Chapter 7: Warring feelings
The quiet in Sage’s room wasn’t peaceful. It was the dense, charged silence after a forest fire, everything reduced to ash and potential.She didn’t sleep. She sat on the edge of the bed, fingers tracing the cold seam of the mattress, listening to the distant, familiar sounds of the compound: the groan of a pipe, the faint echo of Sam’s wings in the hangar bay, the murmur of early-morning voices.Her hands had stopped trembling. The hollow felt occupied, a black lump of spent coal where a fire had roared.
A soft knock, not on the door, but on the wall beside it—a courtesy tap.Bucky shouldered the door open, balancing two steaming mugs. He didn’t ask if she was awake or okay.He just held one out.“Coffee. Powdered milk, two sugars.The good stash Pietro lifted from a Patrol van.”
She took it. The heat was a blunt fact against her palms. “Thanks.”
He leaned against the wall by the door, sipping his own.“Pietro’s doing perimeter laps.Fast ones. Says it helps him think. Mostly he’s just making the dust devils nervous.”
A ghost of something touched her lips.Not a smile, but a recognition of the gesture. They were giving her space, but orbiting.A loose, protective formation.It should have felt suffocating. It didn’t.“Romanoff’s called a meeting,” Bucky said after a minute. “Full council.After breakfast.” He watched her over the rim of his mug. “You don’t have to go.”
“I’ll go.”
He nodded, as if he’d expected nothing else.“Murdock’s making eggs. Don’t get your hopes up.”
The common area was a study in muted tension. The scent of slightly-burned eggs and brewing coffee mixed with the ever-present smell of damp concrete and machine oil. Matt was at the hotplate, his movements precise, his head tilted as he listened to the sizzle. Peter was setting out plates, his chatter a nervous, low-frequency hum. Natasha sat at the head of the scarred metal table, cleaning her fingernails with a tactical knife, her eyes scanning a datapad. Butcher slouched in a corner, sharpening a different knife on a leather strap, the shhk-shhk sound aggressive and rhythmic.Sam floated down from the upper gantry, landing softly. “Perimeter’s clear.No tail from last night. Runner must have scared himself into the next county.” He glanced at Sage, a quick, assessing look, then gave her a brief, acknowledging nod.
Sage took a seat near the middle, not hiding, not claiming focus. Bucky settled a few chairs down. Pietro blurred in, deposited a stolen jar of jam on the table with a thunk, and took the seat opposite Sage. He didn’t look at her, but his foot tapped a staccato rhythm on the floor.Matt served the eggs. They were, as promised, a bit crisp at the edges.He placed a plate in front of Sage with a gentle clatter. “Salt’s on your left,” he said softly.
They ate with the quiet efficiency of people used to fuel, not pleasure.The clink of forks was loud in the space.
Natasha set her datapad down.The sound was flat, final.“We have a problem. Not the Patrol.Not the government.” She looked around the table. “We’re low on cortisol suppressants. Specifically, the synthetic corticosteroid Barnes and Maximoff require to keep their… unique physiologies from turning on them.”
Bucky’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth. Pietro’s tapping foot went still.“The old supply chain is ash,” Natasha continued, her voice clinical. “The last stash we raided was compromised.We have maybe three weeks’ worth left. After that…” She didn’t finish.She didn’t need to.Butcher scoffed. “So the super-soldier starts seizing and the ghost runner cooks his own nerves.Charming. What’s the play?”
“The play is a place called the Greymore Clinic,” Natasha said.“Pre-Conflict, it was a black-bag biomedical research facility. Funded by Wilson Fisk, among others.It had a fully stocked pharmacy for experimental treatments. The building was shelled in the early purges, marked condemned. Intel from a scavenger network suggests the lower sub-basement labs were sealed and untouched.It’s a maze.Reinforced. Probably trapped.”
“Probably?” Matt asked, pushing his plate away.“Definitely trapped,” Natasha amended. “Heat signatures are inconsistent—could be automated defenses, could be squatters.The suppressants are there. We need them.”
“We?” Sam said.“Who’s ‘we’? This sounds like a two-person job, max.In and out, quiet.”
“It is,” Natasha agreed. “But it requires a specific skill set.Demolitions, for the sealed vault doors. Counter-intrusion, for the traps.And… delicate handling, for the pharmaceuticals. Some of the compounds are volatile.” Her gaze traveled the table, landing not on Sage, but past her.“Barnes. Maximoff.You’re the most vested.You’re also the right tools. I’ll lead.”
