and pushing a few buttons on his cell phone. “We talked about this yesterday, remember?”

Remember?

No. He has trouble with that.

“He looked familiar,” the Soldier says. He’s confused. He knows the man, really knows him, and the man knows him back. The man called him Nico.

“You spent all of last night researching him,” the handler replies, bringing the phone to his ear. “I should hope he did.”

It wasn’t that kind of familiar, the Soldier wants to protest, but he knows better than to disturb the man while he’s speaking to someone else.

“Yeah, he tried,” the handler says. “I set the weapon on him. He doesn’t know anything.”

Pause. The handler glances at the Soldier. “We could use a pickup. Someone here needs a little reconditioning. Yeah. He is.”

They’re talking about him. He hardly pays attention.

The man from the bridge--the man from the videos--the man wearing an American flag--the Soldier’s thoughts, usually so sporadic, keep returning to him. And there must be something wrong with him because he keeps picturing images that never happened on the bridge, seeing the man doing things that make no sense in this life; snapping on a pair of suspenders over a weak chest, bent over a ream of paper with a stick of charcoal in his stained fingers, beaming happily at him.

“Jason,” he says aloud.

His handler glances at him, still talking into the phone. “It’s been almost a week since he was under. It’s wearing off,” he says, and then, "Hurry."

Chapter Text

“Project Insight,” Jason barks over the radio at Hazel. “Tell us.”

His demand is met by the same fuzzy static that occupied the channel before he sent out his question, and he shoots a look at Piper, casually sprawled in the copilot’s seat beside him. She shrugs, tearing open a package of beef jerky.

“It’s the end of SHIELD as we know it,” he says. “What better things does she have to do?”

“Gee, let me think about that,” she responds. “Organizing the agents we have left on our side? Orchestrating some kind of retaliation that doesn’t rely on an emotionally retarded super-soldier and his bickering sidekicks? Or how about, I don’t know, burying our Director?”

“You can scrap the smart remarks,” he orders. “This is a security crisis, not your Friday night movie marathon with Hawkeye.”

“Oh? Is that so?” she counters. “Because I could have sworn I was watching a terrible rehash of Romeo and Juliet just now between you and our mortal enemy.”

“He’s not our mortal anything,” Jason growls. “He’s--” but he hasn’t decided what to make of Nico yet, so he can’t finish the sentence. “Anyway, I don’t take to you judging him so quickly.”

“He killed the Director,” Piper says. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“He’s my friend,” he defends. It sounds like--probably because it is--a pathetic line of reasoning, weak as water and twice as wet. “What if it was me? Would you just write me off as a murderer?”

“Yes,” she tells him flatly. “And I’d expect you to do the same to me. That’s just how this world works, Jase.”

“It’s not how my world works,” he says. “There has to be a way to . . . I don’t know, help him.”

“Jason.” Piper drops her bag of jerky and reaches forwards, clasping his forearm in her hand. “Listen to me. Whoever that guy out there is--whatever it is that he’s become--I can promise you, he’s not your friend. Not after half a century of killing for Hydra.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing--he’s been brainwashed, Octavian said so,” he insists, aware that he sounds more childish with each word. Octavian said so? That’s the best he can come up with?

“He’s sentient, Jason. By definition, that means he knows what he’s doing,” she says.

“That doesn’t mean he knows it’s wrong,” he argues. “He needs our help.”

“He killed the Director!” she exclaims. “What part of that sentence do you not understand? We don’t help murderers, Jason. We don’t help enemies. And that’s what he is.”

“But that’s not what he was,” Jason says quietly.

“You can’t judge people by what they used to be,” Piper snaps. “They change--I would have thought you would understand that better than most.”

“I haven’t changed,” he says.

She scoffs.

“I might look different, but I haven’t changed,” he insists. “I’m still . . . I’m me. And Nico is Nico, no matter what he’s done.”

He’s all too aware of the vain, desperate hope in his voice.

Piper is eyeing him doubtfully, her eyes narrow, but she doesn’t call him out on the lie, which is good. That falsehood is all that’s keeping him in a semi-sane frame of mind. He has to be unchanged, and so does Nico. He just has to.

“Okay, what’s this about Project Insight?” Hazel comes through the radio, adding, “over” as an afterthought.

Jason seizes the distraction with relief.

“We tracked down Bryce, he said something about Hydra using Project Insight,” he explains. “Which, not-so-coincidentally, Reyna mentioned before the Soldier tried to kill her.”

“And succeeded,” Piper adds, shooting him a dour look. He ignores it.

“That’s strange,” Levesque says. “I don’t know why either of them would mention that . . . Project Insight is a brainchild of Reyna and Percy’s, but it’s still in its infancy. I don’t even think they started testing it yet.”

“What is it?” Piper asks.

“It’s a computer program,” Hazel explains. “It’s designed to replace our current recruitment procedure. Insight sorts through the digital profiles of potential SHIELD agents and uses the information to pick out the best candidates.”

“By . . . what, comparing their birth records?” Piper asks skeptically. “How useful can that be?”

“I don’t think you realize exactly how exposed most of the public is,” Hazel says. “Every time you walk into a Walmart, you’re on camera. Every time you Google something, it’s filed away. Between emails, Facebook, traffic cams, and--well, don’t even get me started on Cloud storage--that’s ninety percent of your life, recorded on some kind of media or another. And if it exists, Insight finds it.”

Piper and Jason sit in silence for a heartbeat.

Then Piper whistles. “That is some Nineteen-Eighty-Four shit, Levesque. The Director wasn’t seriously going to implement that, was she?”

“The Reyna that I knew was willing to do anything for SHIELD,” Jason says. “She was a big fan of depriving the individual for the good of the many.”

“Let’s not get into politics,” Hazel says hastily. “Whether or not Reyna was going to mainstream the program, it still exists. I can think of plenty of ways for Hydra to abuse it, if they gain control of it. Fortunately, the command codes for Project Insight are in only two places.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Piper mutters.

“In Reyna’s head, God bless her soul,” Hazel goes on. “And in the USB she gave you.”

Piper gets to her feet, tossing her jerky aside. “Okay, that’s it,” she announces. “I’m destroying that thing, it’s given us nothing but trouble.”

“It’s given us information that we need,” Jason tells her, reaching out to yank her back down. She bristles under his stronger grip, but sinks back into her chair nonetheless.

“I’m no expert on these things--hell, I’m barely a novice,” he says. “But doesn’t ‘command codes’ imply that we have some sort of control over the program?”

“Yes,” Hazel agrees. “You could, potentially, launch the program if it’s ready to operate. Or--” she pauses, then speaks more excitedly, “Or you could destroy it! Yes, that’s definitely an option, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Excellent,” Jason says, pleased. “Then we’ll just get Leo back in here to do his thing and--”

“Well, it’s not that simple,” she interrupts. “Project Insight was designed to operate on a certain system. To scrap it, you’d have to first run it on that system and then get it to self-destruct.”

Piper groans. “It’s never easy, is it?”

“What kind of system? Do you mean that we need a laptop?” Jason asks. “Like what Leo did when we first plugged in the USB?”

“I mean, the program was designed to run on SHIELD’s helicarriers,” Hazel tells him. “So in order to get rid of it, you have to run it on the helicarriers themselves. All of them.”

Piper picks up her bag of jerky again, offering Jason a piece. He takes it.

“That’s nearly three dozen carriers,” she says.

Jason takes another strip, and wishes there was beer.

“Well,” Hazel says, sounding eager to be rid of them, “that’s all I have for you. Good luck. Over and out.”

There’s a chirp, and then the line goes back to static. Jason glances at Piper, their argument already a distant debate.

“We have to board almost forty helicarriers,” he states.

She nods.

“Without losing the codes to the hordes of Hydra agents that will undoubtedly come after us.”

“Uh huh.”

“While we’re most likely still on both SHIELD and Hydra’s shit list?”

“Sounds about right.”

Some days, Jason wishes that he’d never been thawed.

Chapter Text

“Okay,” Leo says, spinning out of the chair he spent the last six hours hunched in, a laptop on one knee and a keyboard for the jet’s onboard computer on the other. “I’ve made this as easy as it’s possibly going to get, and it’s still not going to be a cakewalk so strap in, boys and girls.”

“There are only two of us,” Piper says, gesturing between herself and Jason. “Not exactly a full house.”

Leo snaps his fingers and points at her. “Exactly,” he declares. “There are only two of you. And SHIELD’s helicarriers? Literally everywhere. Malaysia, Russia, Australia--across the world. It wouldn’t be possible for the two of you to eradicate Insight from all of them if I gave you unlimited plane tickets and five Hydra-free years.”

“This is your idea of easy?” she asks. “Because it actually sounds a lot harder than it was when Hazel proposed the idea.”

“I’m saying that we can’t do this alone,” he tells her. “But, thankfully, we aren’t alone. There are SHIELD agents in every one of those bases I just mentioned.”

