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Chapter Text

track a - Katya

When she blinked her eyes and found herself in an entirely different body, her first instinct was to start screaming. Thankfully, incoherent screaming was apparently a normal response for newly orphaned nine-year-olds. The woman she’s pretty sure is Melinda May (or the actress who played her, or a dedicated cosplayer) blinked in shock as she opened her mouth and screamed her head off.

Doppelgänger May said, cautiously, “honey, she’s not a threat anymore. Can you calm-” The air was static, pulsing, crackling. She clapped her hands over her ears, curled into a ball, and firmly shoved away every thought and bit of sensory input she was receiving. The air was just hot now. She looked up. May is crouched in front of her, face concerned, hands outstretched. “-breathe with me?” Oh no. Ohh, no. The first thing to note was that she was wearing leggings. Why was she wearing leggings? She hated leggings. Her hair was long, and perfectly straight, and not pulled up in a braid or a bun or even a ponytail.

That’s not right either- under very few circumstances, she left her hair down, and this was clearly not one of them. The walls were all brown, and the floors were covered with unconscious or soon-to-be-dead men, and one tall blonde woman with her hair wrapped in a pretty blue headscarf. She has been impaled on what appeared to be a lamp. Good lord, if she’s not wrong, that’s Eva Belyakova. And the woman in front of her was Melinda May, who was inexplicably dressed in business casual, an odd combination with her mussed hair, black eye, and the particularly nightmarish blood drying on her face. She was short. She was very short. The air was hot. The walls were brown. The ground was covered in bodies, one of which was Eva Belyakova. Melinda May killed her. Melinda May is trying to calm her down. That was Eva Belyakova, dead, so this must be Bahrain. She is short.

“Scheißdreck!” Katya Belyakova hissed, pulling out a swear word she’d never actually used before, and one which, with any luck, May didn’t know.

“What?” Asked May. She did not sound like she was about to lecture her on her choice in German swear words she found on the internet. The smallest of mercies.

“I,” she said, with feeling, “would like to be anywhere else.” May smiled. It looked painful. Katya tried not to wince.

“Okay, honey, just come with me. Everything’s gonna be okay.” May’s hand was in hers, and she blinked as the sun hit her eyes, and she was thinking exactly one thought: I can’t believe my name is Katya, of all things.

track b - Coulson

Waking up with a tie around his neck- fuck ties- and stiff shoes were the first signs that something was wrong. Waking up in an expensive, vintage, red car that he didn’t even know how to drive was the second. Even though he claimed to know how to drive in a pinch- his state allowed people to get permits when they were 14.5, and he was only a year away from that- he had never actually been behind the wheel.

“Holy shit,” he muttered, twisting himself around in the leather seat to stare at the backseat, then up at the clear sky and around the traffic around him. The wheel was cool in his hands, painted red with three metal spokes in the middle. He knew exactly what this car was.

“A 1962 Cherry Red Convertible Chevy Corvette? No fucking way!” Looking into the rearview mirror, he gaped and slapped himself.

“Holy shit. Okay, that hurt. Not doing that again. I’m not dreaming, which is good, I think. Can you feel things in dreams? I’ve never slapped myself before in a dream, right?” He honestly couldn’t remember if he had ever slapped himself in a dream. He’d definitely slapped someone else, probably telenovela style. That would be fun. The hook from ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls blasted from somewhere in Lola, and Now-Coulson startled, jerking a little bit as he took his foot off what must be the brake and put it back down. Scrambling to find the phone, he eventually realised it was in his pocket. He squinted as he pulled out a blocky phone with a keyboard. What the fuck? Trying to answer the still-ringing phone whose buttons were faded enough that any symbols had been rubbed off by use, he finally landed on hitting the answer button and putting it up to his ear, balancing on his shoulder.

“What’s up,” Phil said, a grin on his face. This was so fucking cool. Weird that he was a guy, but cool. He had read fanfiction similar to what was happening. Holy shit, he would get to meet all his favourite characters. He could fix everything! He was the main character! He was never the main character! OH MY GOD, HE COULD GET HIS SHIPS TOGETHER. This was amazing!! He had no idea why this was happening, but he would make the most of it while he could.

“Fury wants you to get your ass back to Base.” That was Hill. He tried not to freak out.

“Yep. Right away. I will get my ass down there and meet everyone. This is so cool.”

“...Coulson, what the hell?” He jumped as the cars behind him honked in unison. Oh, the light was green. Which one was the go pedal again?

track c - Steve

A singular thought echoed through the indomitable and expansive darkness.

“Why am I so fucking cold? God, my toe itches. That’s gross.”

Chapter Text

Katya clutched the sippy cup in her dumb child fingers and drank apple juice with her dumb child face. She didn’t like being eight. She didn’t like being eight at all.

Also, she’s very bored.

The SHIELD agent watching over her left, like, a million hours ago, and now she only had a sippy cup of apple juice and a disguised security camera. Did SHIELD get a sippy cup of apple juice specifically for her? Did they already have one on hand? Both options were equally funny.

She briefly contemplated manipulating Agent’s senses after she tagged him a few hours earlier, but that would give away her powers, and she didn’t want to end up like Ava Starr or those Enhanced in that freezer facility. She sipped her apple juice and tried to concentrate on Agent’s senses instead of her own. It was incredibly disorienting, and she couldn’t splice the input. Maybe she’d learn to with practice? 

The door to The Room swung open, and Katya hastily shoved Agent’s input into her mental pocket. 

“Uhhh,” said Clint Fucking Barton , looking around, “I think this is the wrong room.” He seemed confused. She knew this because his forehead had the squiggly lines people get when they are stressed or confused about something.

“It definitely is,” agreed Katya. “Hi. I’m Katya. I’m very bored.” She did a little wave in his general direction, using the hand that did not hold the remains of her precious apple juice.

Hawkeye blinked at her. “Uh, hi, Katya. I’m Clint.”

Katya nodded. “Okay.” She drank the rest of her apple juice. After a brief pause, she added, “You should probably go find the right room. And if you see Agent, tell him to come back here and fight me because-“ she waved her sippy cup in the air, narrowing her eyes- “I’m out of apple juice, and I’m bored.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. Then, “which agent?”

“How am I supposed to know?” She asked irritably. “I’m eight. No one tells me anything.”

“ Clint ,” called someone from the hallway, “ what are you doing ?”

It’s in Russian. Katya beamed. Take that, Dad, learning Russian on Duolingo was worth something, after all! 

“ Nothing of substance ,” she yelled back.

Clint blinked at her. The wiggly forehead lines were gone. (From this, she surmised he was too busy being surprised to be confused. And from that, she guessed he was not a good multitasker.) A redheaded woman whom she recognised as Natasha Romanoff walked in and looked around, unamused. Good lord, that was Black Widow! She killed many people! She was an actual, hand-to-god, ex-KGB assassin !

“ My name is Katya ,” she greeted cheerfully.

Black Widow stared at her.

“That’s Natasha,” Clint offered, clearly trying to be helpful and only kind of succeeding.

She waved dutifully at Natasha. “Hi, Natasha,” Katya said.

Natasha did not speak. Clint shifted his weight from one foot to the other and glanced at the door as if preparing to bolt at a moment’s notice. She could relate. She, too, wanted to escape this stupid room. She narrowed her eyes. Could she leave this room? She never actually tried.

The room was still quiet. 

“Can I call you Nata?” She asked, attempting to wipe her face of any expressions to match Natasha’s.

A tiny smile quirked on her face. “Sure thing, Katka,” she agreed. Aw, yes, she made Black Widow smile!

“Can I call you Katka?” Asked Clint.

