"You're just going to take off, Natasha?" I asked her as she climbed onto her motorcycle and slid on her helmet. We were in the parking lot of the New York headquarters of SHIELD, still recovering from the chaos of the past week.
"Yes," she said, looking straight at me through her visor.
"The intelligence community is on our necks. We intercepted 15 attempts from triple-letter agencies to make contact with the Novans. For all we know, they could be striking up a deal as we speak. And then there's the Asgardian delegation. This isn't the time for our best agent to—"
"My sister is gone," she said softly. "Do you know I spoke to her a total of five times before last week?"
The words hit me like a bucket of ice-cold water. "Natasha. I—"
"Dante is going to find her," she said, "just like he did last time. And this time, I intend on being there when it happens."
My jaw clicked open and shut. There was nothing I could say to convince her to stay, and even if there was, I wouldn't.
This was something that she needed desperately. And maybe she wasn't wrong for wanting to step away. It was one crisis after another ever since Fury brought me back from the dead. Now, here I was, deeper and higher in the Shadow system, controlling the world with no idea what I wanted for myself.
A year ago, I would've answered Peggy, but now…
"You should come with," Nat said. "See him, or at the very least, Jean. She can help Bucky."
Bucky had been put under cryogenic sleep after our scientists exhausted themselves trying to piece him together. Whatever Corvus did to him, it left him a biological enigma. According to the Novan scientists, it's a miracle that he's alive at all. And they expect it would take them years to reverse all of the damage done to him.
I'd be lying to myself if I said I wasn't tempted to ask. But after everything that'd happened, I was afraid Dante would say no, or worse yet, he'd say yes, and I'd owe him.
For all of his generosity, he didn't strike me as a person you wanted to owe a favor to lightly.
Even if I managed to put aside my fears and reservations, I didn't think I could step away right now. Too many irons in the fire. The demon world. Asgard. The intelligence community. And there was talk of somebody gathering powerful mutants in the Sahara.
The world was constantly on fire. And I was the leader of the GDF—the first line of defense.
"The world won't break without you there to hold it together, Cap," Natasha said, starting her bike. It was nearly soundless. "It survived over 60 years without you; it can survive a week more."
She pulled out of the garage and merged with traffic. I tracked the low hum of her quiet bike until it faded several blocks away.
A sigh escaped me, and I turned back to the elevator.
Right. Back to work.
--
President Vladimov's POV
"The outreach failed...again, Mr. President," Ivanka said to me slowly.
It was well past midnight, and the Kremlin was mostly empty, but Ivanka and I stayed back, enjoying opera music and cigars in nervous quiet as we waited for word from her spies in New York.
I cursed, flinging my mostly empty liquor glass into the dying fire in the fireplace. I roared to life briefly before dwindling further.
"The Americans told them about the Red Room, didn't they?" I said, slamming my hand on my table. "Damn that Dreykov. Even from the grave."
I growled. "Still, I didn't expect a civilization so advanced to refuse diplomacy because they disapproved of how we chose to defend ourselves."
"That's not the reason they turned us down, Sir…"
I recognized the look in Ivanka's eyes. She was actively trying to 'manage' me.
"Just spit it out," I said in Russian.
"They see us as a failed state. We have nothing that they want," she said.
I grunted, a bit upset, but not altogether surprised.
"Then they're like the Americans, underestimating us at every turn," I said, waving. America and their guard dog, SHIELD, might believe us toothless, but I'd striven tirelessly to ensure that we weren't. We had four supersoldiers in reserve. We'd plundered them from Hydra's secret base long before the organization collapsed, and our scientists were tirelessly at work trying to reverse engineer the serum flowing through their veins.
Then, there was our covert superhuman team. It contained two powerful mutants, a failed Russian super soldier, and a set of Cambion triplets, if you can believe it.
Alexei, the Cambion who settled in Russia, knocked up one of the many, many honeypots we sent his way. He was a reckless, arrogant fool. Admittedly, he could afford to be, given his power.
A widow had snuffed him out while he was still inside a woman. I wrinkled my nose at the memory.
"Sir," Ivanka said, pulling me from my thoughts. "They know about the programs. Even the triplets. Their answer still didn't change."
My chest felt tight as anger and fear rushed through me. "You told Agent Petra about them?"
She shook her head. "She learned about it from the liaison sent to refuse us. Naturally, I've sent a team to retire her…"
I fell into my chair, my face numb. "How bad is it?" The words came out as a croak.
"I couldn't find the source of the leak… or if there even was one," she said. "They could've obtained the information through any number of ways, given the resources available to them. We might never know."
"Do you think they will share what they know with the Americans?" I asked, although I feared I already knew the answer.
I was beginning to understand why Ivanka was so tense. It was astonishing she managed to keep her composure at all.
"I don't see why they wouldn't," she said, "especially when it would strengthen their ally."
"What are our options?" I said, quietly.
"I'm afraid...we have none," Ivanka said. "We are completely at their mercy unless we find an ally of our own." It was like a dam had broken with those words. For the first time in years, I saw Ivanka Naryshkin, the strongest woman I knew, break down. The news had devastated her completely, and why wouldn't it?
We'd just lost the Cold War. For nearly two decades, we'd deluded ourselves that we were on equal footing with America, or at least not so far behind that we couldn't win a war with them if we needed to. All that changed tonight. Or perhaps, it was more accurate to say, it changed when Dante Sparda aligned himself with SHIELD.
An alliance with the Nova Empire gave us hope that some level of competition could continue, but now…
America was lost to us completely. Nearly two decades of meticulous spy work down the drain. Every asset was burned. They didn't just know it yet. We couldn't trust any new piece of intel that came out of that country.
It took me a long time to rise from my chair and fetch myself a new crystal glass from my cabinet. I filled it with vodka and topped up Ivanka's glass. She gave no indication she noticed what I'd done.
"You said 'we are completely at their mercy unless we find a new ally of our own,'" I said. The master spy looked up at me.
"I say we should do just that," I said. "And I might have a clue where to start."
There was a new look in Ivanka's eyes. One of curiosity.
Several months ago, a man named Kaecilius approached me with an offer of power and security against the growing strength of the Americans. I'd turned him down because of what he asked for in return. The souls of a million Russians.
I had thought at the time that it was too steep a price to pay. Perhaps it wasn't anymore.
The Americans and their allies might be content with ignoring us for now, but that won't always be the case. I would rather gather strength when there was still time to do it, no matter the cost.
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