Ch. 5: Sam’s House
Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Warnings: explosions and a building collapse, head injury
Once the dust settles, Steve punches and kicks away at the larger chunk of debris, him and Nat both coughing up dust. Elsie had been knocked unconscious, and Natasha pulled her out before checking to see if she was hurt anywhere. No blood, but there was a small swell to Elsie’s head.
“I’ve got her,” Steve says and scoops her up as she starts to wake up. Elsie holds onto him as he and Natasha carefully step out into the open, but the world feels as if it was spinning around her. She was dizzy, exhausted, and didn’t want to fight sleep anymore.
“Rest, doll,” he tells her just before multiple jet engines could be heard in the distance.
Steve and Natasha make a run for it, staying out of the choppers’ bright lights. He then remembers Sam lived near him and Elsie and directs them towards his house. When they couldn’t run anymore, they decided to walk despite having to make the journey that lasted until sunrise, Elsie unconscious through all of it.
By seven o’clock in the morning, they reach Sam’s back porch door. Natasha knocks on the door, and Sam answers it within a matter of seconds.
“Hey, man,” he greets them, a bit sweaty from his morning run and a surprised look on his face. He didn’t bother to question why his friend was holding an unconscious woman in his arms or why they and Natasha were dirty.
“I’m sorry about this,” Steve apologizes, out of breath. “We need a place to lay low.”
“Everyone we know is trying to kill us,” Natasha adds.
“Not everyone,” Sam replies. He leads them inside his home and closes the screen door.
Natasha immediately goes in search of an ice pack, while Sam leads Steve to a spare room for Elsie to rest.
“I know who the redhead is,” Sam says, “but who’s the brunette?”
“This is Elsie,” Steve introduces as he lays her gently on the bed.
“Friend from work?”
A blush color appears on his cheeks as he shakes his head. “No, she’s my girlfriend.”
Sam cheekily smiles and crosses his arms. “So, the Captain does have a girl.”
Steve smiles and rolls his eyes at him. “Okay, that’s enough.”
“Is she okay though?” Sam asks, taking the situation a bit more serious.
“I think she hit her head from where we were,” Natasha says as she comes in with an ice pack wrapped in a towel. “She didn’t bleed, but I felt a small bump on her head.”
She then feels around Elsie’s scalp and locates the bump before carefully placing the ice pack on it.
“I’ll watch her,” Steve says and holds the ice on her head. “You go wash up.”
Sam heads back to the kitchen, and Natasha heads to the bathroom.
It wasn’t but five minutes until Elsie woke up, her head pounding.
“Steve?” her voice cracked.
“I’m here, angel,” he reassures before kissing her hand.
When her eyes open and look around, she’s confused and her throat feels dry. “Where are we?”
“The camp was bombed,” he explains. “We got out, but something hit your head when the building we were in collapsed. We’re at Sam’s house.”
She just nods before chuckling at seeing him all dirty. “You gonna hit the showers, Captain?”
He lets out a small smile. “Just wanted to make sure you were okay first.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Steve then helps her sit up before taking the hairpins and scrunchie out of her messy brown and red locks.
After Natasha is done in the shower, Elsie takes a turn but not without Steve standing on the other side of the curtain to make sure she didn’t have a concussion or fall. Natasha took everyone’s clothes to the laundry, and they were cleaned within a few minutes.
When Elsie finishes in the shower, Steve steps out of the bathroom to let her get dressed in private while he finds another bathroom to wash his face and hands. Natasha was in spare room towel drying her hair.
“You okay?” he asks Natasha as he steps out of the bathroom.
She nods. “How is she?”
“She’s fine. She’s not used to things like this, so I think it’s starting to take a toll on her. But she’s tough as nails.”
Natasha glances in the direction of the bathroom she was in before looking back at Steve.
“You know,” she says with a soft smile, “I’ve never seen anyone else put themselves in danger to protect the one they love.”
“The last thing I want is for her to get hurt,” Steve replies.
“I wasn’t talking about you protecting her.”
Steve looks at her confused.
“Elsie chose you over her own position as an agent-in-training the moment she escaped arrest by jumping out of an elevator with you, knowing she most likely lost her job. She’s not told anyone else about the drive, took a bullet for you, and even pretended you two were engaged, all because she wants to protect you as much as she can. If that isn’t true love, then I refuse to believe it exists.”
