Chapter 35

She'd failed.

As Maggie ran from the underpass, tears blurred her vision and she had to duck into the nearest abandoned building she could find, because all of her steely focus was melting away.

She sank to the ground against a cold cement wall, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

She'd failed.

She couldn't get the image out of her head: Bucky, his hair in his eyes as four men in black tac suits knelt on his back, restraining him. It had been him, though – Bucky, not the Soldier, in those blue-grey eyes. And he'd been surrounded by all those people, milliseconds away from pulling their triggers. Captain America had been there, stoic and firm in his uniform. So had the Falcon and War Machine, and some guy in a black cat suit, but she'd had eyes only for Bucky.

Two and a half years on the run, and this was how it ended – Bucky handcuffed and taken away by dozens of armed men, while Maggie let them do it.

She'd been ready to do what she had to, because Bucky had needed her help and she wouldn't stand by. But then he'd met her eyes, so broken and defeated, and shook his head no.

Tears welled in Maggie's eyes, squeezing past the pressure of her hands and running down her cheeks. She knew why he'd said no – it wouldn't have been logical to throw herself into the middle of that choke point. Still, she'd left him.

At that, Maggie pulled her hands away from her eyes and glared at the opposite wall.

"No," she said, and the word echoed in the dusty space.

Maggie was out, and free, with her wings on her back and a laptop in her bag. And she had a mission.

Angrily wiping her tears away, Maggie pulled the computer out of her backpack and got to work.

Joint Counter Terrorist Center, Berlin

After the hustle of transporting them to the JCTC, Natasha cornered Steve and Sam in the office space they'd been designated.

Steve had kept his mouth shut, for the most part, knowing that nothing he said was going to make this better. At least he could see the CCTV footage of Bucky in his glass containment unit. Steve didn't like the situation, but this unfortunately seemed like one that he would have to wait out. He was terrible at waiting.

Natasha appeared as she always did: silently. Sam flinched when he spotted her standing at the end of the desk.

"This is a glass room," he said, once he'd gotten over his shock. "How did you-"

"Unimportant," she said, voice clipped, and rested her hands on the back of the nearest chair. Her green eyes flicked over them, unreadable. "The clean-up crew haven't found any signs of anyone else living in that safehouse with Barnes," she said in a lower tone. "Rhodey's heading up the crew, and he said he hadn't noticed anything either. Tony's too busy and too anxious to ask, so I'll ask for him – did Barnes say anything about the Wyvern?"

Sam looked at Steve. Steve said: "I asked if he knew where she was. He said no."

Natasha rolled her eyes and turned to leave, but Steve wasn't done. "I thought I saw-" she turned back, and he grimaced. "I don't know."

He'd been turning it over in his mind since they'd been arrested. If that had been the Wyvern, then she was in the wind now. But he wondered if she could be Bucky's alibi for the bombing.

After the battle at the Triskelion, information had trickled into the public about the Winter Soldier and the Wyvern, mostly connected to their role in HYDRA and their histories of political assassinations. Still, no one in the public had known their true identities. But after the UN disaster, intelligence agencies released everything they knew about the Winter Soldier, including the name James Buchanan Barnes. Some newspapers had questioned whether the winged assailant from the Triskelion could have been involved as well, given her bloody history with the Winter Soldier, and intelligence agencies did have renewed questions about the Wyvern, but still only a select few people knew the Wyvern's real name.

Natasha frowned at his hesitation. "What, Steve."

He sighed. "There was a woman in the underpass. She was only there for a second, but she was looking at Bucky and she looked similar to that surveillance still from Los Andes."

Natasha cocked her head, and Sam sat up straighter in his seat. There was a moment of silence.

Natasha broke it. "I'll tell Tony. But right now, Steve, this isn't about her, and Tony knows that. It isn't even about Barnes." She levelled her gaze on him. "It's about the Avengers, and whether or not we get to stay together. Think about it."

Steve nodded even though he had thought about it, had been thinking about it ever since Lagos, and he knew what his decision was.

