Chapter Text
Steve has the most boring job in the world. The good news is, his job helps to ensure truth, justice, freedom, and the American way. The bad news is, those things are mostly empty rhetoric and bullshit.
Much more motivating: if he gets in another year, he’ll qualify for student loan forgiveness and a few more weeks of vacation.
The job? To monitor the phones of Shield agents to make sure they aren’t selling state secrets or becoming vulnerable to blackmail because they have fifteen secret mistresses and a gambling habit. Or whatever.
Obviously, any half-decent Shield agent planning on selling state secrets would immediately get a burner phone for that purpose, so another part of his job is to assess the likelihood of that, so that another team at Shield can track them down, and then Steve has to spy on those phones too.
Yes, it’s creepy, and yes, it should be illegal, but on the other hand, these people have access to a lot of guns and in a pinch could probably cause a mass casualty event with a ballpoint pen. Their brains are loaded with secret information that puts everyone from the president to Beyoncé to Moo Deng the baby hippo at risk of annihilation.
Also, most Shield agents are fucked up with PTSD out the ass, so probably someone should keep an eye on them?
Then again, maybe they would be less fucked up if they weren’t being spied on.
What’s his point here? Oh yeah. His student loans are catastrophically high because he got his computer science/art double major at an Ivy league liberal leaning enclave that has some of the highest tuition in the country. In his defense, he was seventeen when he picked that school, the campus was really beautiful, the president of the Socialist club was really handsome, and he kind of figured the apocalypse-revolution would have occurred and money would no longer exist by now.
So yeah, Steve’s job is not only boring as fuck but also unethical as fuck, but here’s the other reason he still does it: besides the fact that he really, really wants that student loan forgiveness: Steve’s cool. He is not a judgy, absolutist, fascist-cop, asshole yes-man. He just gets paid by them.
He’s not here to gossip about what he sees and infers from the mostly boring phone shit he sorts through. He’s not here to rat people out, either.
Some of the asshats he works with, like Sitwell, will sit around and gossip about what they come across. They supposedly only track the agents by code names, but Shield is not that big of an agency, and as boring as his job is, as low as it is on the hierarchy, he did a lot of training to get it. Steve and everyone else in his division are fully capable of figuring out every last detail of who they are spying on, if they were so motivated to lose their jobs and possibly get arrested.
In summary, casually sharing any information gleaned via covert agent observation is a fireable offense, most likely illegal, and also very rude.
But Steve has reported Sitwell through the anonymous employee snitch system half a dozen times. Sitwell must know someone in high places, because he’s currently sitting in the employee break room making fun of an agent for spending hundreds of dollars on bespoke handmade chest hair oil. Which, huh. Fascinating. Steve tries not to listen to anything Sitwell says, but he immediately searches up “chest hair oil” on his phone, cause, no shit, that’s a thing?
Anyway, fuck Sitwell and his asshole friends. Chest hair oil is not any kind of national security threat. In fact, it’s kind of sweet to think about one of the most deadly people on the planet having a bespoke grooming regimen.
Steve takes pride in keeping these personal details to himself. He approaches the job with a sense of discretion and does what he can for the dignity of the people he is systematically taking the right to privacy away from.
The agent who just started using Grindr to set up hookups? Steve double-checks if the guy is married or in a recorded long-term relationship, because then those hookups are a potential blackmail vulnerability, but he isn’t, so Steve casts him a silent Mazel Tov, marks his log as "no noteworthy activity to report," and moves on to the next agent.
Agents that have some amount of quirky or vulnerable shit that he can track are fine. What really worries him are the people who don’t have a single picture, app, or incriminating search history of any kind on their phones.
Case in point today is the agent codenamed Winter. Steve has been tracking his phone since Winter appeared on his docket about two months ago.
Coincidentally, the morning that Codename: Winter appeared in Steve’s docket was the same morning he heard a rumor that a former Hydra operative had been “rehabilitated” and was going to be put into service as a Shield agent.