Bucky wiped his mouth slowly. “Fine.”
Pietro shrugged, a too-casual twitch of his shoulders.“Sure.I’ll go. Fast in, fast out.”
“No.” The word came out rougher than Sage intended.Everyone looked at her. She set her fork down carefully.“You’re both needed here. If something goes wrong, you’re the ones who…” She gestured vaguely.“The compound needs you. I’ll go.”
A beat of stunned silence.Pietro snorted.“You? You’re a walking flame-thrower, not a safecracker.”
“I can be careful,” she said, the words tasting like a lie she was willing to learn.“And I can sense things. Chemical compositions, unstable energies. I can probably tell if a vial is about to blow before we touch it.Can you?”
Matt leaned forward, his hands folded on the table. “It’s a valid point, Natasha. Her abilities could provide a layer of safety pure mechanics can’t.”
Butcher laughed, a dry, hacking sound.“Oh, this is rich. Send the witch who just deep-fried three people into a chemical weapons depot. What could possibly go wrong?”
“I’m not asking for permission,” Sage said, looking directly at Natasha. “I’m stating capability.You need someone who can handle volatile materials.That’s me. You need someone who can get you through sealed obstacles. That’s also me.” She didn’t mention the third thing: the need to move, to act, to do something that wasn’t just sitting with the new, ugly shape inside her.
Natasha studied her for a long moment, the calculating look back in her eyes.“Barnes?Maximoff? This is your medicine.”
Bucky stared at his plate.His metal hand clenched, then relaxed.“She’s right.About sensing things. In Crimea… there was a HYDRA lab. We had a powered individual who could detect unstable isotopes.It saved the unit.” He looked at Sage, his blue eyes guarded. “You follow her orders.Exactly.No improvisation.”
Pietro scowled, his knee bouncing again. “This is stupid. I could be in and out before any trap even cycles.”
“And if you trip a pressure plate connected to an acid bath right under the drug cache?” Natasha asked coolly. “Speed won’t save the merchandise.Or your legs.” She stood up, her decision made. “Sage, with me.We kit up.Sam, you’re our bird. Wheels up in thirty.” She walked out, expecting to be followed.
The meeting broke apart in a murmur of low voices and scraping chairs. As Sage stood, Pietro appeared beside her in a whisper of displaced air.“This isn’t about the medicine,” he said, his voice low and urgent.
“It is,” she replied.
“It’s not.” He looked furious, and beneath it, scared.“This is you trying to scrub off the foundry.You can’t. It doesn’t work like that.”
“I know,” she said, and found she meant it. “That’s not what this is.”
He searched her face, his own a mask of frustrated concern. “Just… come back.In one piece. The correct pieces.”
He was gone before she could answer.She headed toward the armory, her path taking her through the main hangar. The lights were higher here, buzzing faintly, illuminating the quinjet and rows of storage lockers. She saw Bucky up ahead, talking to Tony Stark near a workbench littered with scattered drone parts. Tony looked weary, his goatee peppered with more grey than she remembered from the old news footage. He was nodding, listening intently.
As she approached, she caught the tail end of Bucky’s sentence, his voice lowered but carrying in the vast space.“…just need her to come back safe. That’s the priority.”
Tony patted Bucky’s metal shoulder, a gesture that was both awkward and deeply familiar.“I’ll make sure the comms are crystal, Barnes. She’ll have a direct line to my charming voice the whole time.”
Bucky gave a tight nod and turned, almost colliding with Sage.He stopped, his expression unreadable. For a second, she thought he might say something. He just looked at her, gave another, shorter nod, and walked away toward the barracks.Tony watched him go, then turned his weary, intelligent eyes on Sage. “He’s not good at ‘worry’. It comes out as ‘taciturn grinding of teeth.’” He picked up a small earpiece from the bench.“This is you. State-of-the-art, scans all known frequencies.Also plays music. Terrible music, because I programmed it.A distraction.” He held it out.“He’s right, you know. Coming back is the primary objective. The stuff in the vials is secondary.”