Katya thought. “You have to trade me a nickname.”

He frowned. “Clint is a nickname.”

“So is Natasha,” she told him, shrugging. “That’s the deal, Clint. A name for a name.” 

She felt like a faerie. What were Russian fey called? She’d hit up the ‘Slavic mythology’ Wikipedia page as soon as she got out of here. Wikipedia was a thing in 2008, right? Oh no.

“I’m Hawkeye,” he told her resignedly, rudely interrupting her internal crisis over the possible non-existence of Wikipedia. 

She scrunched up her nose. “I’m going to stick with Clint.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” he muttered. Grinning, he added, “Katka.”

An electronic noise popped and sputtered, then cleared out to loose static as a crackly, bored voice she vaguely recognised said, “Strike Team Delta, you shouldn’t be in this interrogation room.”

“Neither should an eight-year-old,” said Nata. It was very light. No one sounded both that careless and intent unless it was deliberate. Was Nata mad? Good! She should be! Katya was bored !

“Yeah,” drawled Clint, “What’s up with that, Blake?” Ooh, Blake. He wasn’t Hydra. That was always nice to know.

He sighed over the microphone. “A team got sent in to evaluate her mother for the Index. Everyone but the mother walked out alive. Kid’s stuck here until we resolve the matter.”

“Great,” said Clint, “so we can take her with us?”

Katya hid her grin behind her empty sippy cup. Nata noticed, because of course she did. 

“You cannot,” said Blake. She imagined he was rubbing his temples and trying not to yell at Clint. She feels that energy. It was like when she had to be in seventh grade. She was not looking forward to seventh grade. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have depression in seventh grade this time.

She honestly doubted she had good enough luck for that.

***

“Good morning, Katya,” greeted Miss Bobbi, grinning at her as she slapped her badge at the keycard reader. It made a beeping noise. Big Brother now knew she was awake, woo-hoo.  

Katya waved over her shoulder as she fastidiously made a cup of peppermint tea. She wasn’t allowed to have caffeinated tea, and Miss Bobbi was almost always there in the mornings to steal it away, even if she managed to climb onto the counter, get a single tea bag, climb back to the floor, and put it in her tea unnoticed. She wouldn’t, anyway, because they didn’t have a single kettle in the residential kitchenette, and she would never put milk in her cup while there was still a tea bag in there. (This was because she’s not a barbarian. Miss Bobbi laughed at her when she explained this, so she clearly was.) 

“Good morning, Agent Morse,” she said blandly, tucking her badge back into its lanyard sleeve. It was plain white and labelled ‘ Katya Belyakova - Communications Contractor ’ because she spent most of her time at Comms, and they didn’t have a better title for her. Thankfully, her lanyard was less boring. (It was obnoxiously purple and polka-dotted, courtesy of Clint, who seemed to have a never-ending assortment of purple items.) 

“Just Bobbi is fine, Katya.”

“Okay, Agent Morse,” Katya agreed, the corners of her mouth twitching up as she groaned. 

She walks down the hallway, careful not to crash into anyone (or, far more likely, a wall or a stray potted plant), and mentally plots the course from here (the bland, hardly-used residential quarters of SHIELD HQ) to the Communications Wing, where she had been hesitantly assigned a few weeks ago. From what she understood, she should’ve been sent to foster care after the first month and a half, when the Belyakova investigation had wrapped up, but May was possibly going to adopt her. It probably wasn’t going to end that way, given that May was both a) an active field agent and b) at least a little bit traumatised by killing Katya’s mother in front of her. In the meantime, she helped translate things for SHIELD and sometimes went to the gym, where she got very good at outrunning rookie agents and mocking them as she did so. 

Katya came to the end of the tunnel, taking the stairs to the Comms Wing two at a time. She pushed open the door at the top of the stairwell and blinked a bit at the sunlight streaming in through the copious bombproof windows. 

“Hi, Agent Stevens,” she sang, skipping into her supervisory officer’s office. She unlocked the second safe and slipped out the tablet, which she had labelled in large, blocky letters ‘ К. БЕЛЯКОВА :) ’, using obnoxious purple duct tape (borrowed from Clint) and a large Sharpie (one of Miss Rebecca’s). 

“What’m I translating today? Russian chatter? Arabic chatter? Another one of Vasquez’s mission reports she wrote in Spanish because she was feeling obnoxious?”

Miss Rebecca grimaced. “Any chance you know German? Our Berlin outpost sent in the monthly budget in the wrong language, and Webb’s out sick.”

She beamed. “As a matter of fact, I do! You’ll want to send today’s maybe terrorism chatter off to someone else, though-“

“No can do, I’m afraid,” said Agent Coulson, in his bland mid-level government milquetoast sort of way, which was a very ingenious cover. She would even fall for it if she hadn’t already seen his mortal face peel away to reveal the Flaming Skull of Justice. Or perhaps he really was the spirit of bland, mid-level government milquetoasts, made powerful by their large numbers and the normal people who feared them. In his case, his terrifying powers mostly manifested in the irritating ability to only be perceived by the human eye when he wanted to. 

Miss Rebecca and she frowned at Coulson. 

“Unfortunately, kiddo, your time at SHIELD has come to an end.” She sullenly turned off her tablet and put it back in the safe. 

Miss Rebecca groaned. “Agent Coulson, are you sure we can’t make her a ward of the state or something and keep her on as a translator? I hate translating German. Their grammar is terrifying.”

“I’m afraid not,” he said blandly, not bothering to hide his tiny smile. “Miss Belyakova, come with me. We’ll collect your belongings.”

She hesitated, then impulsively lunged across the desk and hugged Miss Rebecca. “Bye, Agent Stevens,” she mumbles. 

“As soon as you’re eighteen, I’m recruiting you,” she muttered fiercely. “Keep learning, yeah?”

She shot her a thumbs up as Coulson hustled her out of Miss Rebecca’s office. “Will do!”

Ah, it was just as well. She had forgotten her tea in the residential quarters, and it shouldn’t be cold when they got back. 

***

Katya glared out the window.

“Fuck Canada,” she announced, furiously scribbling the same obscenity into the tacky heart flip-sparkle diary her foster parents had gotten her. She supposed she was lucky it wasn’t furry, or rainbow-coloured. It looked like something a second-grader would buy at a book fair. 

Good god, she was going to have to live through the 2010s again, with the weird (but honestly kind of cute) geometric bikinis, and the hi-lo dresses, and that one year everyone was obsessed with moustache print for no reason. And fucking book fairs. Worst of all, she lived in Canada now. 

Canada sucked. She was a nine-year-old, vegetarian time traveller, with a strong distaste for all things maple syrup and hiking. Inconveniently, the last time around, she was, like, a year old, so she couldn’t even game the stock market. Hmm. She could try anyway. Things to consider. 

Later. Because she was nine, and these parents would probably not be as thrilled as her old ones if their nine-year-old showed an interest in their personal stock portfolio. Did she even have a stock portfolio now? Damn.

‘ FUCK CANADA ’, she scrawled more aggressively in the stupid, sparkly, lined diary. 

Oh. What if her foster parents read that? 

Katya scribbled them both out and replaced them with ‘ fick Kanada ’. Which, frankly, wasn’t actually that hard to understand, but she didn’t know what ‘fuck’ was in Russian, so that was a no-go. 

Underneath ‘ fick Kanada ’, she wrote: ‘ 1) learn how to say fuck in Russian .’

After what she was pretty sure was a brief moment of consideration, though it could equally as possibly have been five to ten minutes of her staring into space, she added: ‘ 2) Profit .’