Steve learned that via Sitwell, who was, as usual, in the breakroom, spouting off his opinion that this new agent was shady as hell, that he had heard the former Hydra guy was part animal, part robot, and all killer. That the only way anyone could trust that the guy was really safe to be free on the streets was if he was fully lobotomized and brainwashed, which was possible, because Sitwell had heard that Hydra had taken part of his brain out and put a computer in, so probably someone at Shield had a remote control for the guy.
Sitwell had then loudly wondered what all the controls were on that remote, wink-wink, if Winter had to do anything you asked.
At this point, Steve had wandered by Sitwell, accidentally tripped and spilled a cup of coffee all over him, which changed the annoying sounds coming out of Sitwell’s mouth from the talking variety to a kind of shrieking rage.
“Sorry,” Steve had said. “That’s the problem with getting coffee before you’ve had coffee. It’s a classic causality dilemma. Difficult to gain one without the other already present.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you? How can you work for Shield if you’re so fucking incompetent, Rogers?” Sitwell had spit out at him.
Steve had shrugged, nonchalant, as he refilled his cup. “Maybe the handler who manages my remote controls hasn’t had their coffee either.”
The whole thing made Steve inclined to be on the former Hydra guy’s side, which is complicated, because fuck Hydra, but also, fuck Sitwell.
Steve, in theory, believes that no one is beyond redemption, but also one time Hydra bombed the hospital where his mom works up in Brooklyn. She was okay, but bombing his mom is not the kind of thing that makes Steve especially forgiving. Neither is the whole “racism and eugenics are the foundation of our ideology” bit.
Steve wonders if Winter buys into the whole eugenics bit of his former employers. Why did he decide to defect? Was it for political or moral reasons, or does Shield just offer a better retirement plan?
He’s pretty sure Shield wouldn’t have brought the guy on if he was full-on Nazi, but he can’t help but wonder how a former Hydra agent might feel if he knew that a skinny guy with a congenital heart defect, scoliosis and a list of allergies longer than he is tall was the one supervising his social media activity.
Or his profound lack of social media activity, in this case.
Steve pulls up the guy’s phone activity record to double-check his report findings. Every morning, Code Name: Winter uses the maps app to check the DC Metro times and then travels from an apartment building in Columbia Heights to Shield headquarters. He otherwise does not use his phone while on his morning commute.
When in office, he checks his Shield emails on average once an hour and responds promptly to calls and texts, but almost never initiates. All of his phone contacts are colleagues from his department at Shield.
He doesn’t DoorDash lunch; he doesn’t play the crossword puzzle; he doesn’t scroll social media; he doesn’t watch videos about which ceramic tactical knives are the easiest to get on an airplane or which kevlar underpants are the best at wicking sweat. His phone traffic is nothing like that of the other agents. He doesn’t buy chest hair oil; he doesn’t buy anything.
Maybe he is a robot?
The more likely answer is that he has a secret phone that he is using to leak state secrets to Hydra. And, Steve suspects, Code Name: Winter also uses the Hydra phone to order takeout, because how can a person live in a major US city and just never, ever order takeout? Is he cooking? But he doesn’t look up recipes either. Even a robot needs to eat.
Okay, robots don’t need to eat. But this guy surely does.
The only logical answer is a secret phone.
So anyway, Steve needs to tell his boss that he suspects this guy has a secret phone so they can track the guy, find the phone, hack into it, and then figure out what this guy is doing with it.
There is a whole process for this, and it doesn’t involve Steve. People like Steve, who are up to their elbows in the personal data of agents, are supposed to have no to minimal contact with them to reduce conflicts of interest.
Steve thinks back to Sitwell’s comments about Code Name: Winter being a robot that Shield controls with a remote. It’s always bothered him. He wishes he could believe there wasn’t a grain of truth to that rumor, but he’s not sure he thinks Shield is above it, and he knows Hydra isn’t.
So, he decides to wait to tell anyone. He’ll take a few preliminary steps, and if he finds something, he can just backdate everything a day or two. Not a big deal. And if he doesn’t find anything…he’ll explore his options at that time.
Preliminary step one of Steve’s plan to figure out whether he really needs to report Code Name: Winter to his boss is lifting some equipment so he can scan the guy’s office and locker for radio frequencies and then run through those for extraneous signals. Boring but easy. He’ll also wander by with a ferromagnetic detector to check for any dismantled tech equipment.