“And Hydra agents,” she counters. “Don’t forget Hydra agents.”

“But they aren’t all Hydra agents,” he presses. “Some of them--enough of them--should still be on our side. Do you know what I’ve been doing this whole time?”

Jason and Piper shake their heads.

"Solitaire?" Piper offers.

Ignoring her, he waves a USB at them, one that looks frighteningly similar to the one Reyna passed on . . . but they all look the same to Jason, so he’s not the best judge.

“I turned this into our greatest weapon,” he brags. “Get this onto a SHIELD computer and within seconds, it’ll be on all of them. I also included a message detailing exactly how to disable Project Insight on the helicarriers and an eensy-weensy little Trojan virus that will totally shut down their system if they try to, I don’t know, change or get rid of the message.”

“You did that? In six hours?” Piper asks.

Leo shrugs. “I . . . possibly had help. From someone who shall remain nameless.”

“Does it rhyme with Mercy?” Jason mutters.

“Anyway,” Leo says, “that means that all we have to do is break into the nearest SHIELD facility--which happens to be the Triskelion, BTW--shut down the three helicarriers they have there, and broadcast our message to the world. Actual reality, act up.”

“Well, that sounds much easier,” Piper says sarcastically. “Take out three aircrafts and visit the computer lab. Anything else?”

“Well, I’m no strategist, but I’m pretty sure Bryce will keep siccing the Winter Soldier on us as long as we’re getting in Hydra’s way,” he adds. “And I don’t really want to die, I promised Mom I’d have dinner with her on Sunday and she’ll murder me if I miss it for something silly like the enslavement of the modern world.”

Piper rolls her eyes, and Jason squashes a smile.

“So, here’s the plan,” Piper says. “Leo, hit the SHIELD computers first, get that flash drive out to the other bases. Meanwhile, I’ll take out two of the helicarriers, three if I can swing it. If not, we hit that one on our way out. Clean and simple.”

“Wait,” Jason says, doing the math in his head. “What about me? I can take out a helicarrier, too.”

“I think we’re good,” she tells him.

“Then what am I doing?” he asks. “Sitting around watching your back?”

“I was thinking you’d be most useful watching the jet, actually.” Piper steeples her fingers, looking away from him for a second, as if she’s nervous.

Jason is taken aback enough to laugh, his shocked mind conjuring up the only rational explanation--Piper must be joking. “Oh, sure,” he chuckles. “I’ll hang back and make tea. Seriously-”

She raises her eyebrows.

“You’re serious?” he demands. “You want me to babysit?”

“You’d still be contributing to the mission,” Piper says. “In a way that doesn’t . . compromise . . . our safety.”

He looks at her with disbelief, then glances at Leo to see if the other man is similarly stunned. Leo averts his eyes as well.

“Compromising our safety?” Jason asks. “In what way could I ever compromise our safety?”

“Nico,” she says, as if that one name should sum up her entire reasoning process.

“He’s not going to be a problem,” he replies.

“Exactly. Because you’re going to be here, on the jet.” She purses her lips, like this is the definitive end. Which it is not.

“No,” he says. “Absolutely not. I can’t believe you’d suggest that.”

“Really?” she raises her eyebrows. “You were a soldier, once. Would you want to fight beside a man who wasn’t right in the head?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” he denies.

“Nico’s in it,” she fires back. “That’s a whole chapter of crazy, in my book. Your first reaction was to defend him, not defend against him. You don’t think that might be a problem if we come face to face with him again?”

“Actually, I don’t,” Jason says angrily. “I have this thing called loyalty, Piper. I won’t let anything happen to either of you.” Or Nico, he adds, but doesn’t dare say aloud. It wouldn’t exactly help his argument.

“You don’t know the first thing about loyalty,” Piper snaps.

“Oh, I forgot, I’m talking to a company woman,” he spits back. “My idea of loyalty doesn’t include sacrificing relationships for the sake of the organization.”

“Sometimes the needs of the many come above the needs of the individual,” she says.

“Individuals make up the many!” Jason roars.

“Okay, let’s take a step back--” Leo tries to interject.

“Shut up!” Piper and Jason chorus.

“This isn’t up for debate,” Piper shoots at Jason.

“I’d like to see you stop me,” he declares, infuriation throwing the challenge down for him. Piper’s looking at him like she expected him to be more reasonable than this--obviously, she doesn’t know him as well as he thought. She doesn’t respond to his dare, and when it becomes clear she isn’t going to humor him, he backs down.

“It’s Nico,” he implores. “He’s--” Important. Family. Impossible to ignore. “--my best friend.”

Piper rolls her eyes. “And, once again, I have to be the one to tell you: your old friend is a Hydra assassin. Our enemy. He isn’t the person you used to know, and it’s because you don’t seem to be getting this that I have to insist you stay behind.”

“I can take out a helicarrier without having a crisis of morals, thank you very much,” he says.

“Oh, like how you faced the Winter Soldier without becoming totally useless?” she counters. “I seem to remember having to all but drag your ass off that pavement. Face it, Jason--since you found out that Nico was alive, all you’ve been focusing on is him, not our mission. And that’s dangerous.”

“It’s a normal reaction,” he snaps. “Which you would know if you didn’t have a heart made of ice.”

Leo stands up, physically inserting himself between them. “Okay, seriously, let’s slow down,” he says, palm on Jason’s chest. “Please. If anything’s going to get us in trouble, it’s this bickering. I know you two have some major differences, but we’re still SHIELD agents. Putting aside our morals to follow orders is kind of our thing.”

“It’s not my thing,” Jason mutters.

“You were never a SHIELD agent anyway,” Piper accuses. “You couldn’t take one semester in the Academy.”

“What next, are you going to take a potshot at his mother?” Leo demands, shooting her an annoyed look. “Jason has his beliefs, okay? If he was exactly like you, we’d call him the Star-Spangled Widow, or something, not Captain America. And, Jason?”

He stares at Jason for a second, then shakes his head. “Listen, I’m not going to weigh in on the is-he-Nico-is-he-not discussion. I don’t have a death wish. But you can’t turn a blind eye to what he’s done.”

“Not you, too,” Jason says, frustrated.

Leo frowns. “How would your old pal feel if he knew he was running around killing people for Hydra?” he asks. “Isn’t it your duty to put aside your feelings and think about what’s best for Nico?”

Jason stares at him. Leo can’t be leading where he thinks he’s leading. He can’t be saying--he can’t--“And you want me to do what, exactly?” he asks softly.

Leo shrugs. “He’s a rabid dog, Cap. You know what to do with animals like him.”

Even Piper looks sober at that.

“I’m not going to put him down!” Jason roars, shouting so loudly, Leo jumps. “He isn’t a dog, he’s my friend!”

“Are you sure he’s only that?” Piper jumps in, glaring at him. “Because the way you’re acting, we might as well have just asked you to kill your lover.”

“I’m sorry I’m not as cold as you!” he snarls. “God, with that kind of attitude how could you keep a girlfriend to begin with?”

“Shut up about Annabeth!” Piper yells.

The three of them are quiet for a beat. Leo shuffles his feet and backs away, as if by physically distancing himself he could become invisible. Jason’s busy putting the puzzle pieces together.

“You’re seeing Annabeth,” he declares flatly. “That’s the gal you were telling me about.”

“It’s a secret--” Piper begins.

“Of course it is.” He rolls his eyes. “You’re dating one of my best friends and you couldn’t be bothered to tell me. Anything else you’re keeping from me?”

“A whole world,” she replies. “No one tells you everything, Cap, no one tells anyone everything--”

“I told Nico everything,” he declares.

Piper throws up her hands. “Impossible.”

He can’t tell if she’s referring to the claim or just him in general. Leo, once more, intervenes. “Okay, everyone take five,” he announces. “Hydra isn’t going anywhere, after all.”
Piper slumps down in her chair, folding her arms. Jason retreats to the back of the jet, throwing himself in the furthest possible seat from her.

After a minute, Leo comes over and crouches in front of him. “Can I tell you a story?” he asks.

Jason shrugs. Why the hell not, at this point.

“It’s about this fifteen-year-old kid who was recruited for SHIELD,” Leo goes on. “He was smart, this guy, but not very focused. He didn’t have a whole lot going for him, and most people wouldn’t give him the time of day. But, I don’t know, Reyna thought there was hope for him, I guess.”

He grins. “Obviously, that kid was me. And as you can see, I’ve turned into a fine and strapping SHIELD agent.”

Jason sighs. “Obviously.”

Leo gets up from the floor, settling into the seat across from Jason. “Really, I was a mess,” he says.

“So what changed?”

The engineer’s grin widens. “I found something to focus on. Reyna put me in a special weapons program; a branch of SHIELD research that dealt exclusively with . . . out of the ordinary advantages. I saw people who could do things like you do, Cap, and tools that are decades beyond anything we have mainstreamed today, let alone back in the early 2000s. I had a purpose.”