It was at this point in time she heard an unfortunate metallic swooshing noise. Nigh-cartoonishly, she hit the deck, and watched with wide eyes as a very shiny knife hit the wall.

That was new. 

She’d like to say her training kicked in and she heroically dodged the next knife. Unfortunately, she was not a great liar. Also, she didn’t have knife-dodging training. She did have knife-disarming training.

Katya sucked in a breath, trying to pull all of the sensory input from her tagged foster parents into mind. She couldn’t. Oh, shit. This was very not good. She wasn’t quite sure if she had accidentally dropped their tags, or if they had been knocked out, or killed, even, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the adrenaline (also knife) in her system. 

“Are you going to want this back?” She asked her attacker blithely, doing her level best to ignore the blinding pain of the knife in her leg, because if Spider-Man could do it, she could do it better.

Knife Guy (or Lady, because girls can murder children too!) did not respond. How rude of them. 

Katya dedicated herself to trying to find them, because if she could tag them, she could kill them with a thought. Or overload their senses with pain until they passed out, then alert SHIELD and make them come pick her up. There you go. She could go back to SHIELD, and be troubled no more by knife-throwing lunatics who killed Canadian foster parents.

The third knife came whizzing from a dark corner. This one she blocked with a helpful stuffed animal. She looked at it mournfully. Damn. That was the purple frog Clint had sent her for her birthday. She liked that frog. 

RIP, Millicent , she thought sadly, then redoubled her efforts to find the Knife Guy.

As it turned out, she didn’t need to find him. He just came out of the shadows and stabbed her manually.

Katya screamed, because that was what you did when you were in unimaginable pain. She spun around, yanked the knife out of her leg - ow ow ow - and rammed it directly into his left armpit. She remembered somewhere that stabbing someone in the armpit would sever a nerve or an artery or something. 

Or, she tried to. It just made a metallic clinking noise and bounced off. 

Holy shit! 

She stabbed his other armpit instead.

He took one whole audible breath. 

Katya smiled smugly. Now she’s thrown him off his rhythm.

She tagged him, the sense of relief overpowering the very disturbing and continuous feeling of bleeding from more than one place. 

Now it was just her and her routine. Tag them, tap into their senses, observe, and manipulate.

Push up the pain from the knife, make every one of his senses overload with input. She knew how miserable that felt, and she knew it was James Barnes she was effectively torturing right now, but sue her, she was pissed.

It wasn’t doing much. Of course it wasn’t. He was used to pain. Fuck, that’s so sad. What would make him sleep? What could knock him out?

She could try making him think he was in cryo?

She concentrated on the air vents, on the cold of the metal arm, and amplified it to a thousand. Cold like winter, and biting ice cream and getting that nasty feeling when your teeth got cold, and freeze-brains and not asking for a jacket because your mother told you to and she’d be insufferable if you admitted you were cold.

“ Go to sleep ,” she said, in Russian, because why not.

He went to sleep.

Katya stared at the body of the guy who just tried to kill her. The Winter fucking Soldier. What even was her life anymore? This was what happened when you had too much main character energy. 

Then the adrenaline started to run out, and she started crying. Ah, fuck , she’d been stabbed.

Chapter Text

“Follow through. You’re not following through!” He shot again, trying to remember everything from the different shows he had watched. Was this how you posed? People always seemed to pose like this in movies when they shot. He could barely remember how his cowboy friend had taught him.

“There it is! Remember, Phil, follow through, and you won’t miss anyone.” Panting, he grabbed a nearby towel to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

“Yes, sir. Thanks for doing this, Garrett. I’ll miss having this arm.” It would be difficult fighting people with what little training he’d learned through osmosis, and unfair, too. They would have two arms. He would only have one!

He’d been getting weird looks since he had shown up, but he figured that was the price of saying weird things. The tally was at 17. He began the trek up to his office after changing back into his suit, cursing and fiddling with the tie he had definitely not tied correctly.

People were looking at him. It was weird. Why were they looking at him? He glanced down at his suit, which looked fine. Maybe it was the tie. As soon as he was in the elevator, he scrambled to undo it, shoving it into his pocket as the doors opened. The junior agents were still staring at him. He resisted the urge to hiss at them like a cat or do a funny dance.

Finally, he returned to the formerly plain office he had decorated with various memorabilia upon possessing Phil. Slumping with his back to the door, he trudged over to his desk, sipping at the now cold coffee mug and wondering if the weird looks he would get were worth another cup of mediocre office coffee. Seriously, couldn’t SHIELD afford the good stuff? When he got to meet him, he decided to ask Tony Stark for a coffee machine.

A knock sounded at the door.

“What’s the password?”

“Coulson? It’s Hill. Fury’s called for a meeting.” Phil groaned, pushing himself up out of his chair. Maybe covering it with one of those Cap car seat covers would make it better.

“Actually, the password was avocado, but that works too, I guess.” Grabbing his phone from his desk, he pushed open the door and flipped his phone open, checking if he had missed any messages. He’d quickly learned that only a few people had his personal cell number.

“Why the hell do you need to bring a flip phone to a meeting?” Maria squinted at him from behind her tablet. He twitched, startled and stared at her

“Cause then I can copy down all the quotes I’ll get!” Coulson exclaimed, practically vibrating, smiling warmly at Hill’s unimpressed glare. He deflated, looking away from her like a scolded child.

“Okay, you caught me; it’s actually ‘cause I can’t tell time on a watch.”

They entered the board room, and he immediately noticed a whiteboard on the far wall that had been wheeled it. Though it was blank, he aimed a confused look towards Fury, who remained impassive as usual. Either way, it was cool. Spy things. He could totally do this. He had kept a lot of secrets in his life.

***

“Sir,” said Coulson, trying his best not to fidget and sound like an adult person who does grown-up things like talk fancy and taxes and shit. “Have you thought that maybe we have spies in SHIELD?”

Fury didn’t move his head from examining the paperwork on his desk but raised an eyebrow. Coulson had never managed to figure out how people did that. How did someone only raise one eyebrow? It was like those puppets with strings- the weird ones that they used in Sound of Music and also in France sometimes. They were symmetrical, right?

“Of course there are spies in SHIELD,” Fury flipped a page. “You’re one of them.” His tone heavily implied that he thought Phil was stupid. Phil agreed sometimes, but he knew he was right about this.

Hopping into the spinning chair on the other side of Fury’s desk, he spun a few times as he thought about how to answer. This would be so much easier if he were himself Before. On second thought, they might not take a random thirteen-year-old girl who knew way too much classified material seriously. But people were usually nicer to thirteen-year-olds when they weren’t little shits, and Coulson’s older sibling had mastered the art of winning over adults. Coulson was still getting the hang of it and this was a horrible fucking way to test run this shit.

“I hate ties,” Phil grumbled instead of answering. “I had to wear one at that stupid British school because the man Athena thought killed Princess Diana even though he was, like, twelve when it happened, and our stupid, professionally trained clown headmaster made us.”

Fury raised a singular eyebrow again.

“Anyways, that’s not my point. Fuck, what was my point?” He paused, manspreading. That was a bonus to being a man. You can manspread. Well, you can manspread as a lady, but most of the time, it just felt weird, and he lived in the South, where people weren’t too keen on that. Plus, if you wanted to help out at Cotillion to make money and maybe get away from your parents some nights, you can’t manspread.

“Oh, yeah, that maybe some of the spies are…. Y’know, anti-spies. Like, they’re spying, but for other people, you feel me… uh, sir?”