Natasha saw right through him, as always, and she sighed. "Wilson, come with me, they want to debrief you."

They left him alone in the room, and he went back to watching the CCTV of Bucky. Even though he was locked up in a glass prison, Steve couldn't help the relief of seeing his friend again.

Twenty minutes later the glass door slid open once more to reveal Tony, looking harried and hopeful. "Hey, you want to see something cool?"

It was a set of pens.

Office Building, Berlin

It was a nice day in Berlin, if one cared to notice, with a balmy blue sky and warm weather. The window of the room Maggie was working in had a wonderful view of the city, and the glittering river winding between statuesque ancient buildings.

It also happened to have a very good view of the Joint Counter Terrorist Center.

But she wasn't looking out the window right now. She was intently focused on her laptop screen, drafting plans to rescue Bucky from the clutches of the Avengers, the Joint Terrorist Task Force, Wakanda, and whoever else wanted him.

Within minutes of leaving Bucky in the Bucharest underpass, Maggie had opened her laptop and worked out the JTTF's plan for him: a flight to Berlin, followed by psychological evaluation and extradition. Her face had twisted at the diagrams for Bucky's containment unit: a glass box with heavy metal restraints, in the back of a truck. He'd spent a lifetime in a glass box, and the thought of him confined to another one made her hands clench into fists.

It had only taken her a few seconds to work out that she didn't have the resources to intercept Bucky on the way to Berlin, at least not without being taken herself.

So she'd found a postal flight she could sneak onto that would arrive in Berlin not long after the JTTF one did, and made a false employee account in a German van company's database, so she'd have a disguise and a vehicle as soon as she arrived.

Her van was currently parked outside the office building, and her starched uniform pressed against her skin as she worked at her laptop. She wore black trousers, a pale blue collared shirt, a thick navy jacket with the company logo emblazoned on the breast pocket and a cap that she could pull low over her face. The office workers hadn't looked twice at her when she strode into the building and found an empty room.

Her wings were a reassuring weight on her back, moored to her spine through holes she'd cut in the uniform jacket, and concealed by the backpack cover.

Now, she was looking through the digital notes of the clean-up crew sent to Bucharest. She was taken aback at the name Colonel James Rhodes, immediately picturing the neatly-dressed young man she'd teased mercilessly at a kitchen table so many years ago. Then she remembered that he was the War Machine now, an Avenger, and he'd signed the Accords. Not only that, but he was in charge of the crew sent to clean up the damage Bucky and the others had made in Bucharest, and investigate the safehouse.

The team had inventoried his things: his old notebooks, his mattress, the kitchen utensils they'd bought together. One part of the inventory read 'assorted food items', and Maggie remembered wondering on the bus back if Bucky had bought more of those Romanian cookies that they both liked, or if he might have visited another fruit market.

They'd also seized his backpack and inventoried it: his current notebook, his virtual planetarium, El Hobbit, and his Swiss Army Knife (they'd labelled it a 'multipurpose tool'). Seeing Bucky's belongings, his presents and the things he'd treasured, on a document labelled "Seizure List" made Maggie's eyes well with tears again. But she couldn't afford to cry any more, so she wiped her eyes, touched the shape of her pearl necklace hidden under her clothes, and focused on getting Bucky out.

She'd come up with almost a dozen rescue plans in her head, involving infiltration, EMPs, staging a non-lethal terrorist attack elsewhere, turning herself in with hidden weapons, and multiple other drastic and unlikely-to-work ideas. Infiltration was definitely a no-go, as the building was packed with Avengers who might work out who she was, including her brother.

She tried not to think too hard about the fact that her brother was almost definitely in the building, closer to her than he'd been in… many years.

Her best bet was intercepting Bucky in transit, once she worked out how to crack that containment unit and get around the likely dozens of troops that would be guarding him. She briefly questioned if he'd even want to vanish again, after seeing Steve, but that was a conversation to be had once he wasn't at the mercy of dozens of different intelligence agencies and governments.

