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Secret Bit of Right From Wrong	By : ChrisCross Category: Marvel Verse Movies > Avengers, The Views: 9417 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Captain America or The Avengers. I make no money, and live on reveiws alone

Chapter List
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A.N. I got a visit from the TOA fairy, who comes in the night to leave warnings. Apparently, I should not reply to your replies. o-0 So I've set up a review reply thread in the Het-Male/Female section of the page you go to when you click "discuss this story" Thanks for sticking with me!
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Even with the two former agents taking shifts, they still wound up having to stop for the night. Although neither of them explained why, they insisted that everyone would need at least half a night’s sleep before meeting their contact, the ‘maniac’ Clint had mentioned in the car. This landed the whole group in a No-Tell Motel in the middle of nowhere, getting a couple of rooms. Clint and Steve shared a room; the three women shared the other.
They were all exhausted, in that bone-deep way that comes from being too tightly wound for too long. Karen had only been under the stress for a day, but her life wasn’t consistently in danger every day. The agents, current and former, had the higher tolerance for stress that comes with familiarity to danger, but they had also been carrying the weight longer. As for the de-powered super soldier, Steve was still reeling from the past twenty four hours. The result of such total weariness was, ironically, insomnia. They all tried to sleep, but that night some very interesting conversations took place.
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In the women’s motel room, two sisters had a long overdue talk, while a certain red-head took a well-deserved hot shower.
“I just can’t believe you would keep a secret like this! I mean, from me. Obviously, you can’t just billboard this kind of thing, but… we share everything. I thought.” Karen looked down at her hands as they rested in her pajama clad lap. Cate sat on the bed next to her and wrapped her arms around her out-of-depth sibling.
“We shared everything for the first nine years of your life, out of necessity. Then we shared everything through my high school graduation, because we both would have gone insane.” The agent furrowed her brow, her hands curling minutely in long buried anger. “I needed to get out of that place, desperately. If I had stayed, Ray and Brad would be six feet under by now. I could have held out to keep you safe, but what they did to Meggie was the tipping point. I had to have a chance to grieve, and I couldn’t have had that with reminders everywhere.”
“So you got out. You ran from the memories of the only person other than me that you loved, got a fancy government career, and I got left in that sucking chest-wound of a school? Honestly, Catie, if Joslyn Kirby hadn’t moved in and opened her theater that year, I don’t think I would have made it.” Karen’s indignation put her voice markedly more forceful, and her back teeth ground together audibly. Her sister took this anger as a positive sign; with Karen’s chronic depression, she was always safer when she directed her pain outward, rather than back on herself.
“I didn’t just, just, up and leave you for a goddamn paycheck, paying no never mind to the consequences! Surely you know I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, do that. Before I accepted the job, S.H.I.E.L.D. promised me that you were going to be safe, that you would be looked after. I had to have you safe, but I also desperately needed a shot at a life separate from you, as much as I love you, Kare-bear.” As prickly as she was with everyone else, her voice took on a softer tone when talking to her sister. “I required my own identity. So did you, really. We needed to be different people, not just the two halves of Catie-and-Kare-bear.”
“What we needed were better nicknames.” Karen grimaced at the mention of their old street handles. “I can’t believe we thought those were cool once. Street names never sound cool after the fact, and mine led to the misspelling nightmare.”
“I’m fairly sure that ‘Keren’ would have gotten you socially nuked. Fulton wasn’t a place where you wanted to explain that you were named after a daughter of Job. Even if it is kinda kick-ass that it means ‘strength’. Do you think any of them would have liked the explanation? As a wise man once wrote, ‘You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons’” Seeing Karen’s repressed laughter shudder shoulders under the soft canary yellow pajama top , Cate knew that her sister had loosened up, Cate moved on to a new topic, one that she wasn’t sure how to handle. “Umm, Karen, I think you should know…. Steve, the guy you know as Roger? He’s really not so much with the lies, as a rule. S.H.I.E.L.D. made him take a cover identity. And although hard to believe, he did actually serve in WWII.” She could see that Karen was arching her brow, and knew that proof had better be in the offing or she would be facing stubbornness to rival a Missouri mule. Unfortunately all of the proof of both his existence and current state were super-duper-über classified, and she wouldn’t feel right about coming right out with it. “He sort of… stumbled onto cryogenics by way of a plane crash. Do you remember last year, when I called and told you to turn on your T.V.? When there was the giant sucking vortex that spat flying tortoise-eel hybrid things? Did you see all the supers running around fighting aliens?”