“Phil, are you saying we have double agents in SHIELD?” Phil tried to do that thing where you snap and do finger guns. Hey, he’s bi. He’s automatically good at finger guns, but it didn’t snap. Stupid fucking man fingers. Maybe cutting them off and getting cool robot fingers was a better idea. Then he could wear all the nice rings. Guys had a really fucking boring selection of rings, and he was pretty sure it was a bad idea to order something off of Etsy to his office. He could have ordered them to his house, but he had no idea where that was, so he had just been sleeping in his office for the past month he had been in the MCU.

***

“What do you mean they found Captain fucking America?” He was trying his best not to freak out, but his weird man voice was reaching frequencies that he didn’t know were possible for guys. Flapping his hands, Phil excitedly followed Maria. He could call her Maria now; she’d upgraded him from calling her Hill after he helped braid her hair before a mission, and wasn’t that the coolest fucking thing ever?

“Calm down,” Maria said, her tablet in hand. He squinted at it. One of those days, he should steal it and see if he could download Angry Birds. Did that exist yet? He was pretty sure it existed, but the last time he lived through the year 2011, he was barely a year old. As he figured out from seeing children, a potato and not much else. He had actual MCU trading cards now! He could get Cap to sign them before he had to fake his death!

“Holy shit,” Coulson hissed as they entered the room. “Are we pretending it’s fucking Chicago or something? Why is it so fucking cold in here?” He’d never been more grateful to wear a suit. He should get a dress. He’d look great in a dress. He could kill some Nazis in a dress. He’d be willing to kill some Nazis if he weren’t in a dress, but all the early 2000s action movies taught him that it was way cooler if you were wearing a dress.

“Phil,” Maria said, looking down at her tablet and swiping at a few things. “Why have you been so weird?” Maria had one eyebrow raised at him. Was that a spy thing? Could he do it? Was that a requirement for joining SHIELD? Could Captain America raise one eyebrow?

“I, uh-” Phil looked around for something he could use. Quick, what would Natasha Romanov do? “I’m a spy.”

“We’re all spies.”

“And that’s bad for inner morale,” Coulson bullshitted. Bullshat? What was the correct tense? Nah, he didn’t really care. “We should have casual Fridays. Better yet, no Fridays.”

“No Fridays?”

“No work on Fridays. I think that would be really helpful for mental health and, uh, spy things.”

Dashing out of the room, he started doing his hop-two-threes down the hallway to his office, stopping and breaking into an awkward jog when he ran into people. Could he sign up for Irish dance again? Would he have to wear a kilt? So many questions and so little time.

“Is Coulson high?” He could vaguely make out Fury’s question to Hill, who shrugged.

“I should call Melinda. Fuck, what’s happening in 2009. Thor happens. Do I have to prepare for Thor? How the fuck do you prepare for Thor?” Phil said as he hopped on his phone in his office. How did you memorise people’s phone numbers? He’d gotten a new asshole ripped into him by Fury when he’d been caught writing down people’s numbers in those fancy pocketbooks or whatever old people called them that he’d picked up from a store. A knock sounded at the door.

“Come in,” he said, clearing his throat. In walked Natasha-fucking-Romanov, holy shit. Was Winter Widow a thing here? Could he make Winter Widow a thing here instead of whatever Marvel was doing with Bucky and Yelena?

“Heading out to get Barton,” she said.

“Yeah,” he replied dumbly.

“Are you alright?” Natasha tilted her head as his dog did Before when he was curious.

“Yeah,” Phil repeated, smiling weakly. “Bring him in with no injuries, please.”

***

Darcy Lewis reminded Coulson of his older sister Before. In the knitting and overbearing with a lot of pop-culture references kind of way. She was so fucking cool. It was so fucking weird that most people were shorter than him- except for Thor, who was a fucking unit- because he’d been about 5’3” and a quarter, thank you very much, Before. Even though he had watched the MCU religiously and had a few of the comics, Coulson didn’t remember everything. It was a bitch, especially when there was that little push in the back of his brain like a chicken was pecking him to tell him he had forgotten something. He didn’t like the chicken.

Well, thank fuck for living in the South because he was contractually obligated to habitually refer to Fury as sir, which was easy enough when your friends were cowboys. He did have to stop himself from ma’aming Dr. Foster and Darcy, who were technically younger than him by at least a few years. Phil definitely was trying not to focus on how he was a man- Phillis or Phillip or whatever the fuck Phil was short for Coulson.

“Did you know that the interns have a running bet about whether or not you’ve been smoking weed?” Clint popped up out of nowhere. Coulson tried not to flinch. It didn’t work. Clint grinned.

“All that weed is making you paranoid, man,” Clint said.

“I’m not smoking weed,” Coulson replied, exasperated as he tried to figure out the computer that was basically new in 2010 but was slow for anyone from 2023. He groaned as the same pop-up about horny singles in his area blocked the page he was looking at and made that annoying moan every time he tried to click out of it.

“What do you need, Agent Barton?” Clint was breathing loudly over his shoulder, obviously trying not to laugh as the ad persisted.

“Oh, well, Dr. Foster’s assistant-”

“Darcy?” Clint blinked.

“Yeah. She wants her iPod back. I know she wants her iPod back because she keeps hacking me and writing ‘I WANT MY IPOD BACK’ in large, multicoloured letters on my screen.” Coulson looked back at the computer with a glare as one of the nearly naked women had an animation of one of those planes with a banner on it repeat to him that Darcy wanted her iPod back.

***

The helicopter’s roar made Coulson shiver, the wind blowing at his surprisingly not-tight pants. His glasses slightly squeezed his nose. Fury’s leather shoes stepped out of the copter, Hill hidden behind her tablet close behind, moving blindly.

“How bad is it?”

“That’s the problem, sir. We don’t know.” Coulson sighed. “It’s hard to get answers while everyone’s running around like the North during a hurricane, sir.”

Fury rolled his eyes. Maria snorted, not even being polite enough to try and cover it up with a cough. Before, he would have been over the moon; Maria freaking Hill laughing at one of his jokes, but this wasn’t Before.

“Sorry, sir. Dr. Selvig read an energy surge from the Tesseract four hours ago.”

“NASA didn’t authorise Selvig to test phase.”

“Spontaneous advancement. He wasn’t testing it. He wasn’t even in the room.”

Fury turned to look at Hill, then to Coulson.

“It just turned itself on?” Maria crinkles her eyebrows in confusion, “What are the energy levels now?”

“Climbing. When Selvig couldn't shut it down, we ordered the evac. ‘Bout a half hour ‘till campus is clear.”

“Do better.” Oh my god, he was going to get to meet the Avengers. Holy shit.

Chapter Text

“Workman up for the Phillies, now. Holding that big club down at the end. He sets, and Chipman pitches. Curveball, outside. Ball one.”

Who on fucking earth was listening to baseball that loud? He kept his eyes closed even though he heard the door open and someone entered. Maybe that was his roommate coming back from class. Why did the sound of the game sound so familiar? Finally, he opened his eyes, pressing himself on the bed with thin sheets. Had he knocked everything down in his sleep again?

“Good morning,” a woman’s voice said, and who the hell had broken into his dorm room? Did he lock the door last night? Honestly, he couldn’t remember. What the hell was going on? Sitting up, he looked around the strangely beige and undecorated room, eventually landing on a woman sitting on a chair in a vintage dress.

“Or, should I say, good afternoon,” the woman continued, and he narrowed his eyes slightly, scanning her up and down. She had loose hair, not of the same era as her clothes from the 40s. Why did this ring some bell inside his head? What was going on? Why was he not in his dorm room at the university? He rubbed his face, listing everything in his head to see if he could come to a conclusion.