In the next building, Steve and Tony exchanged shouts and heated barbs.

"I'm doing what has to be done," Tony eventually sighed, looking every bit of his forty six years, "to stave off something worse."

The air between them was silent and charged.

"You keep telling yourself that," Steve said, and returned the pen. "Hate to break up the set."

Steve stormed out, and Tony pushed his sunglasses onto his face to hide the desperate, damaged expression in his eyes.

As Maggie's fingers flew over her keyboard, tracking down weapons caches, transport hubs, mercenaries for hire and potential safehouses in Berlin, her mind raced a mile-a-minute.

She'd been working pretty much non-stop since she'd jumped off the bus in Bucharest, but something was nagging at the back of her mind. So far she'd just been reacting to the situation, instead of understanding it. She knew Bucky hadn't blown up that building in Vienna. He just hadn't. So why would someone use his trigger words to make him do it, or frame him?

Maggie sighed and tucked her hair back into her cap. She'd always expected she and Bucky would be arrested for the things they'd already done, not something they hadn't.

She turned the problem over in the back of her mind as she turned her attention toward the Joint Counter Terrorist Centre itself. She tried to slip into the intranet quietly, but was surprised to find herself blocked by some kind of… intelligence. A thrill of fear went through her at the memory of Ultron's malicious work last year, but this wasn't quite like that. Not as alien, more… artificial.

Maggie grit her teeth. She'd done research on her brother's A.I., and this must be it. She was lucky she'd chosen to hack in under the pretext of a bored, smart kid playing around, so the A.I. shouldn't be too suspicious. She could probably get around it with enough time and thought and maybe a faster computer, but she didn't have the time for that and the A.I. might decide to alert its master. She backed off, frustrated that she couldn't have a look through the building's cameras or read a personnel list. This was going to complicate things.

As she was frustrated in one problem, her mind came through with a solution to the other:

Making the Winter Soldier the most wanted man in the world guarantees that he'd be found. Maggie bit her lip. They'd hidden well, these last two years, but not even they could stay hidden when everyone on the street was looking for their face.

Who would benefit from finding the Winter Soldier?

Cold fear washed over Maggie, and she glanced out the window at the JCTC. Bucky was in there, somewhere, along with her brother and hundreds of other agents and civilians.

She didn't know who had done this, but she didn't like it at all. She cracked her fingers and turned back to her laptop, determined to get Bucky out of this.

"I can't help you if you don't talk to me, James."

They'd already caught him, why did they need his mind, too? "My name is Bucky," he murmured.

He could still hear Steve's voice in his head, startled and hurt and disbelieving: Bucky?

Meg said that had helped her break away from HYDRA, knowing that a weapon could have a name. He wasn't a weapon any more, and his name sure wasn't James.

Five levels up, Tony watched Barnes' evaluation with crossed arms. He'd gained a new respect for psychiatrists since he'd started having panic attacks, but he didn't know what this guy hoped to get from the obviously resistant Barnes.

One of Tony's therapists had said you can lead a man to therapy, but you can't make him talk, and Tony didn't think that a city-wide chase, a glass prison and a live broadcast were exactly conducive to talking about one's feelings.

Still, he hoped he could talk Ross and the CIA into extraditing Barnes back to the States, instead of Wakanda. And it wasn't just for Steve's sake – if they started a precedent of shipping off their amnesiac assassins for foreign reprisals, what would happen to Maggie when he brought her in?

And after the news about the potential Maggie-sighting on the underpass, Tony had a few questions of his own for the metal-armed fugitive once the JTTF was done with him.

As the psychiatrist talked about the horrors Barnes must have seen, F.R.I.D.A.Y. spoke through the earpiece on Tony's sunglasses. "Boss, I've just detected and shut down an attempted electronic infiltration-"

Before F.R.I.D.A.Y. could finish, however, the room plunged into darkness.

When the lights in the office went out, Maggie frowned. Then she heard the commotion from outside – beeping horns, shouts, sirens.