“This is a quaint story,” Jason says dryly.

“I’m getting to the point,” Leo replies. “Have a little patience.” He picks at the lining of his jacket, pursing his lips. “My research partner there . . . she easily became my best friend. Like I said before, most people didn’t have time for me. I was a spaz, I was a loser, and they used those words to dismiss me. She didn’t. She was the one who said, ‘you’re a spaz, but,’ and turned the phrase into a challenge. She expected me to do better, and slowly I did.” His smile returns, but less sparkly than before. He looks a little sad.

“She changed my life,” he says, but not like it’s a good thing. “For four years, I ate, slept, and breathed what she had to teach me. And when I was nineteen, I found out . . .”

He bites his lip. “Listen, Jase, people aren’t always what they claim to be,” he says. “Even people who you think are friends.”

“You came over and gave me a whole story just to tell me that?” Jason demands. “I know that. Hell, Piper’s been telling me that all day. I’m sick of being told that Nico--”

“I wasn’t talking about Nico,” Leo says hastily. “I’m . . . God help me, I’m talking about Piper. I haven’t known you long, but I can already tell you see things in a pretty rosy light, and it’s done a bang-up job of hiding some things that maybe you don’t want to think about.”

“Piper?” It never occurred to him before, that Piper might not be trustworthy. She’s Piper after all. She’s done nothing but lie since the day he met her, sure, but that’s just how she is. The lying doesn’t make her a liar, but he guesses to outsiders the distinction might appear nonexistent.

“She sees the world one way,” Leo says. “And you see it another. Just because she initiated you into the world of SHIELD doesn’t mean she’s absolutely right on everything, and just because you have a good forty years on her doesn’t mean that you’re absolutely right on everything.”

“Are you telling me not to listen to her?” Jason asks.

“I’m advising you to think independently,” Leo replies. “She gave you two options--side with her and fight Nico, or stay on the sidelines. And, because it’s her, you’re thinking that two options are all that exist. But that’s not true. Piper has her own motivations and agendas; for all she claims, none of us are ‘just following orders’ here. It’d do you some good to think about why she does what she does.”

He has a point, of course. But.

“I’m not killing Nico,” Jason says flatly. “Even if it’s the right thing to do. Even if I should. I’m not doing it.”

Leo looks at him very sadly, like he believes nothing more in the world than that Jason is making the wrong call, but he doesn’t argue any further.

Jason looks across the cabin at Piper, who meets his eyes, shakes her head, and shrugs. It’s the closest thing to surrender he’ll get, he thinks, and takes it with a nod.

Chapter Text

Piper declares she’ll act as a distraction, and Leo and Jason wait outside the Triskelion for her signal, sitting on a park bench and doing their best to look inconspicuous. Leo, in his black sunglasses and bulky jacket, pulls it off a little better than Jason, who’s still sporting the red, white, and blue.

“You think I should kill him,” Jason says, broaching the subject that’s bugged him since they left the jet. The past three and a half minutes have been spent in tense silence, the two of them waiting for Piper to poke a large, armed bear so they can sneak into the most heavily guarded building in Washington, White House included.

Leo shakes his head. “I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean to set you off. It’s just . . . when I see a possible solution, I have to share it. Even if it’s not exactly orthodox.”

Jason leans back on the bench, by no means satisfied. “But why?” he asks. “Why do you think I have to kill him?”

“He’s after us,” Leo replies. “He murdered the Director. He’s assassinated God knows how many others. If you really love him, I wouldn’t think you’d allow him to continue like this.”

“But there are solutions other than--” Jason halts. “Hold the phone. Love him?”

“Are you saying that you don’t?” Leo contradicts. He catches Jason’s eye, his expression serious. And, for a minute, he looks a little bit like Nico; the way his head tilts, eyebrows slanting down, the way he seems to really see Jason, like Jason’s been craving this whole time, Jason as a person and not Jason as a historical relic or national hero or novelty conversation piece.

“I’m not an idiot,” Leo says. “Well, I’m kind of an idiot. But the way you looked at Nico on the bridge . . . I’ve worn that face. I know it.”

He shrugs, breaking his gaze away. “I used to look at Callie like that,” he says quietly.

“It’s different,” Jason mumbles. “And anyway, I don’t intend to let Nico go on like this. I just think it can be done without--I don’t have to--look, I just got him back!” he bursts out. “I’m not going to throw that away!”

Leo breaks out in a grin. “Now you’re being honest,” he says, and Jason jostles him. For a few minutes, they’re just two fellows mucking around on a bench until Piper comes onto the line, a sharp, crisp sentence cutting into the moment: “Boys. Now.”

“Showtime,” Leo whispers and, praying that he isn’t making a huge tactical error, Jason leads the way into the Triskelion.

They sprint across the lawn, Jason biting back a chuckle as he notes a suspiciously Captain-America-shaped dent in the front walk from his flight yesterday.

“On three,” Leo declares, and Jason’s stomach lurches, despite the half hour of practice he and Leo had before coming here.

“Three,” he agrees, and Leo begins the count. Jason barely hears him, too preoccupied with what might happen if one or the other of them fails in their timing.

They’re a few yards from the front doors of the Triskelion, and only a couple feet from the startled-looking security guards patrolling the building, when Leo shouts, “Three!” and Jason throws his arms up.

That’s his only job--throwing his arms up--but he’s still so nervous, he almost whacks Leo in the face, which nearly ruins everything but through some miracle doesn’t.

Leo seizes him around the chest, jacket fluttering, discarded, to the ground as his wings snap out and the momentum of both the jetpack on his back and their combined weight and speed launches them into the air.

Leo did all the calculations and claimed they could reach the still-broken window that Jason launched himself out of yesterday morning, but in all of their practices they never actually reached that altitude. So Jason feels that the unbridled terror that sweeps through him as his feet leave the ground is not unjustified.

He’s been carried by Iron Man before, but that was only briefly, and in the middle of a fight. He wasn’t thinking about the paradox of a man in a metal suit remaining airborne. And Leo isn’t Percy. Leo’s wearing a pair of extendable wings, like some kind of steampunk Icarus, and he has this habit of swearing under his breath in Spanish every time they lurch or dip, and he’s an engineer, not a multi-million-dollar genius who tests his inventions a couple hundred times in his personal lab before attempting to use them.

The window into the elevator, clumsily covered over with a sheet of brown paper, looks really far away. Jason hopes that when he finally bites the dust, the ascent into heaven is nothing like this; jerky, uncertain, and infected with the possibility of plummeting back to the earth at any second. He misses his shield. Again.

He glances at the ground, seeing the security guards tearing into the Triskelion, mouths pressed to their walkie-talkies. Despite whatever ruckus Piper is causing inside, Jason and Leo are probably going to have to battle a few mooks between here and the control room. Jason armed himself before he left the jet--just a couple of Piper’s throwing knives and a hand grenade he hopes he won’t have to use--and Leo grabbed a couple submachines, but neither of them are fully equipped for a proper showdown. Leo’s tired and Jason’s injured. Their best bet is get in as quickly as possible and find somewhere defensible to hole up in while Leo does his thing.

Leo swings him into the elevator, the paper tearing easily to let him through, and Jason drags the agent in after him, both of them somersaulting over the floor to slam into the opposite wall. Leo groans, wings retracting with a series of mechanical tics.

“My head,” he complains, rubbing it. “Not all of us are indestructible, Cap.”

“You poor baby,” Jason says dryly, getting to his feet. “You should try a week with one of my old drill sergeants. Up at three in the morning for a twenty mile run in the pouring rain, obstacle course with real, unmarked land mines, marching halfway across the country ‘til your feet bled--and that was just the warmup.”

Leo rolls his eyes. “This isn’t one of those stories where you say that we youngsters have it easy, and you used to walk to school in a blizzard every day, uphill both ways, is it?”

Jason scoffs. “You youngsters do have it easy. I stopped going to school when I was fourteen so I could work for my living, even though I had asthma and pneumonia and every other lung disease under the sun. I went through basic training like the rest of the guys, but I did it when I was six inches shorter and nearly a hundred pounds lighter than my competitors. Complain to me about your head after you’ve gone through that.”

Leo stares at him.

“What?” Jason asks impatiently, crossing to the elevator doors, which are already propped open. He guesses they were prised apart to allow Bryce, Leo, and Nakamura to get out and then, in the ruckus following, no one remembered to get them fixed.

“I dressed up as you for Halloween,” Leo says. “I read about you in history books, and--hey, did you know they made a documentary about you, like, six years ago? I bet they’ll want to remake that . . .” He trails off for a second, bracing himself on Jason’s shoulder as Jason gives him a leg up to get out of the elevator.

He wriggles onto the floor and circles around, helping to haul Jason up after him, groaning comically. “Damn, you can’t be all muscle,” he complains. “Tell me that at least some of that is Burger King and Mr. KFC.”

Jason snickers. “All muscle. You were saying?”