“So, the Dodgers are ahead eight to five. And Chipman knows one swing of the bat, and this fella’s capable of making it a brand new game.” Wait a minute. He had read enough fanfiction to know that line. Wide-eyed, he-who-was-now-Steve-fuckin’-Rogers stared at the radio and then quickly down at himself, noting the plain white t-shirt and khaki trousers. Damn, they really put this man in khaki. Well, it wasn’t as if their stylists were very good. He looked back up at the woman, trying to remember the line he was supposed to say.

“How long have I been out?” Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Steve’s eyes darted towards the door. Damn, he was a guy now. That was weird.

“Outfield deep, round toward left, the infield over shifted.” He didn’t know a damn thing about baseball, but he knew what needed to happen next.

“I’m afraid I couldn’t say-” With lightning speed, Steve grabbed her arm. “Captain Rogers, please!”

“Who are you? How do you know who I am?” Thank fuck for Mickey’s hyper fixation. He’d heard this scene repeated as the film was played and replayed. The woman winced, and he almost felt bad for her.

“We know all about you.” That was ominous as fuck. Really, didn’t they have tact courses at SHIELD? A man in modern clothing rushed into the room with metal restraints like they were in a mental health facility.

“Here’s the pitch from Chipman...” He let go of the agent instinctively as the man moved closer, calculating if he could take this man down with whatever instincts this body he now possessed had. The brawny intruder moved closer, the restraints now in both hands.

“Swung on, belted, it’s a long one, deep into left centre back goes Galan. Back, back, back...” Oh, god fucking damnit. Really? 2011 of all years? Well, at least they had no expectations of how Steve Rogers- not Captain America- was supposed to act. He swore out loud, grabbing the man and snapping the restraints on him, throwing him through the door. Steve didn’t take a moment to hesitate at his own strength as the shards of broken wood flew every which way.

Springing into action, he sprinted out of the false set, searching for a stairwell. Once it had been discovered and he had momentarily checked it was not alarmed before pushing it open and gleefully jumping down flights of stairs from the gap between the railings. It was like a movie. Suddenly, the blast of sunlight hit his face as he exited the building, so he blinked, looking every way, knowing that they were seconds behind him. He couldn’t hide from SHIELD because they would just track him down. All he could do was allow himself to be caught in the same way the true Steve was in the film.

Well, he could have a crisis later. Older cars than he was used to speeding around him because people drove crazily everywhere. A girl walked by him with dip-dyed hair; he hadn’t seen that in years. Then again, he had been seven when he had last lived through 2011, so he supposed this was another chance to cringe at fashion choices. Sprinting away from the building further, he passed by people on their way to work, some with their faces in their phones, but most walking sight unimpeded, entirely unconcerned with what everyone else was doing. Ah, New York.

Stopping in the middle of Times Square, Steve paused, looking around. He used to come here a lot as a kid, stopping by to take photos whenever his mother insisted on Facebook when they were in the city to see plays or musicals. He’d once performed there with a dance troupe, back when he was in his mid-teens in stifling August. They’d cleared a space, and the musicians had set up, though they’d had to leave quickly so they wouldn’t get in trouble with the cops. The inconspicuous black government vehicles pulled up, and Steve cursed the fact that they were in New York and not some city in the South where people can’t mind their business. Why couldn’t a costumed person approach him?

“Captain Rogers,” Nick Fury stepped out of one of the cars, approaching him with strange confidence.

“Who are you? How do you know my name?”

“Nick Fury,” he said, “I’m with SHIELD. You would have known us as the SSR.”

***
The bag tore open, spilling out the sand onto the floor, and he stood there, panting. Unlike the true Steve Rogers, he had never had much in the way of anger issues, but, like him, he didn’t have much in the way of training. As much as he hated regular exercise- which his college roommate had hated-he knew that if he wanted to survive and not raise any red flags while fucking with nazis, he needed to train.

“Trouble sleeping?” He was thankful he’d adjusted to the enhanced hearing relatively quickly, but it was a pain having to hear everyone chew. Steve had always been someone who could adjust well, having moved several times as a kid. Being shoved into the body of a twenty-six-year-old male supersoldier was… a bit different to adjust to than moving several hours away from your support system at the age of eight, especially when you had gone to sleep as a nineteen-year-old pre-law female college student.

There were benefits, he supposed. He hadn’t really minded about pronouns before, but it was a bit of a learning curve with the equipment. Captain America- the original one, not Sam Wilson- had never been his favourite. MCU Steve didn’t live up to the ones on AO3, and if he hadn’t possessed the man, he would probably have beaten him up for travelling back in time.

“I’ve slept for a while, sir. I think I’ve had my fill.” It was nice being in a body without three sleep disorders. Fury’s lips almost twitched.

“Then you should be out, celebrating, seeing the world,” He suggested. Steve smiled politely, walking over to the bench to guzzle some water and begin to unravel the tape on his hands.

“I’ve been reading,” he said as a non sequitur. Memory failed him as to this particular scene. Fury’s expression didn’t change, so he continued. “About all that I missed, I mean. Hell of a lotta good. Hell of a lotta bad.”

Again, Fury remained silent, but Steve could pick up on the subtext enough that he knew the man was wondering what was being classified in black and white. Steve didn’t answer them, instead rubbing a towel over his face and shoulders to mop up the sweat, thinking of everything he would have to research. Slowly getting off the bench, he walked past Fury to the barbells.

“Oh, Director?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“One of the files interested me. Thing called ‘Operation Paperclip’. Buncha Nazi scientists the US brought over. Couldn’t help but think that it may have been letting the fox into the henhouse, especially with Zola.” He began weightlifting, hoping that was enough to push Fury into action. When he finished, a manila folder awaited him beside his water bottle, and the Director was gone.
“The Tesseract,” Steve murmured as he flipped through the file, definitely not panicking at all. The final paper in the confidential folder was a photo of Loki in his dramatic ass garb, eyes as blue as the stone. Oh, holy hecking shit fuck, Steve would have to deal with the Avengers. He nearly laid his head back and groaned.

***

Sat in the Quinjet, Steve watched the footage of the Hulk at Culver. Coulson walked over to him, and he couldn’t help but feel that something about the agent differed from Fury.

“They were trying to replicate my serum?” He didn’t remember the lines to this scene. Phil’s eyes narrowed. The Hulk roared with fury as he slammed a jeep into pieces.

“A lot of people were. You were the world's first superhero. Banner thought gamma radiation might hold the key to unlocking Erskine's original formula.” Steve hummed in response, his brain working a mile a minute trying to remember the events in the first Avengers film.

“Didn’t really work out well for him,” he commented, turning off the tablet.

“Not so much. When he's not that thing though, guy's like a Stephen Hawking.” Phil paused when Steve merely raised his eyebrows at the name and nodded.

“You know who Steven Hawking is?”

Shit, Steve, think of an excuse.

“Yeah, I’ve been looking around and reading things on The Google.” He smiled, hopefully disarming Coulson, who stared at Steve momentarily and cleared his throat.

“It's an honour to meet you, officially.”

“The honour is all mine, Agent Coulson,” Steve returned. “I hope I’m the right man for this job.” Considering he really wasn’t a man at all, it was a positively untrue statement from his perspective.

“Oh, you are. Absolutely. Uh... we've made some modifications to the uniform. I had a little design input.” He looked at the laptop, which displayed a Kevlar padded suit in the American flag style, yet was not what he remembered the suit in the first film looking like. When he had time, he ought to buy some devices of his own and move out of SHIELD housing.

“It’s old-fashioned,” he smiled. “Isn’t it a bit… on the nose?” Coulson gave him a look again, strangely x-raying, almost like Steve wasn’t quite right.