Maggie shot to her feet and ran to the window, spotting the blacked-out traffic lights and billboards. At the same time her latest burner phone, purchased in Berlin, buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and read: city-wide power outage in Berlin, unknown cause.

"Shit."

Whatever this situation was, whatever the plan was, it was going down now. Discarding all her previous plans, Maggie hastily repacked her bag, straightened her uniform and ran for the stairs.

She'd been two steps behind since this started, she couldn't let herself be late this time.

"What the hell is this?" Bucky hadn't trusted the look in the doctor's eyes from the start, but cutting the lights? If they'd meant to confuse him, it was working.

"Why don't we discuss your home?" the doctor suggested. "Not Romania, certainly not Brooklyn, no-" the doctor dug in his bag, and pulled out a book. God, Bucky really didn't want to talk about his notebooks. But the doctor brought the book out fully, and something inside Bucky flinched at the sight of a red cover, and a single black star. "I mean your real home."

Flash memories: a man in a red slouch hat – Colonel Karpov, he recalled – reading from the book, his eyes and voice cold. The Wyvern, just a teenager with a hard face and troubled eyes that only he could read, lying in the snow as a helicopter vanished into a storm.

"Zhelaniye," ["Longing,"] the doctor read, reading the book by torchlight as he closed the distance between them.

Bucky closed his eyes. "No." He'd had dreams about this, nightmares, but this was real, the metal holding him down and the cold voice in the darkness-

"Rzhavyy." ["Rusted."]

Bucky's mouth was trembling, he couldn't help it- "Stop," he whispered, for all the good he knew it would do.

The doctor came right up to the glass, his eyes hard – the eyes of a killer. "Semnadtstat'." ["Seventeen."]

There were innocent people here, Steve was here. He knew that someone would use him against Steve, this was why he'd run away.

"Stop," he growled, the metal arm whirring. He knew Meg couldn't be far, knew that she would try to stop the Soldier–

"Rassvet!" ["Daybreak!"] the doctor continued, relentless.

Bucky screamed, against the storm of words in his mind, against the compulsion to obey, against the inexorable doctor in the torchlight who had a book that should never have been written. He ripped free of his restraints, racing against the flow of words. He would stop this, this needed to stop – he threw his metal fist at the glass, fighting the cold voice–

"Gruzovoy vagon!" ["Freight car!"]

The Winter Soldier toppled out of the glass prison and knelt on the concrete, dark hair loose around his face.

He rose.

"Soldat?"

"Gotov podchinit'sya." ["Ready to comply."]

Maggie had to physically push through floods of evacuating civilians to get into the JCTC building, keeping her cap low over her face and her senses strained for whatever was causing the rush of panic emanating from the crowd.

The building was all neat lines and glass panes, and once she stepped out of the flood of people Maggie was able to sweep the main lobby and the major corridors with ease. She didn't know the building layout, thanks to her brother's meddling A.I., but she'd been trained to sweep unfamiliar terrain and she relied on that now.

It was chaos, and no one spared her a second glance as she switched from one group of evacuees to another.

In a quieter passageway, she ran into an agent in a tac suit who shouted "Alle zivilisten werden evakuiert, du gehst in die falsche richtung!" ["All civilians are being evacuated, you are going the wrong way!"]

Maggie called back "Oberst Rhodes schickte mich!" ["Colonel Rhodes sent me!"] And that made the agent hesitate just enough to allow her to slip past and keep running down the corridor. She knew she had a limited window to search before the net closed in and someone realised she wasn't meant to be here.

As she joined a group of civilians jogging through a dark corridor with blinking red lights, they passed a black-suited agent with a radio.

"Barnes is loose," came a frantic voice over the crackly radio system, "we've got contact in the cafeteria, request-" the voice cut out in a burst of static, and out of the corner of her eye Maggie saw the agent's face go pale.

Heart pounding now, Maggie slipped into another corridor and fell into a full-on sprint, thundering past panicked civilians and agents alike. She followed the corridors to where she thought the cafeteria should logically be, and her heart flipped when she turned a corner to see three crumpled bodies at the end of the passage. There was a fist-shaped hole in the wall.

