14. Sins Of The Father 13

Steve was used to being thrown off his game, it was a long-standing feature of his childhood, but he wondered if he was getting sloppy in his "old age" because amidst all of his concern and worry over Bucky, not to mention the very real risk that the Winter Soldier posed to him, Steve had not been prepared to get side-swiped by the World Security Council.

He stared at Fury, who stared back at him. Steve rapped on the conference table with his knuckles, hard enough to vibrate the glass just nearly to the point of breaking it. "You can't have her."

Natasha, sitting across from him, raised one eye brow in disbelief. "You did not."

"Oh, he did!" Tony looked utterly delighted. Bruce sat with his face in his hands, laughing or possibly crying, while Clint very unsubtly scooted his chair closer to the door. Coulson, as usual, looked implacable.

"I don't think that's your choice to make. We've got a situation, and despite her new high-profile status, the Black Widow is still our best choice for dealing with this situation."

"No."

"She's still a SHIELD agent, Captain," Fury said, sitting up straight. His voice carried as a deep chord through the room, through Steve's bones, but Steve did not care.

"The WSC can clean up their own messes. We're the Avengers and we fight to protect the world and its citizens, not as the lackeys for a governmental agency that, as far as I can tell, as no legal right to exist."

"I assure you it's quite real."

Steve leaned over the table. "One of the best things I ever heard about as a kid was the League of Nations. The Great War ruined my family and a lot of good men, and I while I always wanted to do my duty, up until Hitler marched into Poland I kind of hoped we had advanced far enough to avoid another war. The League didn't do such a good job keeping the peace, but when I woke up the one thing I hoped for was that it had somehow kept going. And it did, but as the United Nations. Not as the World Security Council, which I can't even get a clear history on, despite my own clearance level. We don't know how the WSC was founded, we don't know where its budget comes from, and officially no one even knows who is on the council. When I tell you that I think it has no right to exist, I'm damn sure of what I'm talking about."

Tony was giving him a slow clap while Bruce looked impressed.

"Now you're asking for a critical member of my team to get signed off on an assignment for the WSC, for no other reason than your say so, and I'm sorry Director, but aren't you the guy who told me Coulson was dead?" He pointed at Coulson for effect.

Fury almost grimaced, Steve could see his neck muscles twitching. Natasha was surprisingly quiet while they wrestled for her like school boys, which set Steve's nerves on edge.

"What if I told you that the mission concerned the Winter Soldier?" Fury ground out.

Steve leaned back in his chair. "Then I'd know you're lying, because right now Bucky is on the hunt for me."

"He's not working alone, Rogers." Fury mirrored Steve's pose, leaning back in his chair. "He was hired by someone, and whatever his reasons are for not pulling the trigger, someone out there sent him to kill you."

He was definitely lying, which Steve knew by default and also from the way Fury chose his words. He was too sure, too certain, about things they had no way of knowing. Bucky could be being paid to miss; after all, they didn't know why he was pulling his shots so that meant every option was up for grabs. Fury would never settle on one answer unless he either knew it was true, in which case he was holding out on telling them why; or because he had no clue, in which case he would bluff.

Steve would have bet his shield right then that Fury was bluffing.

"How long will she be gone?" Steve tapped the conference table with his index finger. He was impressed by the way the rest of his team, especially Stark, was holding back. Everyone had eyes on him, and that was exactly the way he wanted it.

"Two weeks, give or take." Fury acted friendly and contrite, and nothing about that sat well with Steve.

He looked over at Natasha. "Your call."

She stared at her hands a moment, and that alone was enough to tell Steve that she was as in the dark as he was, or perhaps simply had a very different perspective than any of them about the situation. Sighing, she tipped her head towards Fury. "I'm still a SHIELD agent, and we need more answers than we've got."

Steve nodded at her, glad that she was picking up on the same issues he was concerning Fury's motivations, and was on the same page. Or so he hoped. "We'll manage, but don't dawdle."

"Dawdle? Who even says that?" Stark rolled his eyes.

"I do." Steve stood up. "Anything else?"

Fury took his time rising from his seat. "Nope. Hopefully it will be an uneventful two weeks for the Avengers. Try not to put yourself in the Winter Soldier's cross hairs in the meantime."

"Not like I have much choice in the matter, Director. Although I assure you I'm not keen on making myself a target. With the Widow off the board, that just makes us all vulnerable."

Fury nodded amicably, as if Steve had moved the conversation forward, but a quick glance towards Clint proved Steve's suspicion that Fury was simply sitting back to play a long game because Clint's posture was far too casual to be genuine. Steve figured someday Natasha would let Clint in on that tell, but for the moment, it was still useful. He shook hands with Fury and motioned for his team to follow him. Clint pulled out of the chair reluctantly with a long look at Natasha, but stomped out on Coulson's heels. Natasha stayed in the room, waiting with Fury for Hill to join her with details of the mission she was being sent on. Details that Fury had conveniently never gotten around to telling the Avengers.

As they left SHIELD and got into Tony's limousine, Steve looked over his rag-tag group. Thor was absent, off again to spend time with Jane in her lab in England. With Natasha on a mission for SHIELD, the Avengers were down to Steve, Tony, Bruce, Clint, and Coulson. Spiderman and the Falcon were around more often than not but they kept their independence, which some days Steve could really appreciate.

