Chapter Text
Steve knew it for what it was, when he saw it: a war zone, strewn with blown-out rubble, most of the houses half-collapsed. Certain stark signs of sudden shattering made a greater impression than just the twisted steel and strewn brick. Steve stepped over the cracked half of a bathtub in the street. He could smell the tang of bleach in the air.
The tallest building that still stood in the tiny once-a-town was an old Hotel International. Art Deco, incongruously Southwestern touches tacked onto the poured concrete. It struck Steve, he’d seen buildings like this in his real life. No. Wait. Before the war. All clumsy curled steel moldings and peeling pale pink paint. One corner had been gnawed away like a giant mouse had chewed it, which added to the sense of surreality about the place. A faded sign in Sokovian and English hung out front, letters gray as old newsprint against the fine scrolled molding. In English, it said, Welcome Traveler’s.
“Let’s not let Natasha pick the hotel next time,” Sam said.
He had put on his uniform, wing pack settled on his back. It relieved Steve to see him bulletproofed. His mother had, touchingly, tightened his buckles for him before she’d left, her brisk competence as she got him squared away a reminder of Steve’s own mother. And everyone else--he realized now that there had been several--who’d helped him put himself together.
Technically it was a no-fly zone, so Major Wilson had left soon after landing. StarkTech had furnished the plane with some useful extras. For example, they’d been able to scan the zone for heat signatures before they had touched down. Nothing, though they knew the hotel was shielded. Steve still couldn’t stop his eyes from automatically tracking the landscape, the skin on the back of his neck prickly and his focus sharp. He counted eight places where a sniper might be positioned before he made himself stop, and when he looked over at Sam he saw him doing the same thing.
Steve had exchanged his uniform for a plainer one. No stars, no stripes, just dark blue and heavily armored. He held his shield on one arm and had their bags slung over his motorcycle.
The hotel door opened when they were still a good twenty yards away, and Steve tensed; relaxed at the sight of familiar red hair, but started again when he saw not one but two redheaded women. One of them Natasha and one, from a distance, close to a doppelgänger.
“You have interesting friends, Wilson,” said Natasha, her voice pitched just loud enough to carry the distance. The woman next to her blushed visibly.
“I’m Willow,” she said, and now that he looked at her he saw immediate differences: her face quirky, mobile, and sensitive where Natasha’s stayed fixed. Her movements untutored. “Rosenberg. And you’re Captain America, I mean, Steve Rogers, I’ve heard so much--”
“All good, don’t worry,” said Sam, and Steve held his breath for a moment and let it out.
“--and not just from the comics. I’m sure you get that a lot, right? You get that a lot. Anyway, uh… hi, Sam.”
“Hey, Will.”
“Come on,” Natasha said, beckoning them inside, her eyes caught steady on Steve. “Inside.”
Inside, the building looked no less efficient and busy than the interior of SHIELD, though its outside couldn’t have been further from the Triskelion’s pristinely lidless glass. The people here dressed casually; there wasn’t exactly a military air. More like an office, one of the ones Steve had seen on TV shows about modern young professionals who wore unbuttoned shirts and jeans while they did harried, important things and shouted into their phones a lot. Here were banks of computers, yes, but there was also a corner full of esoteric devices, metal, stone, wood; heavily leather-bound books; and what Steve could swear was a set of crystal balls. Did they come in sets?
Also, what he thought was just a guy in a flannel t-shirt turned around and… he had horns and a wrinkled face like a reptile. Not the strangest thing Steve had seen, after the Chitauri, but jarring. “Hey, there,” the lizard-faced man said in a disarmingly casual tone, nodding and sipping at a cup of coffee. Steve inclined his head warily in return.
They met the man in charge, a lanky, not at all reptilian, dark-haired guy with an eyepatch. He introduced himself as Commander Harris but immediately relaxed after his salute in a relieved kind of bonelessness, and told them to call him Xander.
He said to Steve, "It’s an honor. I have almost all your--"
"... trading cards?" Steve suggested, trying not to sound weary.