She ran to the bodies, saw that at least two of them were breathing, and then her head snapped up at the sound of fighting up ahead. A muffled gunshot, shouts, the unmistakable sound of bones and flesh colliding.

Maggie tore down the last corridor and skidded into the open space of the cafeteria, blinking at the bright daylight, eyes darting to assess the situation.

Bodies, broken tables, and Bucky –

That wasn't Bucky. The man leaning over the woman on the table, dark and menacing with his metal hand around her neck; that was the Winter Soldier.

Maggie didn't have time to think, or to feel.

"Soldat, pokidat'!" ["Soldier, stand down!"]

That made him hesitate – his body automatically reacted to the Russian order, giving Maggie enough time to sprint across the cafeteria floor and knock him bodily away from the choking woman.

The Soldier stumbled, then squared his shoulders and met her eyes.

The blood drained from Maggie's face. It had been so long since HYDRA, she'd forgotten what this was like – looking into those blue-grey eyes and seeing nothing but blankness. Blankness, and murder.

"Bucky," she choked out, but he only charged at her. Maggie ducked his swinging fist just in time, her body automatically rolling into a dodge and switching into combat – she aimed a kick at his knee, making him stumble once more, and she followed it up by leaping onto his back and hooking an arm around his neck.

"Bucky, the mission!" she cried, but the Soldier got a grip on her arm with his metal limb and he threw her off, sending her skidding across the floor.

Maggie's mind was reeling. She'd fought the Soldier before, but back then she'd been fuelled by hatred and rage. Now, as she jumped to her feet to dodge the Soldier's relentless blows, Maggie was filled with nothing but fear. The Soldier knew how to take advantage of fear.

She clipped him in the jaw, buying herself a moment's reprieve, but then those eyes were back on hers and it was a nightmare made real. She didn't know how to bring him back, it had always taken days for the programming to slip away. Their fight was fast and brutal, barely giving her a second to think.

The Soldier threw a metal-armed punch square at her chest, and she just managed to catch it before it crushed her sternum, though it sent her skidding back. The feel of the metal in her hands jarred her – she'd been holding this hand only a few weeks ago, admiring the grooves and plates. Now it was trying to kill her.

Her instincts were screaming at her to focus, but this was Bucky and she didn't know how to bring him back.

Gritting her teeth, Maggie launched herself toward the Soldier and kicked him in a move she would normally use her heel spurs for – though of course she wouldn't now – but the Soldier managed to catch her leg, use her momentum against her, and throw her straight through the glass wall of the cafeteria into the kitchen.

Maggie had fallen through walls before, but the force of the Soldier's throw sent her sailing through the first plate of glass and into the next surface, crunching into a fridge display of soft drinks. Her head slammed against the hard surface behind her and she dropped to the floor, stunned.

The first thing Maggie was conscious of was a groan – her own – and the sound of tinkling glass. She blinked, and then heard more fighting, further away now. Bucky, she thought, and she might have said it, but her head was getting clearer every second and she had a mission to carry out.

She got her feet under her, grunting as her aching body complained, and staggered out of the destroyed kitchen. Her wings, still mostly hidden in the backpack cover, had taken the brunt of her collision with the walls, and she didn't think she had a concussion.

Back in the cafeteria Maggie looked around wildly, searching for the Winter Soldier.

But there weren't any more signs of fighting. The cafeteria was silent but for the defeated agents' groaning, and distant sirens. Someone jumped down from the nearby stairs, landing with a catlike grace, and glanced around searchingly. King T'Challa, Maggie realized – she'd seen him back in Bucharest, wearing that cat suit, and she'd read his name in the JTTF reports. Now the King looked confused, as if he'd lost-

He got away, Maggie realised. A well of panic surged in her gut, washing away any remnants of confusion from her fall and stealing the breath from her chest. She didn't know what the Soldier's orders were, or where he might be going. What he might be going to do.