“Well,” Leo shrugs. “I know we’ve been chilling together for the past day and a half, and I’ve seen you around in the cafeteria, and heard your mission reports with Piper, but . . . every now and then it hits me, y’know? That you were there. 1944. And now you’re here. Seventy years later, you’re here. It’s kind of a mind trip.”

“Try being me,” Jason quips. “It gets worse.” He rolls his shoulders, the pain in his back little more than a twinge, and starts down the hallway, waving at the security cameras as he goes. “C’mon, fanboy--we need to move.”

Leo trots after him. “It’s gotta weird you out a little, right? And--you aren’t going to be calling me fanboy from now on, are you?”

Jason shrugs. “You’re the one who dressed up like me for Halloween.”

“Yeah, but that was when I was ten!” Leo exclaims. “Okay, eleven. Maybe twelve. Definitely not after that.”

They round the corner, Leo still rambling on in a way that reminds Jason of Frank. He’s either trying to distract Jason from thinking of anything but the mission, which is good, or just blithely chattering because he’s nervous, which is less good.

Jason’s a little nervous, too. Not to get to the control room and settle this whole Hydra threat, but to potentially be seeing Nico again--to be fighting Nico again. For all that he swore to Leo he wasn’t going to kill his friend, he’s afraid he won’t be able to stop if it comes to that.

He briefly touches his collarbone, feeling the raised spot through his plated armor where Nico’s--where his rosary sits, and he remembers being told that Nico was gone, captured, no hope of return, write him off as dead, soldier, and go back to doing what you do best.

What Jason does best is fight, fight as hard and as long as he can, which is longer and harder than any other son of a gun; fight when nobody else can or will or should. He fights because it’s all he has, the sum total of what he can offer the world, and he fills up what he lacks with copious amounts of faith and good luck. And maybe that style is what got him thrown into the Arctic Sea, but it’s also what made him Captain America to begin with.

He barely notices the agents who pour out of board rooms and offices to try and detain them; he and Leo barrel through with elbows and knees and a lot of nonlethal blunt force. There aren’t as many obstructions as he thought there would be; Piper’s distraction must be working. He idly wonders what she did to draw the majority of agents in the building to the second floor. He probably doesn’t want to know.

“The stairwell is the next door on the left,” Leo tells him, frowning at an agent who latches onto his ankle like a starving zombie. He impatiently kicks the guy away and picks up the pace, gluing himself to Jason’s back. “Man, fighting with a supersolider is the best,” he says, ducking down and using Jason as a shield against a charging mook. “I’m so glad we’re on the same side.”

Jason punches the offender--looks like a STRIKE agent, by his gear--in the stomach hard enough to send him flying and ducks into the stairwell, slamming the door behind him. They mount the stairs quickly; the narrow space is by far the last place they want to be caught by another swarm of defendants.

“You should try fighting with a Norse god,” Jason tells him. “The guy who can summon thunder from anywhere? Yeah. He always wins.”

Leo laughs.

If ascending to the opening in the elevator shaft seemed to take a lifetime, then the time it takes to reach the seventh floor equals just this side of forever. Leo makes him stop halfway, clutching a stitch in his side.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jason frowns, leaning against the wall and folding his arms. “We’re kind of on a time crunch.”

“I--should have warmed up--” Leo pants. “You run fast.”

“Time crunch,” Jason repeats. “Seriously, I thought you were a STRIKE agent. What are they teaching you guys--Advanced Snarking?”

“Ha. Ha.” Leo sniffs. “Not all of us have a miracle drug running through our veins.”

“You guys have five minutes,” Piper says through the comm link, startling both of them. “My friends over here are getting bored. I don’t think I’ll be able to play with them much longer.”

“Roger,” Jason replies, reaching up to press the device in his ear. The plastic jams uncomfortably against his eardrum, and he regrets throwing away his old earpiece back on Constitution St. At least that one was a custom fit.

He angles an impatient look at Leo. “Are you done resting, Gramps?”

“Oh, I bet you liked that one,” Leo retorts. “Yes, smart guy. I’m done resting. Let’s go.”

“Wouldn’t want you to overexert yourself,” Jason mutters, resuming the climb. He has a flicker of pride in him, just a tiny one, that he isn’t winded, but that’s only because he remembers the long years when even a trip to the corner store could send him into a fit. He’s earned his smugness.

They reach the seventh floor without further incident, Leo taking the USB out of his pocket and holding it in a tight fist. They crouch on the landing, on either side of the exit, and quickly run through the plan again.

“I run for the control room, you hit anything that tries to stop me,” Leo says. “If I go down, don’t go all noble on me. Just grab the USB and get it into that computer.”

Jason nods. Even for him, this is an easy plan. “On three again?”

“Three,” Leo confirms, and throws open the door.

Piper must have overestimated how much time they had, or maybe her ruse only occupied the agents on the lower floors--either way, Jason finds himself facing an entire squad of agents, all of them bearing the Hydra crest rather than any SHIELD logo.

“This is bad,” Leo blurts out, just before Jason tackles him to the floor and slams the door shut again. The ping-ping-ping of bullets hitting steel follows an eighth of a second later.

“I want my shield,” Jason mutters into Leo’s neck, more than a little sulky.

Leo pushes at his shoulder. “Gerrof,” he hisses. “You aren’t bulletproof.”

“Thank God the door is,” Jason says, as the shots die down and the hammering begins. He sits up, allowing Leo to rise to his feet, pressing against the wall beside the door.

“Jason--” he says warningly, peering down the stairwell from his vantage point. Jason doesn’t have to look; he can hear the steady rhythm of mounting feet, at least twenty pairs. They’re going to have to go now.

Jason looks around for something to use as a shield, like back in the street against Nico, but the only thing is--

“Stand back,” he tells Leo. “Behind me. Get your gun out.”

Leo draws one of his SPPs and hunches behind Jason, his body taut. “Remember, I said I couldn’t die today,” he declares. “Don’t make a liar out of me, Grace.”

“Nobody’s dying. Don’t be so dramatic,” Jason says, and proceeds to rip the door off its hinges.

The barrage of shots is instant, a roar that drowns out every other sound, and Jason is reminded of the awful shoot-and-pause ritual of battle; but there’s no pause here, no strange lull as the opposing sides reloads and assesses their respective damage. There’s just a wall of agents, and a lot of guns, and each shot strikes the metal door like a hammer, drilling another dent into its surface.

With Leo covering his back, he plows forwards, knocking the first row of Hydra spies to the floor, trampling carelessly on their splayed limbs, kicking out at heads and hands and chests indiscriminately. It’s like plunging into the center of a storm, only instead of being surrounded by thrashing wind, he’s enveloped in a mass of jostling bodies; people assault him instead of ice chips, and he has Leo’s comforting weight at his back rather than his familiar weapon.

And then it’s over, and they’re looking over their shoulders to a hallway of groaning bodies, all piled over each other like a scene from a video game. Jason tosses the door aside and they scram, Leo guiding the way.

Jason opens their radio channel again. “Widow? How are we doing?”

“Great--” she pants, and then, “--oof--”

He hears a few muffled blows, and she’s back. “If you two have reached the control room, I’ll start for the helipad.”

“We’re almost there,” Jason says, glancing at Leo for confirmation. The other man nods.

“Meet me on the roof when you’re done,” Piper says, and cuts the link.

Leo opens the next door they come to, revealing the same debriefing room the Directorate used to question Jason and Piper. “This is it,” he declares. “I’m good here, so you go help Piper.”

“That isn’t the plan,” Jason objects.

“You’re just going to be useless here, man,” Leo tells him. “And I’ll be done before Hydra can so much as sniff in my direction--go. Take out the helicarriers. I’ll handle the SOS.”

Jason considers it, but it’s not like they have all day to debate. He ducks into the room, does a quick scout around to make sure it’s really empty, and then hands Leo one of his knives. “You said you weren’t going to die today. Don’t make a liar of yourself,” he half-warns, half-jokes, and Leo cracks a smile.

Then Jason’s running, running like he ran through the belly of Mt. Kamen, Cal’s jacket flapping around him and the Howling Commandos’ picture hot in his pocket, and Nico hot on his brain. He’s praying like he did that day, for the safety of a friend, but this time he isn’t racing to save anybody. He’s running away from Leo, away from his instinct to protect the guy, and he know that’s significant somehow but he can’t be bothered about it now because he needs to be on the roof already, dammit, and why are there so many hallways and dead ends in the Triskelion? Would a You Are Here kiosk be too much to ask?

Another flight of stairs; maybe he’s outrun Hydra. He reminds himself that Piper’s making her way to the roof, too, and they’re going to be occupied with her. He has to resist the urge to look for her, rather than the helicarriers, because she’d be mad as hell if he jeopardized their chance to shut down Project Insight just to check up on her.

“Widow. You good?” he asks, barreling into a landing door just as it cracks open. Whoever was opening the door grunts, hopefully knocked on their ass, and Jason picks up the pace before they try again.

