Tony landed on the deck and pulled his faceplate up.
Steve was already on his feet, one hand pressed to his side where the blood was soaking through. Tony looked at him with the flat expression of someone who had just been tackled away from something he'd waited a long time to do.
"If you hadn't stepped in front of me," Tony said, "none of that would have been your problem."
"Tony." Steve's voice was tight. "That's Bucky. He's my oldest friend. We grew up together." He glanced back at where Bucky was sitting against the railing, shaking his head slowly, one hand on the deck. "HYDRA brainwashed him. Whatever he's done — it wasn't him."
Bucky had hit his head hard in the blast. The impact hadn't given him anything back, but something about the man standing in front of him had snagged on the edge of whatever was left. He looked at Steve and felt the shape of a question he couldn't finish.
He knows me. He stopped me from falling. Who is he?
He didn't get up. He didn't reach for a weapon. He just looked.
Tony closed his faceplate. His arm came up.
Steve turned and drove his shoulder into Tony's chest before the targeting lock could complete — a full-body block that shoved Tony sideways. Tony's palm cannon discharged into the hull of a parked Quinjet.
The fighter went up immediately. The fireball threw orange light across the whole aft section of the deck.
Bucky looked at Steve through the heat shimmer.
"Who are you?" His voice was rough and careful. "Why are you helping me?"
Steve heard that voice — the particular rhythm of it, even stripped of everything that had made it familiar — and something clenched behind his ribs. He thought about an alley in Brooklyn where a bigger kid had Bucky on the ground and Steve had thrown himself in anyway, useless and bleeding. He thought about a train, a metal railing, and a hand that didn't catch in time.
He wasn't going to not catch him twice.
Tony used the distraction. He stepped in and drove his fist into Steve's stomach — armored knuckles, full extension. Steve folded and went down.
Tony stepped over him without looking and walked toward Bucky.
Bucky came to his feet and brought the dagger up. His eyes were steady, tracking Tony's movement, reading the suit's weight distribution and speed.
"I don't know you."
"No," Tony said. The voice coming through the suit was stripped of everything but the words themselves. "But I know you. You killed my parents."
He fired.
Bucky dropped and rolled, came up inside Tony's reach, and drove the dagger at Tony's faceplate. Tony caught it on his gauntlet — the blade shattered against the primary adamantium plating — and then triggered the sonic emitter on his opposite wrist.
The sound hit Bucky like a physical thing. He grabbed his head and dropped to one knee.
Tony started forward.
Steve hit him from the side with the shield, flat face-on, and knocked him across the deck.
Tony recovered in the air, turned, and came straight back. He caught Steve with a shoulder ram that sent him skidding ten feet on his back, then turned again as Bucky came in with his metal fist.
The punch rocked the suit. Tony grabbed Bucky by the collar, ignited his boot thrusters, and drove him down the length of the deck — metal shrieking against metal — before slamming him into the surface hard enough to leave an imprint.
Tony put one foot on Bucky's metal arm to pin it. He raised his palm over Bucky's face.
Steve's shield came in from the left and hit Tony across the shoulders.
Tony staggered. Steve caught the rebound, ran in, and hit Tony again — a shield check, full speed — that moved him back three steps.
Tony straightened and looked at Steve across the smoking deck.
"You just attacked me," he said. "For a HYDRA asset."
"He's not a HYDRA asset." Steve's voice was fraying at the edges. "He's Bucky. He was brainwashed. He didn't choose any of it."
"He chose to put his hands around my mother's throat," Tony said. "Nobody told him to enjoy it."
He drove his shoulder into Steve and popped an electronic restraint from his forearm at the same moment — the shackle locked around Steve's ankle and dumped him to the deck.
With Steve down, Tony turned back to Bucky, grabbed him by the collar, and lifted. His free hand closed around Bucky's throat — squeezing the same way, he was thinking. The same way.
Bucky's metal arm came up between Tony's hands and pulled the palm cannon housing sideways. The device shrieked and crumpled in on itself, components grinding into misalignment. Tony felt the targeting system go dead.
A red laser indicator blinked on his opposite wrist.
Bucky dropped his weight, got his legs under him, and kicked straight up into Tony's chest. The repulsor housing absorbed it, but Tony went back and the laser fired on an upward angle — the beam crossed Bucky's scalp at speed, close enough to be heat, close enough to smell. The hair along the center of his head burned and disappeared in a single instant.
Bucky landed in a crouch with a perfectly clear stripe shaved across the top of his skull and the expression of a man who has decided to stop being diplomatic.
On the deck, Steve drove the edge of his shield into the shackle mechanism and it gave. He came up.
"Bucky — jump!"
He threw the parachute pack toward Bucky's position. Tony's palm cannon — the undamaged one — tracked it and fired. The pack disintegrated in mid-air.
Tony looked at Steve. The suit's voice modulator made everything sound like a verdict.
"You sure about this? Because this is the point of no return for us."
Steve didn't move.
"He was brainwashed," he said. "He's a weapon someone else aimed. That's not who he is."
In the interrogation room, Sam was duct-taped to a chair with his hands behind him and blood drying in a crust from his lip to his chin. His broken shin had been left unset. Every time he shifted his weight he could feel the bones move.
Rumlow came in and stood in front of him, hands in his jacket pockets, looking like a man making a casual visit.