Maggie took a sharp breath through her nose and took a second to review the room: T'Challa was looking around the corner behind the stairs, now. The room was littered with agents' bodies. The woman Bucky had been strangling had rolled off the table, coughing and gasping for air, and there was a blonde woman groaning on the ruins of a shattered table nearby.

Finally, as her eyes slid sideways, Maggie spotted him. He was unconscious on the floor a few paces behind her, which was why she hadn't noticed him when she first entered the room.

Her mind, normally working at a breakneck pace, simply shut down.

It had been so long since she'd last seen his face, but all it took was once glance and she was a little girl again, small and scared, wishing the world made sense.

Tony.

Before she knew what she was doing Maggie was kneeling beside his prone body, pressing her shaking fingers against his neck and praying for a pulse. There was blood on his temple and his eyes were closed, but at her touch he mumbled and started to rouse.

The world flooded back in with a rush of sound, though it wasn't that noisy in the cafeteria. Maggie heard her own harsh breathing, distant sirens, and the sound of shouting, distant but closing in. Tony was there under her fingers, her brother. She'd known he was alive but the proof of it, his warm, pulsing veins and the breath in his lungs, was exhilarating. Maggie could hardly believe it, he seemed so real and colorful, wearing a nice suit, a robotic glove on one hand, and… his eyelashes were fluttering.

She shot to her feet, her fingers tingling where they'd touched her brother, and she stumbled backwards. She couldn't remember what she was doing, why was she-

As she looked frantically around, trying to straighten her mind, she found herself drawn in by a pair of unblinking green eyes on the other side of the room.

It was the woman Bucky had been attacking when she came in; she was propped up against the wall, one hand on her neck, staring at Maggie. The woman had red hair, and Maggie's mess of a mind noted that she was familiar…

Maggie swore internally. This was Natasha Romanoff, the female target from D.C., the woman she had helped Bucky shoot all those years ago. This woman had no end of bad luck when it came to the Winter Soldier and the Wyvern.

Strangely, it was that thought that helped Maggie to center herself. It was all too much – fighting the Soldier, Tony unconscious and bleeding, he was still right there – but under the Black Widow's scrutiny Maggie was able to align her thoughts.

Mission priority: find the Winter Soldier, get Bucky back. She couldn't give in to the part of her that burned to turn around and sink beside her brother. He was waking up, he was safe now, and there was nothing more she could do to help here.

With that realization came another: T'Challa had jumped down from the stairwell. The Soldier had been heading up.

Maggie squared her shoulders. Romanoff looked confused by her very presence – she supposed the former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent had never seen her face – and she was still injured, so Maggie pressed her advantage. She turned on her heel and was out of the room in three paces, slipping into the still-dark corridors and out of sight.

Maggie burst out onto a fire escape at the back of the building, her hair falling out of her cap and her chest heaving with exertion and emotion.

She was about to start pounding up the fire escape to the roof, but she happened to glance at the river almost ten stories below, and her heart sank to the bottom of her feet. The water closest to the JCTC was roiling, disturbed, and her eyes tracked to a snapped-off helicopter rotor on the footpath. Debris fell from the destroyed helipad a few floors up, and Maggie spotted the blue hull of the rest of the helicopter sinking into the river's grey depths.

I'm too late, again, Maggie thought, and suddenly her feet were flying down the metal stairs, her eyes fixed on the disturbed water. Only this time he's not getting arrested, he's drowning, or already dead-

Maggie reached the second floor and launched herself off the fire escape, rolling to absorb her fall and then sprinting to the edge of the water. Her heartbeat was loud in her ears and the concrete was hard under her feet, and she did a quick scan of the surrounding area as she prepared to leap into the water. There was no one else around, the area had been evacuated, but-

Gasping, Maggie skidded to a halt inches away from the embankment.

Hundreds of feet up the river, a head had emerged from the calm surface. Maggie caught her breath and stared, and her heart leaped into her mouth when a second head joined the first. She was too far away to see clearly, but as she watched, the two heads began moving to the gravel riverbank, hair gleaming with water.

