Chapter Text
*** Fury ***
Barton and Romanoff were in the break room when Nick Fury arrived at White Star Securities' Manhattan office: a half-full carafe from the coffeemaker, the scattered contents of a first aid kit, a bag of frozen peas, and two forks in an empty pie plate on the table between them. Both looked up briefly when he strode in, then went back to the business of bandaging Barton's bloody right thumb.
Nick closed the door, shutting out the murmurs from the rest of his crew, then put his shoulders to the door, crossed his arms over his chest, and waited. It didn't take long.
"You gotta give the guy credit," Barton muttered with a wince as Romanoff knotted the gauze, "The raccoons were a stroke of genius."
Nick felt the muscles under his good eye twitch as Natasha picked up the frozen peas and held them to the bruise swelling her left cheek.
"I mean, Jesus, those things are way bigger up close than you'd think, and fifteen, maybe twenty raccoons running around in Grand Central Station at rush hour on a Friday?" Barton went on, picking up the carafe as though to drink from it directly. "You couldn't ask for a better distraction."
"So you lost him three hours ago," Nick prompted, striding over to take the carafe away and pour out a cup for himself before smacking it back down in front of the man.
"He lost us three hours ago," Natasha growled the correction deep in her throat, as though the fact offended her. Nick hoped to hell it did offend her, because it sure as fuck offended him!
"He lost you." Nick turned a chair to perch astride it, and steepled his fingers on the headrest before him. "A man who's only been awake in this century for about a year, has managed to ditch White Star's very best retrieval team on their home turf in a train station, in the middle of the day, over urban wildlife? Is that what you're telling me?
She shrugged, glowering. "It was a big crowd. Panicking mobs are stupid, dangerous, and impossible to navigate. He took advantage of that."
"And raccoons, man," Barton agreed, miming a creature roughly Labrador sized. "Where did he even get raccoons? Like, can you rent them by the hour?"
As if summoned (or more likely, listening at the door, as the analyst had a habit of doing,) Sousa the younger put her head into the room to announce, "Animal Control filed a pickup report on two adult raccoons and three juveniles in Grand Central this evening, Boss. Said they were nesting in the store room of the bagel place that closed down last month, and workmen probably disturbed them."
She cut a glance at the noise of offended disbelief Barton made, but managed not to smirk as she nodded toward the bandaged hand. "They're also recommending that anybody exposed to them should probably get rabies shots, just to be sure."
Barton whipped the hand in question under the table, and scowled. Nick turned his head to glare the analyst back to her own business.
Natasha turned her frozen bag to the colder side until the door shut again. Then she fixed Nick with an unrepentant stare and said, "Yasha told you Steve would not like the protection detail."
Nick gritted his teeth until the urge to shout had faded just a little. "Well, did Barnes bother to tell Rogers that the only reason we can afford to let his ass run around New York at all is because SHIELD and HYDRA each think the other one killed him getting him outta the ice? Did he maybe tell Rogers that the game of Three Card Monty we had to play on those two agencies to keep them from dissecting him to harvest Project Rebirth's only success is what killed Stark and put Carter out with an injury she is never coming back from? Did he maybe explain what could happen the instant any agent of the Government figures out that Captain America's ashes are not buried at Arlington because he's walking around Manhattan unescorted and without backup? Oh, and did Barnes maybe tell him any details about HYDRA's little super soldier reeducation program while he was telling his best buddy all the rest of the facts of twenty-first century life?"
The pair eyed him for a long moment of silence, then Natasha stole the carafe from Barton and slugged back a long drink, while Barton leaned back in his chair and gave Nick the disingenuous stare he'd come to dread. It meant the archer was thinking.
"Due respect, sir," he said, taking the coffee back when Natasha passed it over. "I think you're maybe forgetting something important."
Nick laced his fingers together, hard. "Please: educate me."
"This is Captain America we're talking about here," Barton said, fiddling with the knotted gauze. "This is the guy who took the serum without knowing whether it would kill him or not, and this is the guy whose very first combat experience was when he went AWOL on a solo rescue mission and succeeded. Brought hundreds of POW's home, and left the whole prison camp in flames behind him, then he spends the rest of the war doing it again and again and again?" Barton shook his head. "Dude like that was never gonna stay quiet and play in the yard for very long, Boss. You were gonna have to introduce the world to him sometime or other."
And yes. Yes, they'd known that, dammit. Damn near the entirety of White Star's legal department, and half of logistics had been working on how to make their recently rescued, and not nearly so dead as he was presumed, war hero into an actual, legal entity, capable of representing White Star to the world now that Margaret Carter couldn't do it anymore. It didn't help that Howard, in true mad genius fashion, had filed a last minute will with his lawyers just before shit got hot with SHIELD and HYDRA, naming Steve Goddamned Rogers as his sole heir now that his own son was dead. So they couldn't even change Cap's damned name without losing White Star's entire funding base to the inevitable squabble of second cousins and lost bastards!
They'd been working on it, damn him. And now this -- Nick couldn't even send out teams to search Cap's few favorite haunts, in case one of his agents got made and led Hydra right to the man. Nick gave up and pinched at the budding headache between his eyebrows.
"He'll come back," Romanoff opined after a moment. "I give him the weekend. Maybe a day or two longer, and then he'll come back. He won't leave Carter, and he won't leave Yasha. Just give him time to feel his point's been made, and he'll show up with bagels like nothing ever happened."
Nick cracked a glare in her direction. "You seem pretty confident of that."
To which she shrugged. "It's what I'd do."