“How’d you know?” Turning to Willow. “How did he know?”
“Lucky guess,” Steve said.
“Well, that’s not important,” Xander said, waving it off. “I guess it’s also not the time to tell you what a big fan I was of Nick Fury, for obvious reasons,” pointing to his patch. “Not just that. What I mean is I was really sorry to hear about that.”
“It’s all right.” If Natasha hadn’t told him, neither would Steve.
“We’ll debrief later,” Xander said. “Get settled first. Tell me if there’s anything you need. Food? We have many kinds of food.”
“We’ll let you know,” Sam assured him, glancing at Steve, who shook his head: he’d eaten about eleven sandwiches on the plane, just to avoid having to talk too much.
Willow showed them to the armory, where Sam deposited his wings. Steve stowed his Harley in the big, reinforced concrete garage underground, next to a fleet of old Sokovian Humvees, a tank, and, to his surprise, another motorcycle with an American license. Xander informed them that this had been part of a rebel base before they’d moved in. To explain the motorcycle, he sighed and said, “Spike. Don’t ask.”
Willow and Xander left them alone to settle into their rooms, which were next to Natasha’s. Just narrow hotel rooms, with dilapidated furnishings and rickety beds. Papered over in dusty green. A big brass lamp askew in one corner, an old radiator covered in peeling paint. Sam and Steve dumped their things and then stood in the hall, in the small space between their doors, while Steve tried to absorb everything he’d just seen.
“Retro,” Sam commented at last. He leaned one hand against the doorframe, scanning his room again in the switched-on way Steve noticed he had sometimes. He had a heightened awareness that somehow translated as just another level of his usual calm. But that wasn’t really fair, was it? Steve supposed he looked calm from the outside, too.
“Familiar,” Steve said, with a tired smile that felt false on his face. “Art deco was in, back in the day.”
“All good?” Sam said. “I know this is strange.”
“Like I said… what’s strange anymore?”
“Well, it’s a little weird for me,” Sam admitted, and Steve looked harder at him, shifted so he was leaning sideways against the wall, too, to face Sam. “Not just this place, though I’ve never really met all of Riley’s… friends. I’d just kept in touch with Willow. Whew.” Blew out his breath. “They’re quite an outfit, huh?”
“Definitely different,” Steve said, trying diplomacy. “Not like SHIELD.”
“Yeah, and maybe that’s the good part,” Sam said, nodding. He paused. “But it is… seeing the street like that. That smell. Someone set off a dirty bomb. I didn’t think I was going to smell that again.”
“Are you all right?” Steve didn’t really know what to do with himself, wound up bunched up against the doorframe, arms crossed.
“Oh, man, sure, of course.” Sam had the capacity to almost-smile in a way Steve had to file away in his head as something to draw someday. Not that he ought to be thinking about that. “I was just thinking, I’m glad I can still help.”
Steve believed him. He realized what a relief it was to be around someone he could believe like that.
___________________________________________
Steve, Sam, Natasha, and Willow followed Xander to a conference room, the table laden with books--funny, Steve had gotten so used to the streamlined holographic displays at SHIELD that books struck even him as quaint. They did have one of those displays, though, an older-generation holograph that popped up to show a map of the region.
Natasha sat with lips tight and arms folded in her chair, expression blank. Steve had a feeling she was looking at Xander that way on purpose, simply for amusement. Willow, next to her, kept shooting her nervous glances.
“What’s going on out there?” Steve asked, bluntly, as soon as the door had shut behind them. “I knew there was unrest in Sokovia, but…”
Sam added, “Out there? That’s not just unrest.”
“It’s not just the Sokovian government,” Natasha said, shrugging; Xander had been about to say something but he shut his mouth abruptly when she spoke. “Strucker’s been using the rebellions as leverage. This town became a rallying point for the rebels, and then, when they heard the government planned a strike, an example. Citizenry blew it up themselves, ambushed the police detachment. Of course it escalated.”