Steve is silent for a moment as he ponders over the last 48 hours. The last thing he wanted for Elsie was to put her in this position, especially now that she had a bounty on her head for being a witness to Fury’s murder. She had been injured, but she always pulled through. With the amount of danger they had been in, Elsie never held back from fighting or tried to run away. She knew from the start what dating him would entail, and her actions told him she was in it for the long run no matter how dangerous it would be. Like Steve, she could do this all day.
Elsie soon steps out of the bathroom fresh as a daisy and in clean clothes, her hair combed through with the red dye starting to fade a little from being washed. She spots Steve and Natasha in the other room and joins them, sitting at the foot of the bed with Steve.
“I’ll go see if breakfast is ready,” Natasha says and grabs her jacket.
It’s silent for a moment before Elsie takes Steve’s hand.
“I owe you one,” she tells him in a hushed voice.
“It’s okay,” he shakes his head.
Elsie sighs. “Sweetheart, be honest with me for a minute, if it was the other way around, and it was down to me to save your life, would you trust me to do it? Same goes for Natasha.”
He looks her in the eye. “I would,” he swears. “And I’m always honest.”
“You seem pretty chipper for someone who just found out they died for nothing.”
He wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her closer to him. “Well, I guess I just like to know who I’m fighting.”
Steve leans in to kiss her when Sam’s voice announces from the doorway, “I made breakfast. If you guys eat that sort of thing.”
Elsie chuckles. “I am actually starving,” she nods and stands. “Care to join me, Captain?”
…
Wolfing down eggs and bacon, Elsie was forever grateful Sam gave them food to eat. It had been at least a whole day and a half since any of them had eaten, and she felt her energy return once some food was in her stomach.
“You’re an excellent cook,” she tells Sam. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” he smiles at her, refiling her glass with orange juice. “Just don’t choke now.”
“So, the question is who at S.H.I.E.L.D. could launch a domestic missile strike?” Natasha changes the subject while sipping on some milk.
Steve thinks for a moment, and then realizes something. “Pierce.”
“Who happens to be sitting on top of the most secure building in the world,” Elsie adds after swallowing her last piece of bacon.
“But he’s not working alone. Zola’s algorithm was on the Lemurian Star.”
A light bulb went off in Natasha’s head. “So was Jasper Sitwell.”
Steve’s gears begin to function as he comes up with a plan. “So, the real question is, how do the three most wanted people in Washington kidnap a S.H.I.E.L.D. officer in broad daylight?”
“The answer is, you don’t,” Sam chimes in as he walks towards them with a manila folder in hand and tosses it on the coffee table.
“What’s this?”
“Call it a resumé.”
Nat takes it and examines the photo on top more closely.
“Is this Bakhmala?” she asks. “The Khalid Khandil mission, that was you?” She looks at Steve. “You didn’t say he was a Pararescue.”
Steve takes the photo and sees the other man in the photo by Sam. “Is this Riley?” Sam’s military partner.
“Yeah,” Sam confirms.
“I heard they couldn’t bring in the choppers because of the RPGs,” Natasha adds.
“What’d you use? A stealth chute?” Elsie wonders as she comes over to join the rest of the group.
“No,” Same replies and hands them another folder. “These.”
Steve’s demeanor changes as he sees the label on the file titled “FALCON,” and it wasn’t talking about aircraft. “I thought you said you were a pilot,” he says as he looks up at his friend.
A proud smile grows on Sam’s face. “I never said pilot.”
Steve was about to jump the gun at the idea, but he hesitated. He had already put Elsie in danger, and now Natasha was just a wanted criminal like them. He didn’t want another person he cared about to get hurt.
“I can’t ask you to do this, Sam,” he finally says. “You got out for a good reason.”
“Dude, Captain America needs my help,” Sam insists. “There’s no better reason to get back in.”
Realizing he was right, Steve goes for it. “Where can we get our hands on one of these things?”
“The last one is at Fort Meade. Behind three guarded gates and a 12-inch steel wall.”
The trio just shrugged as if it were nothing.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Steve says.
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