“Peachy,” she snaps back, brief and a little cranky.

He takes the stairs two, three at a time.

And when he finally emerges on the roof to see the three helicarriers parked there in a neat row, and the sun glinting off of Piper’s tawny hair as she disappeared into the first one, and the stream of black figures chasing her, he’s struck by the crazy notion that she needs help.

Being Piper, she predicts this.

“Jason--take the second carrier--” she barks, a little too out of breath for his comfort. “Don’t--make me be right--”

He grits his teeth. “Piper.”

“Jason,” she snaps back. “I’ve done--a lot worse--believe me.”

“Fine,” he retorts. “So long as you promise to tell me about it over hot chocolate later.”

“Make it pudding,” she says, “and we have a date.”

He runs for the second helicarrier, going over Leo’s instructions in his head. He’s not the best with tech stuff, and he knows it, but he’s not a complete chucklewit. He can do this.

That’s what he keeps telling himself, anyway.

The helicarrier’s bay doors are open, making it easy for him to vault onto a nearby crate and launch himself inside, hands gripping the corrugated entry ramp with ease. He hauls himself up, finding himself among a series of small planes and solo crafts that still, after two years, remind him of something out of a science fiction novel.

All of the helicarriers have the same basic setup, making it easy for Jason to navigate out of the bay and up to the primary control room. The craft, compared to the Triskelion, is quiet. His footsteps are too loud and too rapid, disturbing the eerie peace. Their hollow sound echoes around him, bouncing off the steel walls.

Why couldn’t Reyna and Percy come up with a recruitment plan that used something friendly, like Facebook pages? Would that have been so hard for them? But no, they had to run their top secret, morally questionable program on a flight of machines that reminds Jason of an alien spacecraft, and not in a neat, futuristic way. More in the, cow-snatching, brain-melting way.

All this chrome and staircases and silence is making him nuts.

His heart thuds in time with his footsteps--clank, clank, clank--and he reaches for a shield that, dammit, he knows isn’t there anymore. He scowls, even though he probably won’t need it by now. The helicarrier is, for whatever reason, empty.

That’s kind of strange, now that he thinks about it. If his super-secret evil plan relied on a helicarrier, he’d have the aircraft flooded with personnel. He’d have every security measure put in place, his very best soldiers on duty guarding the thing twenty-four seven.

It’s just intuition, but his stomach drops anyway because Jason lives off of intuition and by now he trusts it like fact. If he were Bryce, and he had an indestructible super-soldier on his hands, and he just happened to have another indestructible super-soldier that he wanted to get rid of, he’d make sure to put that first guy in the path of the second.

Somewhere safe. Somewhere he was sure the second guy would go. Somewhere he wouldn’t lose any collateral.

Like, an isolated place.

Like, here.

So Jason isn’t entirely surprised when he bursts into the control room to see Nico standing there, maskless and armed to the teeth and waiting for him.

Chapter Text

Jason isn’t fully convinced that Nico doesn’t remember anything.

That, or maybe Bryce just has a sense of humor because the Winter Soldier, in addition to his three visible guns and six visible knives, is carrying Jason’s shield. The one that’s supposed to be safely in his room, and that he’s privately vowed never to so much as go to the toilet without ever again; the shield that he’s spent the past twenty-four hours missing on and off, like a phantom limb.

Nico has it.

Jason’s kind of ticked off about that.

He starts walking towards Nico, careful and slow. He isn’t sure if the other man is going to attack or not; Nico stands there blankly, face empty of any telling emotion.

Jason’s never liked the design of the helicarrier cockpits; while the glass chamber gives a near-180-degree view of the world outside, the disorienting notion that nothing but a sheet of fiberglass is between him and another fall more than makes up his mind about its usefulness. As he travels to Nico now, he glances down in time to see Piper pelting across the roof below, in the direction of the third helicarrier.

It’s almost over, then. Leo’s doing his part, and Piper hers--and the only thing Jason has to worry about now is doing his.

So get out there and do it, dammit.

“Nico, I wasn’t lying,” Jason says evenly. The closer he gets, the more taut Nico’s body becomes, like a spring coiling tighter and tighter and getting ready to give. “I don’t want to fight you. You’re my friend. You were born in 1923, the year after me. I remember when we first met. You were wearing your sister’s boots.”

Nico shakes his head violently, showing the first sign of animation. “I don’t have a sister,” he says. His voice is rough, as it was back on the bridge. It’s hard to hear when Jason still has the fluid tones of Nico’s Hail Mary stuck in his head.

“You had two,” he counters. “One died before she was born. And Bianca got tuberculosis, same as your mom.”

Nico raises the shield, covering most of his face and upper body. All Jason can see, all Jason focuses on, are Nico’s eyes, that indeterminable shade between brown and true black. The boy says nothing.

Jason balls his hands into fists. If Nico won’t back down, then they’re going to fight. It won’t be like the ten second chase from Jason’s apartment, or the senseless showdown in front of the Hart Building. It will be Jason, fighting Nico.

“Don’t make me do this!” he spits, suddenly frustrated. “Nico, will you listen to me? I don’t want to fight you!”

It might be wishful thinking, but he could swear that Nico’s expression flickers for a second, that his eyebrows slacken and the shield drops a few centimeters. He could swear he’s almost getting through.

Then the helicarrier abruptly rocks to one side, sending both of them hurtling away from the control panel and sliding across the transparent floor. He hears the clang-whom-clang of Nico going shield over ass across the smooth surface.

Cal’s jacket has no traction, which proves to be a good thing as he glides harmlessly up the side of the helicarrier’s domed nose and then back down again, rising more or less gracefully to his feet, confused as hell as to what’s happening.

Nico’s in a cranky pile on the floor, Jason’s shield over him like a turtle’s shell. He mumbles something that sounds an awful lot like, “Well, today just got that much better,” and it sounds so much like something the Nico-who-was-Jason’s-friend would say that Jason cracks a smile. That means there’s hope, right?

“Listen, buddy, we can walk out of here without a fight,” he offers. “Head downtown, grab a hotdog, talk this through. If there’s anything you’re confused about, I can help you.”

Nico shoves Jason’s shield off him and gets to his feet, reaching down to retrieve the vibranium weapon as he does. His expression says no. Jason doesn’t need to be fluent in di Angelo to read that.

“I have a mission,” Nico says shortly. “I don’t know you.”

His words ring strangely false, as if he’s repeating something he’s been told rather than something he actually believes, but the time for dallying is over. Jason can’t stand around negotiating forever.

He sighs. It couldn’t be easy, could it? Not to mention, once he’s done here he’s going to need to hunt down whatever’s pounding on the helicarrier and teach it some manners. With his luck, it’ll be another giant serpent or feathered mutation.

He cracks his knuckles, calculating the best way to go at the Winter Soldier. He’s not crazy about the idea of facing his own weapon, so he decides his first course of business will be to get the shield back. Percy’s dad gave it to him; there’ll be hell to pay if he loses it to a Hydra agent.

Nico’s still on the defensive, waiting for him to attack first. He could have started this fight at any time, just by pulling out one of his guns, but he didn’t. Jason wishes the fate of the free world wasn’t at stake so he’d have time to analyze Nico’s behavior.

As it is, he remembers how he used to win against Nico when they played Keep Away. Slipping a hand behind his back, he unsheaths one of his knives and hurtles it at Nico’s head.

Nico ducks to dodge it, his gaze following the knife’s path for a nanosecond. It’s just long enough for Jason to propel himself forwards with the kind of speed he’s always amazed his enhanced legs posses and get under Nico’s guard.

Nico hasn’t lived, breathed, and slept with this weapon for the last six years; he doesn’t reflexively bring it up to strike Jason on the chin, as Jason himself would have. He tries to duck behind it, sure, but Jason’s arm is already there, elbowing the shield out of the assassin’s grip and kneeing him in the stomach for good measure.

It’s like driving his knee into a brick wall, which hasn’t happened in . . . well, ever in the history of Jason kneeing people. The shield skitters away, out of both of their reaches, and they spring apart, neither injured from the clash.

Fighting Nico is a little like being in a sword fight, not that Jason’s been in many of those. But the way they fall into a pattern of strike-and-fall-back reminds him of the way two equally matched swords clang against each other. He half expects to see sparks fly from every blocked punch and countered kick.

He’s matched. If he was looking for a sparring partner, someone he could really let loose on and not worry about accidentally crushing, he’d be thrilled. But he’s not--he has a vested interest in winning today, and he’s not getting far like this.

He takes a risk and springs backwards from Nico, an apparent retreat, in the direction of his shield.

As if this is a cue, Nico goes for the gun at his thigh. Jason has a tense, horrified second where his outstretched hand grasps at thin air behind him as he tries to locate the shield, eyes glued to the Soldier in front of him.

BANG.

Clang--ping, ping, ping.