"One hell of a speech, there, Cap. You mind letting the rest of the class in on what that was really about?" Tony knocked knees with Bruce as he talked while Bruce massaged his forehead.

Clint sprawled over a side bench and yawned, jumping in before Steve could answer. "What I don't get is whether that was about the Winter Soldier or the WSC. Not both, I'm not buying that. Unless they are trying to catch Winter Soldier for themselves."

Tony snorted. "You bet your britches they are."

"'Bet your britches'?" Steve shook his head.

"You said 'dawdle'."

"Guys," Bruce said and they all straightened up in their seats, even Clint. Bruce looked over at Coulson.

Coulson shrugged. "The Council wants Winter Soldier, they want Captain America, they want the Hulk, they want the Iron Man suit. This isn't news. We've had to maneuver politics and PR to keep their fingers out the Avengers. It's an ongoing nightmare for both Fury and Pepper." He shrugged again. "I'm inclined, however unlikely, to take Fury's explanation at face value: he's giving the WSC access to Black Widow's skills in exchange for information about the Winter Soldier."

Clint scratched his chin. "I don't remember Fury actually saying that."

Bruce laughed, but kept rubbing his temples.

"No, he didn't, but it's what he meant." Steve stretched out, his feet almost reaching Bruce's across the length of the limo, and he tapped Bruce's shoe supportively. "I'm not keen on any Avenger being aligned with the WSC, even for a moment. But I trust Romanoff's judgment, and she wouldn't play Fury's game unless she thought we have something to gain by it."

"And by 'something' you mean, Bucky Barnes?" Tony asked, shewed and abrasive to the last.

Steve folded his hands over his stomach and looked straight at Tony. "Yes."

No one said anything after that, which was fine by Steve. Everyone acted weird when talk about Bucky came up, and Steve understood why but he didn't tolerate it well. He missed Bucky more now that he knew he was alive (again? Still? Steve hadn't quite parsed that part yet). When most everyone he cared about was dead, it was easy to put those feelings in a box. He still hadn't contacted Peggy because the woman he knew in 1945 was a good as dead to him, and recent pictures of her — frail, still beautiful, still a commanding presence — were like looking at a different person entirely. It hurt, a dull aching bruise on his heart that never healed, but for nearly a year he had managed to push all of that away from his day-to-day life. The feelings of loneliness that welled up and ruined him in the deep hours of early morning nightmares never made it to the light of day, at least until Natasha had pointed at Bucky's photograph and identified him as the Winter Soldier.

Tony had not been wrong when he said that most of Steve's life was tragic, and there was a numbing familiarity to that which was derailed by Bucky being alive, even if he was maybe brainwashed or an amnesiac or both. Steve was not accustomed to hope, it was antithetical to his childhood as an orphan passed around between distant relative, and then as a young gay artist during the dark, poverty-stricken 1930s. Hope was more painful than grief, in Steve's experience.

He looked up to see Tony studying him, even while rubbing Bruce's back. Bruce, curled up into himself, was obviously starting down the road to another migraine. He suffered them regularly, apparently a side effect of not letting the Other Guy out very often. It was definitely a curse, in Steve's opinion, no matter how much value the Hulk added to the team. But Steve understood more than most the pain of unintended consequences.

Steve stared back, working hard to appear unbothered by Tony's flagrant curiosity. It was an odd game they were playing with Tony's interest both in Steve himself and in Steve's reactions to the news of Bucky's survival. Steve wasn't oblivious to the way Tony eyed him up sometimes. It wasn't as if Steve was unused to being ogled by people at that point, and it was hardly the privilege he had thought it was when he first started noticing way back on that blasted USO tour in '43. He represented an ideal, both literally and figuratively, and given what he knew of Tony's bisexuality, it was simply not something Steve thought counted for much. Far more worrying to him was keeping his own interests out of the spotlight, or Tony's cross hairs. As much as their friendship had grown since the Battle of New York, there remained an element of piss and vinegar too. Tony was curious about Bucky and about how Steve felt about Bucky — something far too close to the relationship that Tony and Pepper shared, and Steve fully understood the irony of that. He wasn't scared of Tony finding out, not for his own sake anyway, but it seemed a short jump from Tony knowing that Steve was more than a little gay to discovering that his father had fucked Steve.

Steve knew there were some things that even the closest friendships would not survive, and he suspected that was one of them.

By the time they reached the Tower, everyone was ready to go their separate ways. Bruce quickly disappeared into his own suite to lie down and recuperate, while Tony wandered off to his lab and Clint dragged Phil off to lunch. Steve, left to his own devices, decided to retreat to his art studio, which was really the only room in the tower where he felt at home. Art supplies, unlike pretty much everything else, had not changed much in 70 years. Pastels and charcoal were still ungodly messy, oil paints were still frustrating, and ink still sharp. Steve put on his Dickies overalls, another constant that bizarrely made Steve sentimental for the Great Depression, and he thought that if that wasn't a sign of how messed up his feelings were, nothing was. He started work on another city-scape painting, because people were just too dangerous, too overwhelming, for him to draw outside of his private notebooks.