“And Strucker swept in with whatever new weapon he was testing to, quote unquote, save the day,” Xander said. “That time it was a fire demon. We took care of it when your SHIELD forces couldn’t.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Willow give a tiny, satisfied smile.
“So Strucker’s been causing a lot of trouble, but for awhile, we could handle the occult side of things,” Xander went on. “Then it turned out SHIELD doesn’t just have it in for us because we’re weird and demonic and they’re the big bad government, they have it in for us because they’re weird and bad and demonic and uh… anyway, Strucker’s kind of just been gathering steam since SHIELD went kaboom.”
“What kind of firepower does he have?” Steve asked.
“At least twelve hundred stationed there, but that’s the least of it. It’s the research lab. He’s been churning out some strange stuff, not just occult, tech too. Kinda in line with the grand old Nazi tradition of horribleness, he’s been going after human experimental subjects. We’re not fans of that. Been doing our best to stop it.”
Steve’s stomach plummeted into icy freefall. Human experiments, he thought. Again. “And you think he’s after the Winter Soldier, too?” was all he said, trying not to sound too desperate.
“Yeah, or the Winter Soldier is after him… or after something he has. We honestly didn’t even know the guy existed until Willow dug up the info and that’s pretty spare.. But yeah, he may be what Strucker’s men are looking for right now,” Xander said, running one hand distractedly through his hair. “We overheard chatter about an infiltration on their comms yesterday. Someone scaled the wall of the castle, took out fourteen of their men, and left.”
“Just fourteen,” mused Natasha.
“Strucker was pretty shaken up about it,” Xander went on. “He sent a detachment out looking for the guy. The Soldier. He’s brought out the big guns for this one, something powerful. We think some of the experiments have started to, uh, maybe kind of work. So we sent our best out after them, mostly slayers. Like, right now, Buffy’s group should be almost on them--” His eye darted to the projection screen. “Can I just say how unfair it is that we finally installed 3-D capacity holograms and I have no depth perception? Can I say that? How did Nick Fury deal with this?”
Willow cleared her throat.
“Anyway,” Xander went on, “We’re getting some pretty weird reads where Strucker’s search party went. There’s a whole area, look, where it’s just like even the satellites won’t track it… we can’t seem to get a handle on anything there, it’s like trying to pop soap bubbles with a nerf gun.”
Steve thought, what? This level of modern slang was too much for him. A sidelong glance at Sam, met with a shrug, told him maybe Sam was in over his head there, too.
Willow said, “There are tremendously anomalous energy signatures, and whatever's shielding them is impermeable to most magic. It appears to be something both technologically sophisticated and occult.”
A square on the grid was lit up and flashing yellow. It had been since they’d walked into the room, actually, a steady flicker Steve had noted and then dismissed.
Now the flashing yellow turned to orange, and then deep red.
“Uh-oh,” Xander said. He’d seemed relaxed, but now he tensed, his jocular, casual air slowly hardening. His posture improved. Steve saw something of the soldier in him, then. “Willow, what’s going on?”
When Steve turned in his chair, he found Willow’s face had gone very set. Veins stood out in her forehead, and her eyes--they had become pools of black. All right, he told himself, So that’s what it looks like. Even Natasha seemed surprised.
“Trouble,” Willow said, in a whisper that filled the room. “There is. Something new.” She pointed to a spot on the map at the edge of the flashing zone. “I’d better go.” Her blank, black gaze turned on the rest of them like the glare of some predatory bird, and then she shook herself, and the black drained from her eyes like ink out of a well.
Steve stared. “What’s going on?”
“There’s been an ambush,” Willow said. “The riverbed our group went down to investigate… they’re fighting now.”
“That’s ten klicks out,” said Xander, reaching for the headset on the table. “Summers, do you read? Summers, come in--”
“You need help?” Sam asked.
“I’m in,” Steve said, standing, grabbing for his shield.
“Of course,” said Natasha, unfolding herself with liquid grace. Steve couldn’t tell if she were talking to him or not.