Jason sighs in relief, safely behind his trusted shield. Has he ever missed this thing. “Last chance, Nico,” he declares, his hand sliding comfortably into the worn leather grip. “Stand down, and no one else has to get hurt today. That includes you.”

A blade whizzes over Jason’s guard, just nicking the top of his hair.

Jason clenches his jaw. “Oh, come on!” he yells in frustration. “Why won’t you listen to me!”

He sends the shield hurtling towards Nico, who deftly catches it with his prosthetic arm and tosses it away. Jason dashes forwards, engaging the Winter Soldier in hand-to-hand again. Nico still hasn’t used any of his numerous weapons, with the exception of the one shot while Jason was protected.

Maybe Jason’s just looking for a reason, but it seems to him that Nico doesn’t want to fight him, either. Or, at the very least he’s pulling his punches. His face is expressionless, his movements automatic. He isn’t really here, in the fight, his mind is somewhere else.

“Don’t you remember me?” Jason asks.

“I have a mission,” Nico repeats. “My purpose is to complete it.”

“You have a choice,” Jason tells him, stepping back to avoid the other man’s swinging fist. “You don’t have to do this.”

“If--I don’t--” Nico grits out, grunting as Jason rams him with a shoulder, “--then why am I alive? What purpose--” He thrusts his palm out, knocking Jason to the floor. “--do I have?”

Jason groans, feeling every injury he’s sustained over the past forty-eight hours loudly complain at the blow.

He can’t answer Nico at first. The dilemma sounds far too much like what Jason himself is facing; without a war to fight, without a team to lead, what is Captain America? Just a ghost, same as the Winter Soldier.

“You and me,” he finally says, Nico still looming over him, “we fought a war. Not together, not at the same time, but we both fought it. Because there was a man out there telling people that they were inferior, that they deserved to die.”

He rolls onto his side, nerves screaming with pain as he thoughtlessly leans on his jammed elbow. Nico quickly unclips a derringer from his side, aiming it at Jason but not shooting. Just . . . waiting. Like maybe he’s listening after all.

“And, back in the states, the doctors were all telling me the same thing,” Jason goes on. “That I was weaker than everybody else. That I should just give up. But us? We don’t let other people tell us who were are. We don’t let them limit what we can be. Maybe that’s a Brooklyn thing or a 1939 thing, but personally, I think it’s just common sense.”

He fixes Nico with what he hopes is a stern look. “I don’t care if you’re evil, or go around killing people for a living. I have plenty of friends who live in the moral gray areas. I don’t even care if you think you’re Nico or not. I just don’t want you doing something because you were told that’s what you were supposed to do.”

That’s right, he thinks. I should take my own advice. He volunteered for this shtick, after all. He signed up and said yes, Captain America, that’s what you can call me. He might not like where’s he’s at, and his friends might sometimes mock him for his old-fashioned ideas, but he chose this. He’d choose it again in a heartbeat. Because--

“Nico,” he says. “I know you don’t remember, and I know you don’t believe me, but I’ve waited seventy years to tell you this so I don’t care.”

Nico just stares down at him.

And somehow, Jason’s heart is in his throat and his tongue is thick and he knows he isn’t looking at the same Nico who declared Jason was no longer human, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like he is.

He says it anyway, the one thing on his mind through all the tests, the one thing that kept him sludging through mud and snow and bodies, the words that almost became a heartbeat for him because they pulsed through his entire body as the one complete truth in the world.

“I did this for you,” he says, gesturing to his body. “Not for America. Not for glory or pride or anything so noble. Just you. You wanted to know what your purpose is? All I can tell you is that it isn’t something someone else decides for you. You have to choose it for yourself . . . and me, I chose you. So I’m with you, buddy, no matter what you decide.”

Nico looks at him, eyes narrowing. “You’re right,” he declares. “I don’t believe you.”

Jason grits his teeth, frustrated, and that’s when Nico attacks. It’s immediately clear that the assassin was holding back earlier, because it takes him less than ten seconds to completely destroy Jason’s guard.

Nico drives his palm up into Jason’s already swollen jaw, and Jason reels away, spitting a tooth onto the floor as the lower half of his face screams in pain. He licks his upper lip, tasting blood. One of his lower incisors managed to puncture straight through it--that’s probably going to scar.

He feels the blow to his stomach rather than sees it coming; bending over, he starts to cough, hoping the spittle-laced stream of red that leaks from his mouth is just from his cut lip and not from some internal injury he didn’t know he had.

The wham of Nico’s cybernetic arm against the back of his head is enough to send him to the floor--he hasn’t been this beat upon for years, for so long that he can hardly remember what it was like.

Well, it sucks. That’s what it was like.

The Winter Soldier kicks him in the ribs, each strike of his boot making it impossible for Jason to get in a breath, let alone get to his feet. He gasps short, choking gasps that get him barely enough oxygen, and his vision starts to tunnel in and out of blackness. He starts to think that he might not have a chance against this guy.

Nico toes him onto his back and crouches over him, slamming his fist again and again into Jason’s body; his face, his chest, and even his throat. Jason gets to the point where he can hardly feel it, his head snapped this way and that like the Coney Island Tilt-A-Whirl.

The Winter Soldier’s cold, silver fingers curl under the neck of his suit, tearing the toughened plastic away to strip his vital organs of their protection. And then the beating stops.

Mercifully, it stops, and Jason inhales without trying to figure out why, mouth open, swallowing air like it’s going out of style. His vision stabilizes.

Nico is straddling him, one hand still gripping the torn material of Jason’s suit, the other hovering over the rosary around Jason’s neck, his dark eyes wide and wet and completely human.

He reaches down and runs his fingers over the beads. His hand stops at the end of the strand, and he slowly lifts the silver cross from Jason’s body. He swallows.

“Do you--remember--” Jason starts, and begins to cough again. This time, he’s pretty sure the blood isn’t just coming from his lip.

Nico doesn’t reply. His face has gone slack, and there’s no strength in his hold. Maybe, maybe he remembers--or maybe he’s about to start whaling on Jason again.

Jason can’t take the chance. He doesn’t want to prove Piper right and lose the mission because he’s busy figuring out whether Nico knows him or not.

He bucks his body upwards, bracing his hands on Nico’s shoulders and pushing him away, slamming him into the floor. They wrestle for a second while Jason wonders if it was always this quiet in the control room. Their forced breath sounds unnaturally loud.

He gets an arm around Nico’s throat, pressing upwards, and Nico starts to kick. It doesn’t feel right, this underhanded method of knocking him out, but Jason doesn’t have to worry about his conscience for long because one of Nico’s kicks connects with his knee, and he reflexively loosens his grip enough for Nico to break free.

BAM.

Interrupting their fight, the helicarrier shakes for a second time, this time sending them both flying to the far side of the room. Jason winces as he hears the glass dome crack under his shoulder. What on earth is going on out there?

The helicarrier continues to rumble ominously, though less violently than before. Jason scrambles to his feet and crosses to the other side of the control room, looking in the direction the blow came from. All he can see is the next helicarrier over, nothing obviously the cause of the disruption.

He has to get going, start working on the computer before Nico recovers, but he can’t seem to encourage his body to move from this spot. He’s worried about Leo, alone in the Triskelion, and Piper, who doesn’t know when to retreat. He’s worried about Nico behind him, that he’s going to lose his old friend twice and still not be able to get it together enough to save him.

But mostly, he’s worried that the flash of a person he just saw in the control room of the other helicarrier is Reyna.

Chapter Text

22: 4:46pm

Jason watches incredulously as the next helicarrier over, the one that Reyna might be on and Piper definitely is, raises its weapons and fires at him.

The helicarrier he’s on jars and shakes again, confirming what he can hardly believe--he’s being attacked.

But why? Who by? Is the battle on the other carrier going badly?

He jabs his comm impatiently. “Piper. What’s going on?”

No reply.

“Leo?” he tries.

“SHIELD is out of the closet,” is Leo’s immediate answer. “Ah, metaphorically. Any sign of our Winter Pest?”

“He’s with me,” Jason says. “Have you heard from Widow?”

“De nada,” Leo tells him. “Am I still coming up to the roof?”

“No, stay where you are,” Jason says. “Something’s not right--one of the helicarriers is shooting at the others.”

There’s a pause. Then Leo, sounding totally befuddled, asks, “What?”

“Yeah, so just keep any more surprises from joining us,” Jason orders. “But don’t come up yourself, it might be dangerous.”

“Gotcha,” Leo agrees, and Jason severs the connection. He’s more than a little nervous that he couldn’t get ahold of Piper, but that could easily have an innocent explanation. The problem is, when Piper’s involved the innocent explanation rarely applies.

BAM.

Jason doesn’t have any more time to worry because the helicarrier lurches again, this time tilting dangerously over the edge of the roof, gravity sending him down with it. He hits the same crack he created earlier and feels it give.

He has just enough time to think, panicked and annoyed, Not again, dammit! before he’s falling, the Potomac a lovely black sheet of ice waiting to catch him.