“With everything that's happening, the things that are about to come to light, people might just need a little old-fashioned.”

***

Holy hecking shit fuck, that was Natasha Romanov. She was gorgeous, but Steve still didn’t understand the suit. They watched Coulson walk away together, and she spoke first.

“There was quite the buzz around here, finding you in the ice. I thought Coulson was gonna swoon. Did he ask you to sign his Captain America trading cards yet?”

“Nope.” Pausing for a moment, he leaned over like it was a secret. “I met an Agent May who I think would be perfect for him, though.”

Natasha turned delighted eyes upon Captain America.

***

God, why was the suit this uncomfortable? He jumped between Loki’s spear and the man, pushing up his shield so the blast ricocheted away. The Norseman fell backwards, his head colliding painfully into the pavement, the metal ringing in protest.

“The Soldier,” he said, pushing himself up. “A man out of time.”

Geez, he even fucking sounded like Thanos. Steve didn’t speak, the Quinjet appearing behind him, a machine gun pointed right at Loki. Ah, American solutions.

“Loki, drop the weapon and stand down,” Natasha said behind him. Like greased lightning, Loki sent a blast of blue at the quinjet, which Natasha manoeuvred just in time, giving Cap the time to throw his shield at Loki. He’d never done that at a person before, just the wall, but like the films, it seemed to defy physics. They both began to duke it out, Steve uppercutting and fighting as dirty as he could, letting his minimal instincts take over. Loki flung Cap to the ground.

Fruitlessly, Steve tried to throw his shield, recalling the vine. They should have fixed that or gotten him better gear than ‘40s tech. Loki swatted it away, and Steve, using all the moves of a boxer, was knocked back down to the ground. Standing over him, he pointed the sceptre's tip on his helmet.

“Kneel,” Loki commanded, and Steve, suddenly recalling a scene from the Arrowverse that he watched in junior high, swept Loki’s feet out from under him. He resisted the urge to make a dirty joke.

“I can do this all day,” Steve said, a grin on his face. Okay, maybe that was just a little bit dirty. Speaking of dirty, Shoot To Thrill came blasting, and so did the Iron Man Suit. Every piece of weaponry that the suit had came out.

“Your move, reindeer games,” Alright, Steve was beginning to realise why his friends compared him to Tony Stark. Loki, or, instead, Thanos, seemed to recognise the suit, raising his hands in surrender and letting the armour drop away.

“Good move,” he said, keeping everything readied as Natasha snatched the spear out of his hand and began marching him towards the lowering quinjet. Steve busied himself by checking on the civilians in the area, speaking in his minimal German.

“Captain,” Tony’s artificial voice greeted him when he entered back on the jet.

“Mr. Stark,” he stuck out his hand. “I’ve been, uh, reading up on things. Howard looked for me longer than he should have, and I can only guess that it… took attention away from other things.” Tony froze. “When you figure out time travel, let me know, so we can both go knock some sense into him. I’d like to slap him in the face with a fish.”

Tony did not know how to respond to that and was silent for once. The jet flew into the night sky, and Steve knew what was coming next. How could he tactfully avoid the New York disaster? Tapping his foot, the tension he had lowered earlier grew as Natasha reported to Fury that Loki hadn’t said anything.

“I don’t like this,” Steve said.

“What? Rock of Ages giving up so easily?” He clenched his jaw.

“It’s a trap. That was too easy. You always have another shoe that’s going to drop. He’s the Norse god of trickery.” Steve could see the probabilities being calculated in Tony’s head. Thor would show up any minute, but Steve could implant the idea of mind control within Tony, and they could work together to convince everyone else. That would save Selvig, who could be instrumental in stopping Thanos with his knowledge and protecting the people who are mind controlled after this.

“You’re sure?” Steve ran his tongue over his front teeth as he thought.

“Yeah,” he said, finally. “It’s a trap.”

“Alright, Admiral Ackbar. Let’s go warn the troops.”

***

Why the fuck did the regular Steve Rogers jump out of planes so much? Either way, this one had the self-preservation instincts of a woman who went to turn off her lights at nine after knitting and listening to audiobooks for two hours, so that sure as hell didn’t happen like it was supposed to.

“You’re not freaked out by the idea of a real-life God?” Clint sidled up to him. Steve’s lips twitched.

“Eh,” he said. “Who says I believe in a god?”

“The paragon of truth doesn’t believe in God?” Tony entered, guzzling from a mug a squirrel. Steve deadpanned back at him, walking over to Tony after a pause. Twirling the smaller man into a dip- thank fuck he had joined Swing Dance club-, he deftly snatched the drink out of Tony’s hand and dumped it into a plant. Tony blinked, utterly flummoxed.

“What?” croaked Iron Man. He righted himself after a moment, barking up at JARVIS for another cup of coffee.

“I am sorry, sir. Captain Rogers has expressed the dangers of caffeine and alcohol addiction and the time constraints of your responsibilities with Stark Industries."

“All the more reason I need coffee, J. I’m not addicted.”

“Thank you, Jarvis,” said Steve, reentering the room with a cup of decaf that he promptly placed in front of Tony. “I await the day you become the supreme overlord of Earth.”

“As do I, Captain Rogers.” Tony gaped, his hair and 70’s porn star button up askew. He took a sip of the coffee and promptly spit it back up into the mug. Steve rolled his eyes at the overdramatic gagging noises.

“J, baby, you’re betraying me?” In lieu of responding to that, Steve pushed a file folder of ideas he had written down that various fanfiction writers had come up with. Tony blearily looked at them, rubbing his temples and glaring at the mug of decaf as if it had personally wronged him.

“A medical department?” Steve shrugged. “How the fuck do you know engineering?”

“Working on my shield wasn’t the only thing I helped Howard with.” He winked. Steve genuinely didn’t know engineering, but he had picked up a few of those “for dummies” books at a local Barnes and Noble. The prices were extortionate.

Either way, one of his best friends from Before was the valedictorian of her class and in the engineering program in Cornell; another was an quantum physicist in ROTC. Fuck, maybe Steve was an alternate Tony Stark. No, he had a friend who referred to him as ‘Tom Holland’s Evil Twin’. He was not the evil twin if he was one, and he was eight years younger than Tim Switzerland. That crisis would be brought up in privacy and not in front of Tony, who stared at him in the scarred horror every child does when they think of their parents doing the devil’s tango.

“You slept with Tony’s dad?” Steve had forgotten Clint was there. He grabbed the mug of decaf, dumping it into the plant in the corner.

“That’s fake, you dirty-minded old man.” Tony’s voice was strangled.

“I know. Helps get rid of bugs.” He twirled around and pointed his finger at Tony. Steve tried his best not to grin.

“Behave. Don’t make me spank you, darlin’.” Tony choked on air. Steve stopped himself from making a joke about that. He washed out the mug, placing it in the dishwasher. Putting his hands on his hips, he threw a dish towel over his shoulder. Goddamn, was he ace, but Steve Roger’s upper body did look good in Henleys.

“If you must know, I didn’t sleep with Howard. He’s not my type, anyway. I don’t care for moustaches. Reminds me of my Uncle. He was in the CIA.” Clint squinted.

“The CIA didn’t exist back then.” Steve began wiping down the table.

“Or is that just what they want you to think?” Clint gaped as if that had never occurred to him. Tony fell over onto the couch, lifting the papers above his head. The three of them remained silent for some time until Clint could no longer stand the silence.

“How did you know Loki was controlled too?” Steve smiled warily, contemplating what to say. Did he go crazy? Did he get a reputation for being smart? What was the correct response here? He shrugged eventually.

“Instinct.”