“It’s hard to forget the Battle of New York, sis.” Her eyes rolled in exasperation. “Even though I wasn’t in town then, it was like 9/11 or the Kennedy shooting, NOBODY forgot it. I might be so very over super-humans in general, but that wasn’t a typical bank robbing mad scientist thing.”
“Did you look at the roster of heroes that showed up?” Cate held out her hand and began ticking the big names off. “Iron Man, you met Tony, in the warehouse, then Hulk would be the hard-to-miss green one. You wouldn’t know him, but I’m sure you saw Thor, the flying blond guy in medieval get-up….” Her voice trailed off in an understood signal held over from days when passing messages undetected kept them alive. She couldn’t come out and say it, couldn’t keep talking, but Karen could keep going on her own.
“I think I saw mutants, and I know they said Spiderman and Daredevil were out there, and I got the idea that a good number of villains showed up just to boot the Johnny-come-lately armored space eels out. Then there was the Fantastic Four, and…” The light dawned on her at last. “No. Really? He wasn’t on film that often. I thought he’d be taller…”
Cate laughed with dark humor. “He was. And a good bit more muscular. There’s a reason he was under cover.” Trust her sister to catch on the height difference and blank on the missing routinely-breaks-punching-bags body. “The Super-soldier is on leave. He’s just a guy right now. An uncommonly good guy, whose goodness saddles him with many enemies. They found him at Kings County, and they know about you. There’s a long history of villains using friends of heroes as leverage. Especially pretty, female friends. You need to think about that.” She groaned a bit, stretching. Her sister would think, make her own decisions, and all Cate could do was make sure Karen got all the information up front.
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In the next room over, Steve was staring at the ceiling, dreading another nightmare, or worse, a really good dream like he’d had the night before. Contemplating the benefits of mental self-torture versus humiliating loss of control was a recipe for disaster, though. All he could think to replace it with was thoughts of the next day.
“Hey, Clint, are you still up?”
“Yeah…I’m too tired to sleep. And I’m concerned about tomorrow.” The archer had to be genuinely worried to admit something like that. He never let fear or weakness show if he could help it.
“In the car, you said something about who we’re going to meet. Mind filling me in?” Sometimes Clint got too deep in his own skull, and asking for a briefing would give him a chance to talk about whatever was on his mind, without feeling weak.
“It’s funny you should ask. At any other point in time, I’d be one hundred percent behind trying to arrest the guy we’re going to ask for help. He’s an insane, megalomaniacal villain with a mutant-related God complex. But Fury says he owes you. Apparently, you saved his life when he was very young, as a part of a raid on a concentration camp/research lab. One of those Dr. Mengele-style Hell pits, treating the captive population like lab-rats. You probably don’t even remember him, but he remembers you. His name was Erik Lensherr, but he goes by Magneto these days. He can control any magnetic field, so he’s an understandable worry to someone who needs weapons. If it weren’t for that magnetism power, Tony would have insisted he guard you, but Magneto could kill Tony without breaking a sweat, just by thinking at the arc reactor keeping the shrapnel out of Stark’s heart.”
“Actually, I do remember a kid like that, he would have been about ten. But I didn’t so much save his life, as he saved mine. When we pulled him out, he threw out his hand and knocked the gun out of a soldier’s hands from five feet. It was freaky, but if he hadn’t, I’d have been shot in the back. Is Fury entirely sure about showing up and saying “You owe me.”? If he’s turned criminal, he might betray us.”
“That’d be a worry, but Fury is almost never wrong about how people perceive debt. Even if Magneto doesn’t owe you, he thinks he owes you. I’m more concerned about his alarming track record with allies. It runs the gamut; paralyzed, dead, stranded on Antarctica, depowered. His minions deal with super powered OSHA violations and get no pension, to boot. They need to unionize or something.” Clint had fallen back into more modern speech, and was making references he knew that the man out of time wouldn’t get. That sort of slip was unlike him, a sure sign of agitation. *Time to change the subject.* Steve thought.
“So, has Doctor Strange’s house proposed yet?” An outraged groan rose from Hawkeye’s bed, and Steve smiled, “You shouldn’t have told us about the, ehrm, incredibly friendly squid tentacles in the coat closet if you didn’t want us to ask. I’m looking forward to the wedding. Not quite so much to babysitting C’thulhu Jr., but I can take one for the team.”
“Really? You went there? Really!? Why are the few cultural or literary references you get always related to me being grabbed inappropriately?” A pillow was lobbed at the helplessly laughing soldier, which helped Steve feel better about teasing his friend, because had Clint really been upset by it, he would have just left the room. As his laughter died off in spurts of coughing, a grudging mumble of thanks met the return of the pillow. The cathartic release was enough to let Steve finally reach sleep.
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Secret Bit of Right From Wrong