Maggie started running.

She made it to the embankment at the same time the figures did, and the small measure of calm she'd managed to scrape together shattered as she recognised Bucky, limp and dripping as the other man – Steve – heaved him out of the water.

Maggie couldn't move. The bedraggled and panting Steve managed to drag Bucky onto the gravel and lay him down, but Maggie could only watch. Bucky's eyes were closed, his wet hair was plastered across his face, and a wound on his forehead oozed thick, scarlet blood. Maggie felt like her heart was imploding.

Steve finally looked up and spotted her. He shot to his feet, eyes wide, and tensed as if he expected her to attack him. Maggie was aware of his assessing blue gaze but she couldn't meet it, because Bucky's eyes weren't open and he was limp on the ground and it felt like the world was falling down-

Somehow, she managed to speak. "Is he…"

"He's alive," Steve said. He was watching her carefully, and he didn't miss the relief that flooded her face. Maggie realised that Steve had a protective hand hovering over Bucky's body.

She finally looked up from Bucky and met Steve Rogers' eyes. He was dripping river water, but he still somehow managed to look authoritative, in control: there was a furrow between his brows, and his jaw was clenched as he took her in. Maggie didn't know what she looked like – a woman in a nondescript uniform, with shattered glass sprinkled through her hair and clothes, panic and relief no doubt warring in her eyes.

Her eyes flicked back to Bucky, and the slight rise and fall of his chest made her weak at the knees. A faint breeze blew against her face, smelling of river water and aviation fuel.

"We need to get out of here," Steve said, glancing back at the JCTC.

Maggie was so worried about Bucky that she barely heard him, but then her brain kicked into gear. She almost wanted to question him: we? But if he wanted to get Bucky the hell away from these people then she wasn't going to argue.

She met Steve's eyes, and nodded. "I have a van."

She helped him heave Bucky off the ground, and they each ducked under one of his arms. Maggie's muscles strained under Bucky's dead weight, but Rogers was no slouch – they set a brisk pace away from the river, and Maggie silently led them through the park behind the JCTC toward the office building she'd inhabited not too long ago.

They shuffled forward in silence, though Steve and Maggie's arms bumped together as they carried Bucky between them. Maggie felt numb – she could hardly believe she'd been on a bus into Bucharest only that morning, and she knew that if she thought about her brother she'd fall apart. So she focused on the mission – supporting the dripping wet, unconscious Bucky with Steve Rogers' help, and getting to the van unseen.

They reached the street she'd parked the van on, and luckily the evacuation had cleared the area.

"This way," she murmured.

A second later, she sensed Steve's head turn to look at her. "I'm Steve," he said.

"I know," Maggie replied, as they reached the unremarkable white van. She knew just about everything about him, from his middle name to the asthma attack he'd had his first time in a gentleman's club, to how he used to like his porridge. But this was hardly the time to bring that up.

She swung the back door of the van open. "I'm Maggie."

Steve's eyebrows shot up, but she didn't have time to question that, so she helped him heave Bucky onto the floor of the van. Once Bucky's feet were inside, Maggie took a second to check on him – his head wound was still bleeding, but his breaths were coming evenly, and his arm wasn't making any noise. She wasted a second on pressing two fingers against his pulse, just to reassure herself. His skin was as warm as ever under her fingertips.

She leaned back and met Steve's serious blue eyes. "Get in the back with him," she murmured, reaching into her pocket for the keys. "Restrain him if he wakes up. I'll get us out of here." Without leaving him time to argue, Maggie strode around the length of the van and climbed into the driver's seat. She could hear sirens getting louder, and she knew that in no time agents would flood this street.

Thankfully Steve did as he was told and got in, slamming the door shut behind him. Maggie spared him a glance in the rear view mirror, then gunned the engine and peeled away from the kerb, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.

"Wait," Steve said, and when she glanced at him he had one hand on Bucky's chest and his eyes fixed on hers. "We need to pick someone up first."