"Here's your situation," Rumlow said. "Director Smith has formally assessed you as liable for all equipment damage incurred during your unauthorized operation. I don't know if you've seen the numbers yet, but you should probably start thinking about your retirement package."
Sam worked his jaw carefully. Several of his molars were loose. "I came to help take down HYDRA," he said. His words came out soft and slurred. "You can't hold me for that."
Rumlow smiled. It was a pleasant smile. "The captain was issued a formal arrest order and he's still at large. You're his accomplice in disrupting an active S.H.I.E.L.D. launch operation. The captain's reasons don't transfer to you." He tilted his head. "Start thinking about how you're paying your debt. Otherwise you'll be in this room for a very long time."
He left. Sam stared at the wall.
The conference room was quiet except for the scratch of Marcus's pen across paper.
Fury watched him work — the vampire was assembling the HYDRA roster from Pierce's memories with the focused efficiency of someone filing a report — and after a moment looked down at the two puncture marks on Pierce's wrist.
"You're a vampire."
Marcus didn't look up from the page.
"That ability," Fury said. "Blood memory. I had no idea."
"Do you need to feed regularly?" Fury asked. "To survive?"
Marcus looked up from his notes. He didn't look annoyed so much as mildly bored.
"I'm not what the novels describe," he said. "I don't need to hunt. We have synthetic plasma." He held Fury's gaze for a moment. "And I can tell what you're thinking."
Fury smiled. "Then I won't waste the time saying it."
He turned back to the window. The carriers were still up. The deck of the A-carrier was a ruin of fire and smoke visible even from here. He thought about the resources it would take to do from scratch what Smith had assembled over the past years — vampires with blood memory extraction on the intelligence side, the Paragons team for field operations, Selene as a power anchor, his own Inspectorate authority running underneath S.H.I.E.L.D. like a second nervous system.
I need something new, Fury thought. Something that doesn't have HYDRA's fingerprints inside it. Something in orbit.
"Sentient World Observation and Response Department," he said aloud, mostly testing it. "Has a decent ring to it. SWORD"
He looked back at Smith.
"One last favor. I'm taking Hill with me when I go. If you can spare her."
Smith thought for a moment. "Sure."
On the A-carrier, Agent Hand's operations officer had been watching the deck feeds for the past four minutes with increasing anxiety.
"Commander Hand." He turned from the monitor. "At this rate the carrier is going down. The structural damage from the munitions exchanges — there are load-bearing sections compromised in three quadrants. And now Captain Rogers appears to be engaging Stark directly alongside a HYDRA asset."
Hand absorbed that and keyed her comm.
"Chief Smith. We need you to end this. The A-carrier is at crash risk. Deck is extensively damaged."
Smith heard Hand's voice through the walkie-talkie and set his champagne glass down.
Fury was already reaching for his phone. "Hill — tell Steve that Pierce is in custody, HYDRA is done, and if he doesn't disengage right now Smith is going to come up there personally."
Hill's voice went out immediately.
"Steve — Pierce has been taken. HYDRA is finished. Stand down now. If you don't, Smith is coming."
On the deck, Steve looked at the honeycomb array of micro-missiles rising from Tony's shoulder mount — two dozen tubes clicking into firing position — and didn't move.
"I'm not leaving him."
"Steve, don't—"
He didn't hear the rest. Three concussive blasts rolled across the deck.
Smith stepped out of the conference room.
Fury turned to the window and watched Smith simply lift into the air and move toward the A-carrier at a speed that didn't leave time to track it properly. One second he was on the rooftop. The next he was a point of light crossing the gap.
He arrived on the deck and the deck knew it. The moment his feet touched the surface — even with the ongoing firefight — something in the ambient charge of the situation changed.
The deck was wrecked. Craters from missile impact, fuel fires burning in three places, Quinjet wreckage scattered across the first hundred meters. A handful of intact fighters huddled at the far end near the control tower.
Smith scanned the deck, found Steve Rogers, and crossed to him in the time it takes to decide to move.
He grabbed Steve by the arm.
"Steve Rogers. You are under arrest for insubordination and disruption of S.H.I.E.L.D. operations."
Steve started to turn. Smith was already lifting, pulling Steve up and off the deck in the same motion.
"There are five thousand personnel on this carrier," Smith said, as they cleared the railing. He said it evenly, without inflection, the way you state a number that is supposed to do the work on its own.
Steve looked down at the deck as it dropped away below him.
"No—" His voice cracked. "No—"
Smith brought him back to the conference room in under ten seconds. He released his grip and Steve stumbled forward to the floor-to-ceiling window, both hands against the glass, looking up at the A-carrier still moving overhead.
"Bucky—"
On the carrier deck, Tony Stark looked at the empty space where Smith had been standing a moment ago, then looked at Bucky.
Bucky was on his feet. His arm was damaged and the clean-shaved stripe across his scalp made him look like a man who'd had a very specific kind of close call. He watched Tony with the careful attention of someone who has stopped trying to figure out what's happening and started trying to survive it.
Tony looked at him for a long moment.
Then: "Steve's right. You're just a knife."
He grabbed Bucky by the collar and walked him to the edge of the deck. Below, open sky and the Potomac far beneath that.
Tony released him.
Bucky dropped.
Tony watched him go. The wind off the carrier's forward edge pushed against the suit. Below, Bucky's silhouette shrank and turned.
Then Tony's chest cannon powered up.
"But I'll break the knife anyway."
The beam punched downward through open air and found Bucky Barnes.