23: 4:51pm

He’s fallen before.

Nico snaps into consciousness with this thought, that he’s falling, that he’s fallen before, that careening towards an unforgiving body of water is a memory that he has. He and Jason, going down, down, down.

Jason’s ripped uniform keeps flapping open, his rosary floating around his neck like a strange halo. His eyes connect with Nico’s, his face unapologetically terrified.

And Nico isn’t sure if he believes him yet, about sisters and friendships and purposes, but he’s always known he lives a little outside time and the name Nico sounds comfortably right in his mind and that stupid little black chain is more familiar to him than his own face.

So maybe Jason’s a little right.

24: 4:52pm

Nico’s eyes open, and Jason’s a little relieved. At least now he has something to hold onto.

And then a force like a hundred tons of concrete slams into his head, and everything becomes black and cold.

25: 4:55pm

Nico doesn’t know how he manages it, but he drags both of them out of the river.

He sticks around long enough for Jason to vomit up water and blood and too little food for a man of his size, to hear the first word-- “Nico.”--out of his mouth, and then he slips away.

26: 5:17pm

First thing Jason notices when he wakes up, his rosary is gone.

Well, it originally belonged to Nico anyway.

Chapter Text

The press want to talk to him, and the U.S. Government isn’t too thrilled about the debris in the bay, let alone the public disturbance of three helicarriers destroying each other. It takes Jason a while to piece together what happened, and it doesn’t help that Piper’s too busy doing damage control to fill him in and Reyna--if that was Reyna--has disappeared.

Leo sticks to him like glue, but other than his mildly entertaining story about hiding from a pair of SHIELD agents by squeezing himself into an air vent, he doesn’t have any new information for Jason. As far as either of them can tell, only Piper knows why she decided to push Jason’s helicarrier into the bay.

Nico is gone, along with most of SHIELD. Jason isn’t sure if this is because they’re traitors or just smart; he’d run, too, if he had the option. As it is, he fobs the questions from the media and zips up Cal’s jacket, hoping to hide the worst of the damage from his suit. His shield is, of course, missing again.

Piper gets roped into some kind of disciplinary meeting, and while Jason’s typically the rule-following type, he doesn’t feel like dealing with bureaucracy today so he opts out, no doubt offending more than a few people.

“What are we supposed to do?” Leo asks, staring around at the crowds that have gathered; reporters, of course, and police officers as well as the National Guard, a few men in suits that look important, and a number of politicians that Jason recognizes from TV, not to mention the hoardes of civilians holding their iPhones high in hopes of catching some video of whatever’s beyond the yellow tape surrounding the Triskelion.

They’re all a little shocked, Jason thinks. The news tonight will be all about SHIELD, about what it is and why it’s been hidden and why it had to come to light. And, for a few weeks, everyone will be living in fear, knowing that Hydra is out there and there’s no counter-agency to stop them; but it will fade, and Hydra will be nothing but the latest in a line of threats that never touch the lives of everyday Americans.

Because Jason--Captain America--will still be around.

“I could murder a cup of coffee,” Jason tells Leo, and it’s as good a plan as any when the country’s in a panic.

So they get coffee and wander around until they find a park that isn’t packed with people and Leo pulls out his laptop from somewhere and starts tracking the aftermath.

“We got it easy,” he says. “Other bases fell into total chaos--some agents triggered failsafe mechanisms so the whole rig exploded.” He pauses. “Maybe it’s just because it’s harder to calculate how many agents we lost, but it looks like more laymen were hurt or killed than anyone else.”

Jason swears softly.

Leo whistles. “And you wouldn’t believe some of the things that are crawling out of the woodwork. There’s a guy in England who claims that SHIELD used his basement to store illegal aliens--and I mean, E.T. type aliens, not some guy trying to escape China.”

“I wouldn’t put too much stock in those stories,” Jason advises. “Back in the war, to hear some of the mothers tell it, there was a Hydra base in every empty warehouse or suspicious bar. I spent more of my time chasing down ghost stories than anything else.”

“What’s changed?” Leo jokes, but he leaves the webpage anyway. “There’s no official statement from the government, or SHIELD itself, which makes sense since Reyna . . .” he trails off, shakes his head, and gets back on track, “I guess no one really knows what to say. But Twitter’s exploded; Instagram, too. Everyone’s sharing where they were and what they saw.”

He pivots his laptop around, showing Jason a picture of a blond girl taking a selfie with what appears to be a huge, green, mostly humanoid . . . thing. Jason has no idea what it is, but it beams at the camera like it’s just another dorky teenager.

“And you don’t want to know what they’re saying about our good friends Piper and Annabeth,” Leo says. “None of it is very nice.”

Jason shrugs. He knows they have checkered pasts, at best. He doesn’t need the details.

“It’s only going to get worse,” a woman says, and slides into the bench next to Jason.

He jumps, startled, and it’s only once she pushes her dark hair out of her face that he recognizes Reyna, wearing sunglasses and a hood.

“You really are alive,” he remarks. What else can he say?

“Sorry about shooting you into the Potomac,” she says, not sounding apologetic in the least. “I figured you could survive.”

Jason shoots her an irritated look. “I almost drowned. What the hell did you do that for?”

“You weren’t getting the job done,” Reyna says. “You were busy dancing around with your little buddy. I thought I’d give you a wakeup call.”

“By firing on my helicarrier? And causing the other two to self-destruct?” Jason demands.

“Got your attention, didn’t I?” Reyna grins. “Listen, Jason, I’ve watched you do some incredible things, and you’re just as entitled to your blind spots as the next guy. But I’m not going to be around to cover your blind spots anymore, got it? So you need to shape up.”

“You want me to stop caring about Nico,” he guesses, already weary of the point.

“That’s one way to do it,” she tells him. “Or you could try to recruit him to our side, or convince him to, um, retire. Or ice him again and stash him somewhere Hydra will never reach. You have options.” She glances at him. “He isn’t hurting anyone right now, and I don’t think he will be in the future, either. I watched him save your life--not exactly the actions of a cold-blooded Hydra agent.”

“He saved my life,” Jason echoes.

“Dragged you out of the bay,” she agrees. “Like I said, I was watching. I wouldn’t have let you drown. But Project Insight had to go, and you weren’t fast enough.”

“Because of Nico,” he says glumly.

“Because of you,” she corrects. “Because you were conflicted. If you’re really going to try to save Nico, you have to give yourself to that, one hundred percent. Going about it half-heartedly just got your ass kicked and three helicarriers blown up.” She catches hold of his hand, which is startling because she isn’t usually a touchy-feely person.

“Don’t listen to Piper. Don’t listen to the world. If you want to go after Nico, go after Nico. That’s why I stepped in. If you two had kept on fighting, nothing would have changed. Now Hydra is scattered, SHIELD isn’t around to interfere . . . you can find him, take your time convincing him he’s your old friend.”

“That’s . . . nice of you,” he says, suspicious. Most of Reyna’s gift horses are of the Trojan variety.

She shrugs. “Think of this as your severance pay. Because invading the Triskelion and destroying some of our favorite toys? Definitely grounds to get you fired.”

Jason lets out a short laugh. “So, what about you?” he asks. “Everyone thinks you’re dead--what are you going to do?”

“I’m a hell of a lot more use dead,” she replies. “I figured I wouldn’t be anybody’s friend by the time this was all over. This way, I can disappear. Maybe I’ll get work as a waitress in South Carolina or something.”

Jason tries to imagine Reyna in an apron and visor, chewing gum and jotting down people’s orders on a notepad. He can’t.

Reyna squeezes his hand and lets it go. “Don’t worry about me. You did your bit, now it’s time that you worry about yourself.”

“Can’t remember the last time I did that,” he murmurs.

“Do it now,” she instructs. “And anyway, between you and me? You were a terrible SHIELD agent.” She looks past him, to Leo. “You, too. There’s no way you had permission to use our resources to build that jetpack.”

Leo snickers.

“So, that’s it?” Jason asks. “It’s over?”

Reyna gets to her feet. “It’s never over, Grace. Not ‘til you’re dead. And even then,” she winks, “it really isn’t. Which reminds me--I had your apartment repaired. You’re welcome. Also, there’s a certain piece of red, white, and blue vibranium waiting on your front step. I’d hurry home before some fanboy steals it.”

“Thanks,” Jason says, too surprised to say anything else.

Reyna just smiles. “I’ll be seeing you.”

“See you,” he echoes, and she walks away. He follows her with his eyes, trying to pinpoint the exact moment she disappears into the street, but he blinks and misses it. And she’s gone.

“A manhunt sounds like fun,” Leo says.

“You don’t have to help me,” Jason replies at once. “I know it’ll be dangerous.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” the other man protests. “I like danger. And I like you, and we’ve been through absolute hell these past few days and made it out just fine. I’m not going to abandon you.”

“Yeah, but--”

“Nope,” Leo interrupts. “It’s my choice. You’re stuck with me, Jason Grace, and that’s the end of it.”