“You sound like Natasha,” Sage said, taking the earpiece.“God forbid.” Tony managed a weak smirk. “Natasha would cut your throat to save the mission. I’d… well, I’d probably fail to cut your throat and then blow something expensive up as a diversion. Progress.” His smirk faded.“He cares, you know. In his own, deeply malfunctioning way.”
Sage knew he meant Bucky.The weight of it, of any of it, felt dangerous.A liability. “Caring gets people killed here,” she said, repeating the compound’s oldest, bitterest truth.
“Not caring gets everyone killed eventually,” Tony countered softly. He gestured at the scattered remnants of his suit on the bench.“Took me a long time to learn that. An embarrassingly long time.” He cleared his throat, the moment of vulnerability passing.“The earpiece. Keep it in.Please.”
She nodded, inserting it. A faint, staticky hum greeted her, then resolved into a low, clean silence.
As she turned to head for the armory, she saw Pietro, not blurring, but walking with an unnatural slowness toward Tony. He jerked his head toward a shadowed alcove stacked with ration crates—the same one Natasha had pulled Peter into.Tony sighed, a world of exhaustion in the sound, and followed him.
Sage shouldn’t have listened.She knew it. But her feet rooted to the spot, hidden by the bulk of a hydraulic press.In the alcove, Pietro’s voice was a fast, hushed torrent. “…don’t give me the pragmatic bullshit, Stark.You saw her after the foundry. You see her now.She’s a lit fuse.This clinic is a powder keg. It’s a bad match.”
“It’s her choice, Maximoff,” Tony’s voice came back, low and frustrated.“And it’s a medically necessary mission. You of all people should—”
“I know what’s necessary!I also know what’s going to happen. She’s going to try to be a scalpel, but she’s a damn wrecking ball right now. She needs to sit this one out.”
“Tell her that.”
“I tried!”
“Then you’ve done your part.” Tony’s voice was final. “My job is to give her the tools to succeed.Not to tell her she can’t.”
A beat of silence. Then Pietro, his voice stripped of its usual speed, raw and quiet. “She doesn’t get it.What she does to people.To me. Every time she looks through me, it’s like a hole. I can’t… I can’t outrun that.”
Sage felt a chill that had nothing to do with the hangar’s damp air. She took a step back, her boot scuffing softly on the concrete.Tony’s sigh was barely audible. “Pietro… you can’t outrun your own heart either. Trust me, I’ve tried.It always catches up. Usually when you’re trying to sleep.” His tone shifted, becoming pragmatic, almost gentle.“Look.Let her do this.Let her have the win. Then, maybe, the fuse burns a little longer. Gives you time.”
“Time for what?”
“For whatever comes next.Now get out of my alcove. I have to finish a kinetic dampener before your girlfriend blows up my only working quinjet.”
Pietro muttered something in Sokovian that sounded distinctly like a curse and then there was a rush of air.He was gone.
Sage stood frozen, the words echoing in the newly hollow space inside her. What she does to people. A different kind of heat flooded her cheeks—shame, confusion, a frightening, unwanted spark of something else. It was easier when the only warmth she remembered was the terrible one from the foundry fire.This was complicated.This was messy.This was alive.
Natasha’s voice cut through her paralysis, calling from the armory door.“Sage! Clock’s ticking.”
Sage turned, forcing her legs to move, carrying the weight of the overheard confession and Tony’s weary wisdom with her toward the jet, toward the clinic, toward the next impossible thing. The earpiece hummed its clean silence, a tiny thread connecting her back to a world that was, against all odds, trying to keep her.
The earpiece hummed its clean silence, a tiny thread connecting her back to a world that was, against all odds, trying to keep her.
Natasha’s version of “kitting up” was brutally efficient. She handed Sage a matte black utility vest, lighter than it looked, with compartments holding basic tools, a water bladder, and a compact medical kit. “No firearms for you,” she said, her tone leaving no room for debate. “You are the firearm. This is for extraction contingencies.” She tapped a small cylinder on the belt. “Signal flare. Pull the pin, point it up. We’ll find the smoke.” The final item was a pair of thin, tactical gloves. “To hide the fingerprints. And the burns.”
Sage pulled them on. The material was snug, leaving her fingers feeling both protected and alien.