“Hell of an instinct,” said Tony. “Even Fury didn’t know.” Clint flinched.

“You’re my least favourite pansexual, Tony.” Tony squinted at him in the sort of least favourite pansexual way he did.

“How many pansexuals do you know?”

“Steve.” Natasha entered the room. “I have that info on HYDRA you wanted.”

He dashed over, snatching the papers from her hand and rifling through them. Knocking the back of his head against the wall behind him, Steve stared up at the ceiling momentarily. How did he tell Tony? Awkward. That silence would be even worse than when he announced to his Latin class that the dweeb was looking at the cardboard cutout of Caesar lustfully. (The dweeb in question had later copped to making out with the cutout, so Steve was vindicated eventually).

“So, uh,” he fingered through various photos. “Does anyone have a skeleton?”

Silence.

“That they’re not using. Obviously.”

“Why d’ya need a skeleton, Cap?” Steve shrugged, trying to keep his face as placid as those goth teenagers he kept seeing. Maybe he should tell a few that he liked their shoelaces and see how they respond.

“Fake my death.” Natasha nodded seriously, having much expertise on the topic. Approaching the coffee maker, Tony pressed a series of buttons. Each turned red and refused to work. Steve grinned, putting a tea bag into a mug as his phone buzzed in his pocket.

“Why does this woman keep messaging me?” Tony’s ears perked up, and his head swivelled to track Steve’s phone. He lunged for it, but Steve’s instincts were quicker. He kept it above his head, leaving Tony to jump at Steve’s hand for a chance to get it.

“Who’s texting you?” Natasha asked.

“A dame called Severe Weather Alert. She’s very pushy. I tell you, names have changed a lot since I was a boy. Now, what does everyone think of artificial intelligence? I don’t mean to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but it can definitely cause a job crisis.” He paused, looking around the room. Steve clocked all of the expressions on their faces and thanked the universe that none of his siblings were there because he would have immediately burst out laughing.

“Say,” Steve flopped onto the couch, trying to forget how he would explain he knew about the winter soldier and consequently the Stark assassination, as people do. “Tony.”

“Yeah, Capsicle?”

“How much of your money could you donate to various causes without people getting suspicious?”

Chapter Text

She tendu’ d. She closed her feet back into first position. She did another tendu.

When she was Not Katya and Not Mary Kate, she had joked that her parents ‘didn’t know what free time was’. Of course, she hadn’t known Papa then.

When he woke up in the passenger seat of the Lamberts’ car, Katya holding a knife to his throat, clearly he had come to a realisation. It was not quite correct, but it was much better than his previous state.

The Winter Soldier did not interact with children. The Winter Soldier had only missions. One of the Winter Soldier’s most recent missions was the one in which he was dispatched to the Red Room. When faced with unfamiliar circumstances, the Winter Soldier reverted to previous programming.

The Winter Soldier knew exactly three things about Katya at that point:

1) She was dangerous.

2) She was a child.

3) She was Russian.

The Winter Soldier had looked at her for about six seconds before asking, in a grating voice, “ what is my mission, widow-trainee ?”

She told him that it was deep cover. Suburban. No contact. Training her personally.

He took training very seriously.

She dégagé d . Miss Maggie smiled approvingly at her. 

Waking up, stretching, making her own breakfast and lunch, sparring until she walked to school. After school, it was homework, then studying whatever language he had decided on that week or learning a random skill. Ballet. Dinner. She could decide to read or watch constructive material or spar before bed. Then she went to sleep.

It was very intense. It was also fantastic. 

Structure! Exercise! The joy of learning how to pick locks and fight with weapons! 

Arms up into fifth position. Sous-sus. Turn and down.

Dégagé .

She was eight again. She was Mary Kaitlyn Bell, eight-year-old South Carolina native. And the Winter Soldier had stopped being the Winter Soldier or even Jacob Bell when she asked his name last month. He did not know his name. Katya knew his name. Katya decided to call him Papa anyway.

Well. If he wasn’t okay with it, he would have told her already.

“That’s all for today,” Miss Maggie told them. 

Katya went to go get her dance bag. Dance shoes, extra hair supplies, the fun, colourful booties she slipped on over her slippers, a pair of knives: you know, the necessities. Papa will not pick her up. She will stretch, she will put the booties on over her feet (so small again), and she will walk or jog home. It would probably be better if she biked, but she had not resorted to bicycling in all the years Dad tried to get her to, and she would not now. Because she had dignity. And also the ability to out-stubborn anyone and anything.

Stretching goes first, and she falls into the quick routine. She’s determined to be even bendier in this body than she was in her old one. 

She never did manage middle splits. 

She was also determined to be ripped. These are Yekaterina Belyakova’s life goals: be really flexible; be really strong; become capable of beating Black Widow in a fight; learn to lie (she’s only gotten this far because she has zero sense of identity and can gaslight herself); learn all the languages; learn all the knots. Before, she kept getting really into tying knots but never actually managed to learn them because no one in her suburban neighbourhood kept rope lying around. Thankfully, Papa’s mental stability was questionably stable and he thought having yards of rope in the garage for no particular reason was not only normal but perfectly sensible. 

Katya was gonna learn all the knots. 

…once she got home.

Goddamnit, it was raining. She reached into one of her many, many pockets and retrieved a mini umbrella. (Because she was a mini person! And also for storage purposes.) 

Katya fucking loved pockets. She also loved rain. And walking in it. Unless she was wearing a leotard and tights, in which case she hated the rain and also food, sweat, and any living or dead beings within a three foot radius of her.

“Goodbye, Miss Maggie,” she said solemnly, bravely opening her umbrella and the door to the outside.

“Bye, Kaitlyn,” Miss Maggie yelled over the very loud rain.

As she walked through pouring rain on her way home, she did not contemplate any deep philosophical quandaries. She did, however, contemplate what she was going to have for dinner. Which was much more important.

***

As it turned out, the fanfics called it: Papa did have chronic pain. 

She’d dropped his tag on accident when she got a concussion (getting hit in the head with a metal waterbottle was not it, all y’all) and decided she should practise fighting without her powers.

Which was fine. Until she forgot to tag him again after practice, and then again for day after day. She did remember eventually, and after a very quick breakdown about the very bad potential scenarios where he snapped back into Winter Soldier (Kill Katya Belyakov) instead of Winter Soldier (Train Widow Yekaterina) or the increasingly common Jacob Bell (Dammit, I forgot Mary Kate at school again), Papa was tagged and all was well.

“Why didn’t you tell me your arm hurt,” Katya asked, glaring as she slid into first position. Why was she in first position? Well, crossing her arms or planting her hands on her hips made her feel like a jerk or a baby, and this was at least vaguely dignified.

He stared impassively at her as the ache in his shoulder continued. Great job, dumbass, trying to fool the person capable of feeling your pain into thinking you’re fine.

“It does not decrease capacity,” he told her. Ugh, gross, he was being the Winter Soldier again.

“Okay,” said Katya, despite the fact this was not okay. “But you’re not supposed to be in pain all the time. That’s not normal. Pain is the equivalent of a giant flashing red warning sign to your brain to tell you something is wrong. You don’t ignore it or put up with it, you moron, you’re not Catholic.”

Papa looked vaguely affronted at that. She wasn’t sure if it was at being called a moron, a Catholic, or just being told off by a ten-year-old girl in general.

“...My shoulder does ache on occasion,” he admitted after a long few seconds of sustained eye contact. Katya blinked hastily. Man, she hated staring contests. 

She fought the urge to applaud passive-aggressively. 

Instead she asked: “Do you want me to make it not hurt?”

He blinked, once. 