Jason tamps down a smile. “My last partner was a lot less mouthy.”

“Yeah, but can Piper do this?” Leo counters, springing to his feet. He strips off his jacket, extending his wings, and starts to croon, “I believe I can fly!”

Jason covers his ears. “Man, you can not sing!” he groans, pretending not to notice the alarmed looks of the passersby. Leo strikes a few poses, clearly into his role as--as--Jason bites his lip. They’re going to have to think of a name for the guy.

Somewhere out there, in the world full of kids going to school and parents going to work and sweethearts getting married and SHIELD agents figuring out how they’re going to live from now on, Nico di Angelo is wearing a black rosary and maybe--just maybe--thinking of Jason.

Jason takes a sip of his coffee. It’s bitter, strong, and he blames that for his racing heart, rather than this solitary thought that keeps circling his head: Nico, I’m really going to save you this time. I promise.

The sun beats down on their heads, his and Leo’s, and Leo chatters about Callie and Jason occasionally throws in a few back-in-the-days and it’s the first normal afternoon Jason’s had in forever, and for once he doesn’t feel like he’s a man out of time. It takes him a second to place his finger on it, to realize the reason behind the quiet in his soul, and then he gets it.

He’s now. Not in the past, not worrying about the future. He’s not running anymore.

He’s getting ready to chase.

Chapter Text

Nico cuts deep into a pomegranate, sliding the dull blade through until it makes contact--crack--with the counter. The kettle comes to a boil, the whistle making him jump. He’s still sketchy, not used to the world without the comforting orders of a handler to cushion it.

He yanks the kettle off the stove and pours it over his supper--cup ramen from the corner store. He dumps the pomegranate into his fruit salad and takes both bowls over to the mattress on the floor, the only place to sit in his dingy apartment.

He’s been in Bucharest for six weeks now, the longest he’s stayed anywhere. He can’t say he likes it, but the busy city is big enough to get lost in, which is all he wants. He lives off Hydra’s money, funds robbed from a dying organization, and he doesn’t feel guilty about it even though the Jason in his head says that he should.

He could fake a passport if he wanted to; fake an entire life. The knowledge is in his head. But he doesn’t want to live like that anymore, so he scrapes by with the barest necessities and it’s good. It’s okay. He keeps to himself, and the few other residents of the complex--a mother in her thirties, an older man who’ll ramble on in Romanian for hours regardless of whether he’s understood or not, and a girl around Nico’s age--do the same.

He has a place to sleep, and food to eat, and as far as he knows, no one is trying to kill him, so he’s doing well. He hardly notices the mice that scuttle across his floor like they own the place, and things like dry rot and mold don’t bother him after years of sleeping wherever he was told, whether it was the ground or rock or the bottom of the ocean.

He’s learned to cook all over again, scribbling down the fragments of half-remembered recipes in one of the dozen notebooks he keeps in a duffel bag at the foot of his bed. What he can’t recall, he improvises, and the thick stews and squicky vegetable mashes he comes up with reminds him of Brooklyn, of an apartment not much nicer than this one, and Jason. More than the recipes, he remembers struggling to make four portions out of two, turn a couple potatoes and a hunk of beef into something that will make Jason strong through tough winters. More than rationing, he remembers selling his shares of sugar and flour for medicine and extra blankets.

He has other journals besides his makeshift cookbook, all of them labeled with masking tape and Sharpie: 1939, Music, Jobs, History, Family, War Memories, Timeline and Jason. Jason’s notebook is the thickest, plastered with Nico’s terrible drawings of things he doesn’t have the words to express, articles he found about Captain America, and all the dreams and memories and feelings and things he can’t put into a simple category, like the jokes Jason would make to hide his coughs and stilted breath.

He spends a lot of his time writing, getting down every detail that he can in case he forgets again. No--in case it’s ripped out of his head again. He didn’t forget; that would be too simple, too gentle a word for it. The memories were torn out of him, robbed from him, and while he was still reeling, Octavian crammed new thoughts in. He made Nico obedient, compliant, listless without a task or mission. He fooled him into thinking that the purpose of life was to serve; he fooled him into thinking the world was that simple.

But it’s so much more complicated and messy than that, and sometimes Nico almost misses the days that he didn’t have to untangle mixed emotions after waking from strange dreams that might be memories, and sometimes he thinks it might be better for him if he didn’t have to remember Jason at all, but then he thinks that it’s better for the world this way. He’s not hurting anyone, living like this, so it doesn’t matter if he’s confused and unhappy some days. If he’s learned anything in the past year, it’s that a lot of life consists of being confused and unhappy.

He twirls the long ramen noodles around his fork and sticks it in his mouth. Some things are consistent, like eating. Sleeping. Even going to the bathroom. He keeps that part of his life simple, so that when the dreams show up, and when he feels overwhelmed by a whole lifetime crashing back into his consciousness, he has something basic to cling to. He doesn’t have to worry about where his next meal is coming from while grappling with an existential crisis.

While he eats, he opens his Jason notebook. The first page is completely taken up with a rough sketch of a shield, the first thing he ever put down on paper. He still didn’t remember much about Jason at that point, just that he was important somehow, and that thing was lodged in his mind like a tumor.

Storytime is interrupted by a knock on the door. He sets the ramen aside, body instantly tensing into battle mode. No one knocks on his door; no one comes around just to visit. He doesn’t know anyone that well.

“Who is it?” he calls. He’s learned the hard way not to answer the door with a gun. Normal people find that disturbing.

“40A, from down the hall,” a girl’s voice replies. “You’re Nico di Angelo, right?”

Nico freezes, torn between curiosity and the desire to run. His instincts tell him that anyone who knows his name is an enemy, but--well, but.

He slides his hand under his pillow, drawing out the pistol he keeps there, and tucks it into the back of his pants. He’s armed in other places, of course, but the pistol’s his favorite. He’s good with it. He gets to his feet, eyes darting around the room as he crosses to the door. His duffel bag is there, and his jacket is over there. If he’s cornered at the doorway, he could break either of his windows--one opens out over the street, the other to the adjacent building. Either way, he can easily escape. His credit card and the sole fake ID he has are both strapped into the shoulder holster under his shirt, as always.

Okay.

He’s set.

He cracks open the door. “Yes?”

The girl on the other side peers through the crack, smiling in a friendly way. “Hi,” she says. Nico vaguely recognizes her as the girl down the hall, just like she claimed. That’s reassuring, but it doesn’t mean he trusts her.

“What do you want?”

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asks.

He eases the door open a little more. “Should I?”

She might look familiar--or maybe he’s just easily influenced. The girl takes a picture out of her pocket, holding it out towards him.

After a tense second, he accepts it, lowering his guard by another inch. The black-and-white photo is curling at the edges, yellowed spots eating into it from age, but that’s definitely him in the front row there. On the back, unfamiliar handwriting declares for the Cap!

The girl taps the face next to his, and he looks between it and her, slowly making the correlation.

“You’re one of the Howling Commandos.” The name jumps to his lips like he’s said it a thousand time, and her name comes right after. “Cal.”

She grins. “Been a while, eh, pal?”

He’s getting flashes now, the kind of fragmented memories he usually associates with Jason. A girl with a long face and longer eyelashes, just barely passing for a boy. Handing a cigarette back and forth over a can of warming beans. Singing. Helping her trim bronzed hair before its length gives her away.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. “H--how are you here?”

“That doesn’t matter,” she brushes him off, checking her watch. “All that you need to know is that you have six minutes to gather your things and get the hell out of here.”

“Wha--why?”

She snaps her fingers impatiently. “Five and a half minutes, c’mon! Go!”

He tears back through the apartment, seizing his jacket, his duffel, and--as an afterthought--the Time Magazine profile of Jason Grace that he hung on the refrigerator. He has crap strewn throughout the space, bits of a life he was beginning to get attached to; CDs and a few books, clothes other than the ones on his back, a repair kit he was slowly modifying to use in maintenancing his arm, other junk. He leaves it behind without a second thought.

Cal’s gone when he returns to the door, which is a good thing. If she tried to lead him somewhere, he might be suspicious. Of course, she could still be a decoy to try to draw him out for some other reason, but he’s used to relying on his gut, and his gut tells him that Cal isn’t trying to hurt him.

He sprints down the stairs, wishing he’d been able to land a place on the ground floor. He isn’t panicking, exactly, but he’d like to get out before whoever’s coming for him arrives. Whether Cal’s trustworthy or not, he has no problem believing he’s being hunted.

This place was nice while it lasted, but he knew this day was coming. He knew it from the minute he walked away from Jason on the bank of the Potomac River. He’s never going to retire somewhere and live quietly; it’s impossible for him. His heart and his mind and his fractured memories tug him back to Jason, and it’s inevitable that one time, one of these days, he’s going to find himself facing the man again. Until that day, he’ll never be able to stick around in any one place.

Until that day, he’ll never be home.