Sam flew low and fast, the landscape below blurring into a smear of greens and greys. Inside the quinjet’s hold, the noise was a dull, pervasive roar. Natasha spent the flight staring at a holographic schematic of the Greymore Clinic, rotating it with sharp flicks of her wrist. “Primary access is collapsed. We go in through the old maintenance sub-level, here.” A point on the schematic pulsed red. “It’s a fifty-meter crawl through a ventilation shaft rated for service drones. Then we drop into Sub-basement Three.”
“Charming,” Sage said, her voice barely carrying over the engines.
“The charm is it hasn’t been breached,” Natasha replied, not looking up. “The security grid in the main halls still has residual power. Motion sensors, pressure plates. The sub-level is primitive. Manual traps. Things that go boom or snap.” She finally glanced at Sage. “Your job is to feel the boom before it happens. Can you do that?”
Sage thought of the molten knife, the specific pressure of heat waiting to be born. “I can feel energy wanting to change. Chemical, kinetic… it’s like a vibration.”
“Good. Listen for vibrations.”
Sam’s voice crackled in their earpieces. “Touchdown in ninety seconds. No signs of life on thermal. Building’s a skeleton. You’ve got your six-hour window.”
The jet settled with a barely perceptible shudder in a scrubby clearing a kilometer from the clinic’s shell. The air outside was still and thick with the scent of pine and decay. The clinic itself was a grotesque silhouette against the twilight sky, a six-story concrete jawbone with hollow eyes where windows used to be.
The service entrance was exactly where Natasha’s intel said it would be: a rusted metal hatch hidden under a landslide of thorny brambles. Bucky had used wire cutters ahead of their departure. The hole was just large enough to squeeze through. Natasha went first, a shadow swallowed by the earth. Sage followed.
The crawl space was a tunnel of pure blackness, smelling of damp soil, rust, and something sourly chemical. Her world narrowed to the feel of the rough pipe under her gloves, the scrape of her vest against the metal, and the steady, quiet sound of Natasha’s movement ahead. The earpiece crackled once. “Twenty meters. Slow now. Loose grating ahead.”
Sage’s magic, that restless heat, began to prickle under her skin. It wasn’t fear. It was awareness. She could feel the tons of collapsed building above them, a dense, inert weight. Then, something else. A faint, singing tension ahead and to the left. “Stop,” she whispered.
Natasha froze.
“There’s… a wire. Thin. Metallic. It’s humming. Right ahead of your left hand.”
A beat of silence. Then the faint click of a penlight. Natasha’s beam illuminated a single, hair-thin filament stretched across the pipe, nearly invisible against the grime. It was connected to a small, corroded cylinder lodged in the pipe joint. “Shape charge,” Natasha murmured, a hint of respect coloring her tone. “Good. How far can you feel?”
“Maybe ten meters in front of us. It’s… fuzzy. But the loud things, I can feel.”
“Then stay close and keep talking to the loud things.”
They moved for another eternity. Sage called out two more pressure plates, their mechanical simplicity screaming compared to the organic quiet of the stone and metal. Finally, a grey light filtered from ahead. The pipe terminated in a heavy grate overlooking a vast, dark space. The air that wafted up was cold and carried a sterile, antiseptic smell undercut by mildew.
Natasha eased the grate open, its hinges protesting with a shriek that echoed terribly in the emptiness below. They dropped down, landing on a cracked linoleum floor. Sub-basement Three. Faint emergency lighting, powered by who-knew-what, cast long shadows from support columns. The room was a graveyard of medical machinery—toppled gurneys, shattered glass-fronted cabinets, the skeletal remains of MRI and CT scanners.
“Pharmacy storage is through that archway, down the hall to the right,” Natasha whispered, pulling a small device from her vest. It was a solid-state reader, scanning for electronic signatures. “No power signatures. No heat blooms. Let’s move.”
The hall was a canyon of shadows. Sage’s skin prickled constantly, a radar pinging off the dormant, potential violence in the environment. She felt the latent energy in a half-collapsed ceiling beam, the slow chemical decay of barrels stacked in an alcove. It was a symphony of silent threats.
The pharmacy vault door was a massive, round-edged slab of steel, like a bank safe from a previous century. A manual combination wheel, rusted solid, sat in its center. “Stand back,” Natasha ordered, placing small, programmable explosive charges around the wheel’s housing. “This is a shaped charge. It’ll blow the lock mechanism inward. Keep your senses on the room behind us. Anything moves, you melt it.”