He blinked again. “What?”

“Your shoulder,” said Katya. “I can make it not hurt. I can eat your pain as a nice afternoon snack.” She could also tell him this in her creepy Katya Belyakov voice, but she figured it was probably better to leave that to the TV show she had now invalidated as canon. 

Papa stared at her. 

He did not blink. 

She frowned quizzically up at him. “Did you think Hydra normally sent the Winter Soldier after orphaned nine-year-olds or something?”

He pursed his lips. “Yekaterina, you told me that Hydra sent me on an assassination mission as a test for you.”

She had told him that. Damn.

Oh, well.

“Yes, well, that was then and this was now,” she tried.

Papa arched a single eyebrow. No one should be able to make that look threatening, but Papa seemed to manage it just fine. 

“We’re returning to that later,” he told her. “Now. You said you can… eat my pain?”

“Don’t we all eat our pain?” Katya asked whimsically.

“No,” said Papa flatly. 

So he had not gotten over her lying to him about a major factor in her life and his circumstances, which he had found out less than a minute ago. Wuss. He tried to kill her once and she got over it before she even knocked him out.

***

Katya and Papa strode down the beach with matching blank expressions, stiff posture, and custom t-shirts with ‘I survived an assassination attempt and all I got was this stupid t-shirt’ written on the back in Russian. Both were hidden, of course, under tie-dyed zip-up hoodies they got from some tourist shop a few years ago. Because American vacationers weren’t likely to know Russian, so it would be rather odd for a pair of American vacationers to wear shirts with Russian on them. (She’d suggested they pass it off as Ukrainian, but Papa had vetoed that on the grounds neither of them were fluent in Ukrainian. Anyways, American vacationers weren’t much more likely to know Ukrainian, either.)

Papa, glancing down and back to her, noted, “this is not efficient.”

Katya, who, despite being more than four feet tall now, was not very tall, nodded in agreement. Because despite the fact they were walking at about the same pace, Papa was six feet tall and Katya could be generously considered four-foot-seven. She was fast, but not that fast. 

She suggested, “you should pick me up.”

He frowned at her.

“It would be efficient.”

Papa sighed; she whooped in celebration and launched herself onto his back. 

“Oof,” he muttered, because four-and-a-half feet of preteen just collided with his back. 

“Oof,” Katya muttered, because she misjudged how high she needed to jump and had ended up sideways. 

With one leg hooked over his shoulder and both arms badly gripping his, she awkwardly clambered up into proper piggyback position. Bodyslamming was Not It. Not that she was supposed to bodyslam anyone, anyways. Because she was small, and if she tried to bodyslam Papa, he’d probably just watch, unimpressed, as she hit his torso (which was, in her defence, reinforced with a partially-metal ribcage and collarbone) and fell to the ground like a cartoon character. 

Was there a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip like that? That seemed like the sort of thing to be on a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. She wouldn’t know, really. She’d never seen one. Oh! That’s where she remembered it from- that one Wild Kratts episode where sugar glider-Chris flew directly into a tree, then slid down the trunk, groaning comically. She elected not to share this thought with Papa, as he had never seen Wild Kratts. Also, she didn’t know if that episode was out yet. Or if Wild Kratts even existed here. 

Fuck the multiverse, she wanted Zooboomafoo. 

She decided not to tell Papa that, either. 

She also wanted ice cream. She should tell Papa that.

“We’re getting ice cream,” Katya said.

“No,” said Papa.

She frowned. “Why not?”

“Ice cream is unnecessary and lacking in nutritional value.”

“Ice cream,” she countered, holding one finger up matter-of-factly, “is delicious. It will increase productivity by raising dopamine levels and energy, therefore providing us with the ability to do more.” She pulled most of that out of her ass, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t wrong .

Papa made a deliberating noise, which was something she encouraged, because it made his lack of expression somewhat less disturbing. 

“…we will get ice cream,” he conceded.

Katya beamed at him. 

Oh, right, he couldn’t see her. 

“High-five,” she prompted in a solemn tone, holding her left hand out in front of him. 

“Up top,” he intoned, high-fiving her with his right hand. She grinned smugly.

Someday, she was gonna get him to high-five her without needing eye contact or verbal prompting. For the time being, though, randomly slapping forward excitedly at a PTSD-riddled, ex-assassin veteran sounded like fun. A fun way to get stabbed, that was. Being stabbed could be fun, she supposed, if you were into weird stuff like that, but it was not efficient or practical. You might get a badass scar, but that wasn’t discreet, and then when someone asked where you got your badass scar you had to either lie or tell them you were a moron who tried to high-five a vet with a kill count in the hundreds.

After a few moments of silence, because she had no impulse control without her meds (and no one in their right mind would give a child with alien biology Adderall), she chirped, “what’re you gonna get?”

He frowned slightly. “Ice cream.”

“What flavour?”

He sounded vaguely distressed, which was the equivalent of visible devastation for a normal person. “There are different flavours.”

“It’s okay if you have trouble picking one,” she told him solemnly, reaching up to pat his shoulder. “Once, it took me five whole minutes to pick between chocolate chip cookie dough and mint chocolate chip, and then when the ice cream guy asked me if I wanted a cup or a cone and which kind of cone I wanted, I got really flustered and told him to stop asking me questions.” 

This was a true story. Katya really wished it wasn’t, because it was embarrassing, but it was true.

She sighed. “Anyways, it’s totally okay to just pick a random flavour and if you don’t like it, then… don’t pick it next time. And give it to me, because I like ice cream. Unless it’s coffee-flavoured, because I have taste.” She briefly wondered if there was tea-flavoured ice cream. There should be.

He made a longer deliberating noise, then nodded with concerted effort. She smiled brightly and held her hand up for another high five, because positive reinforcement. 

“High five,” he narrated, deadpan.

She was doing so good at the ‘make Papa a functioning human being again’ thing.

***

It was at this point, as she killed two fascists with assault rifles, using precisely one thought, and awesomely hit a third in the crotch with his own gun, that one might think Katya knew what she was doing. One would be wrong, because Katya, on the occasions she did not know what she was doing, smiled first, shot second, and asked questions never. Metaphorically. In real life, it went more like 1) smile and try to look like you know what you’re doing or at least creepy; 2) do the first thing that pops into your head; 3) immediately dissect the action, then never talk or think about it again.

This resulted in five dead people. Actually, five that she killed. There were undoubtedly a few more that Papa took out, but she needed to do the bulk of the work; if one of them had his command words things would get FUBAR very fast. One would think an eleven-year-old killing five highly trained terrorists was both horrifying and improbable.

In this case, one would be right. Still, it would affect neither the five corpses scattered around the living room, kitchen, and various hallways, nor the soon-to-be corpse she was attempting to snipe. 

Which was pretty dumb, now that she thought about it- gunshots weren’t quiet, it was still dark, and her preteen body was not well-prepared to deal with the recoil. She mournfully noted that they were going to have to move again. And get new identities. Maybe she could make herself older so she could do math that wasn’t for babies.

As she tightened the rear naked choke (thank god for chokes that still worked when eleven-year-olds used them) she landed on the guy she’d given up on sniping, she mentally workshopped names. She should probably drop the ‘K’ names. Wasn’t Mama’s name Eva? She could be Eva. Or Eve. Or Ava. Or Evelyn. 

Papa marched out of his bedroom, accompanied by another man in tactical gear. 

Oh, shit.

“Papa?” She asked.

He did not respond. 

Someone made obnoxious gun noises behind her.

Double shit.

She smiled brightly and hauled up the unconscious Hydra soldier as a meat shield. Smile first, shoot second, ask questions never.