Sage turned, facing the dark hall, her hands held loosely at her sides. The heat coiled in her palms, ready. She heard the soft beep of Natasha arming the charges. “Fire in the hole.”
The blast was a concentrated thump that punched the air. Smoke and the smell of burned metal filled the corridor. The vault door groaned inward an inch. Natasha shoved, muscle and leverage against mass, and it swung open with a deafening scrape.
Inside, it was a time capsule. Stainless steel shelves lined the walls, laden with boxes and vials covered in a fine layer of dust. Cool, dry air whispered from a dormant climate control unit. Natasha went straight to a specific set of shelves, her light scanning labels. “Corticosteroids. Synthetic analogues… here.” She began swiftly loading airtight cases from her pack with boxes and cold-packed vials. “Jackpot.”
Sage hovered at the door, her senses stretching down the black hall. The silence was absolute. Too absolute. The symphony of threats had gone quiet. “Natasha,” she whispered. “We should go. It feels… empty in a wrong way.”
“Thirty more seconds.”
Then Sage felt it. A new vibration. Not from the building, but through it. Through the floor. A low, rhythmic thrum. Engines. “We have company. Vehicles. Above us. Lots of them.”
Natasha didn’t question. She sealed the last case, slung her pack. “Out. Now. The way we came.”
They sprinted back down the hall. The thrumming was turning into a definite roar, followed by the sharp, percussive sounds of boots hitting concrete above, distant shouts. They’d tripped a silent alarm, or a patrol had been closer than Sam’s sweep had seen.
They were ten meters from the pipe entrance when the world exploded in light and noise. Not from above, but from a side corridor they’d passed. A flashbang grenade rolled to a stop at their feet.
Sage reacted instinctively. She didn’t throw up a shield. She grabbed the energy of the concussive blast as it formed, a split-second perception of light and sound about to unleash, and she pulled.
The grenade didn’t flash or bang. It imploded with a sickening crunch, melting into a lump of silent, glowing slag.
But the move cost her. It left her blinkered, her senses turned inward. She didn’t feel the taser probes until they hit her in the back.
Agony, clean and brilliant, locked every muscle in her body. She hit the ground hard, convulsing, the world narrowing to the crackle of electricity and the taste of blood from a bitten tongue. Through blurred vision, she saw Natasha spinning, a gun in her hand, but more dark figures were pouring from the side corridor, weapons raised.
“Don’t kill her!” a voice barked. “Stun rounds on the other! Take her down!”
Natasha took two shots to the chest, the non-lethal impacts knocking the wind from her and sending her stumbling back. She vanished into a side room, a curtain of dust billowing out as she blew a hole in the opposite wall. The sound of her escape was swallowed by the shouts and boots now filling the space.
Hands rolled Sage onto her stomach, wrenching her arms behind her. The cold bite of reinforced polymer zip-ties locked around her wrists. A knee drove into her spine, pinning her. She tried to summon the heat, to burn through the ties, to immolate them all, but the residual charge from the taser had short-circuited something deep inside. Her magic sputtered, a weak flicker under her skin.
A face leaned into her field of view. A woman, late forties, her hair in a severe bun, her eyes a flat, analytical grey. She wore the dark grey urban camouflage of the Federal Superhuman Response Division. The FSRD patch was stark on her shoulder.
“Thermal bloom and energy signature matched the Miller Foundry incident,” the woman said, her voice devoid of triumph. It was a statement of fact. She picked up the packed case of suppressants from where Natasha had dropped it. “And look at this. A shopping trip.” She nodded to the soldiers holding Sage. “Get her up.”
They hauled Sage to her feet. Her legs felt like water. The commander stepped close, looking her over with the detached interest of a geologist examining a new rock.
“You’re quite the specimen,” the woman said. “Raw output is off the charts. Control is… admittedly, a work in progress.” She reached out and plucked the comms earpiece from Sage’s ear. She held it up, examined it, then crushed it under her boot. “That connection is cut.”
She smiled then, a thin, cold thing. “But don’t worry. We’re going to have long, long conversations about your friends. Where they hide. How they think.” She patted Sage’s cheek, the gesture grotesquely intimate. “We have specialists for that. They’re very good at finding the threads people try to hide. You’ll see.”
They dragged Sage forward, toward the stairs leading up, toward the roaring engines and the blinding daylight. The mission had been a success. The medicine was in their hands.
And she was now a prisoner.