It takes incredible skill and intellect in about ten different dimensions to become a Shield agent, so Steve is pretty sure this guy knows better than to leave his secret phone in his locker or a desk drawer, but never underestimate smart people’s ability to be dumbasses.
Steve taps his fingers on his desk, thinking, and then hops up. No time like the present!
First things first, he goes to the café in the building's atrium and buys a dozen donuts, two orange scones, an Earl Gray tea and a Flat Red coffee. He takes a minute to balance all of his purchases, adjust his messenger bag, and then heads back to the elevator to head to the non-lethal equipment library.
He pushes the door open and offers his friend Wanda a big cheesy grin. She’s sitting at her desk in front of a wall that is mostly transparent glass. Through the glass, Steve can see the non-lethal equipment library: a large room filled with rows upon rows of shelves.
“Hey Wanda, I bought you that Ukrainian coffee with the fruit juice in it you like,” Steve says, projecting cheerful with a wide grin. “I have no idea if you like orange scones, but the glaze looked good, so if you don’t like it, I’ll find someone else to give it to.”
Wanda glances up from her computer, a slight frown between her eyebrows. “What has happened to you? Is there some kind of alien spores in the vents again?”
“I can’t bring one of my best friends snacks?” Steve asks, trying to look and sound innocent.
“You can, and you do, but you never smile like that,” Wanda says. “I think you underestimate the amount of time you spend frowning.”
Steve frowns.
He sets down the coffee and one scone. “The reason I’m here is that I hate Sitwell, and don’t want him to be right about something.”
Wanda gives him a long, thoughtful look. Steve stares back. Wanda breaks eye contact first. She takes a sip of the coffee and hums, pleased. “Well, Steven, that is a perfectly made drink.” She gives him a pointed look. “By the way, have you heard the new Starlord album? I’m quite taken with it, though it’s terribly loud. I am now going to listen to it on my headphones at a high volume while I focus on my computer for the next few minutes.”
“I’ll have to check that album out later,” Steve says, but Wanda has slid up her headphones. He can hear the tinny sound of guitars as she leans in close to her computer screen and pointedly ignores him. She idly crosses her legs, and her knee bumps a hidden button on the bottom of her desk.
The door to the non-lethal equipment library slowly opens.
Wanda taps her screen and types something. Steve hears a key change in the music emanating from her headphones.
Steve can work with that. He slips behind her, walks up the shelves, and grabs the scanner he’ll need. It really is a harmless piece of equipment. Especially if you don’t have the training to sift through the data the equipment picks up. Steve has that training, of course, but that is beside the point.
Because this scanner is so very benign, it doesn’t have any special access codes or thumbprint scans required to pull it from its charging station. It’s hardly anything to slip into his messenger bag while still balancing the tea and the other scone and the box of donuts. He slips out of the equipment storage area right as the automatic door slides back closed.
He’s pulling open the outer door to head out of her office when Wanda says, too loud, because she’s shouting over her headphones, “The orange scone is delicious! Let’s go hiking soon!”
“You’re going to damage your hearing, you know that, right?” Steve says back, but Wanda mouths, I can‘t hear you and points to her headphones.
“Hiking soon, got it,” Steve says, offering her a salute as he slips out into the hall.
It’s not the first time Steve has “borrowed” surveillance equipment to try to keep an agent out of trouble. Sometimes there are perfectly reasonable reasons for agents to be trying to get around Shield’s constant monitoring. The way Steve sees it, the goal of his job is to make sure that Shield agents aren’t a dangerous liability to their team or to their country. If he breaks a little protocol to get there in his own way, to give the agents a little more privacy and dignity, he’s still arriving at the same goal.
Speaking of agents whose asses he had saved by letting them know their behavior was sending up red flags, he heads up to the agents’ floor to find Natasha.
…
Back when she’d first defected from the Red Room, Steve had found evidence that she was hacking into her superior agent’s tech. Which would seem damning, but when he looked up what she was looking at, it was mainly to read the instructions and reports from missions she’d been on. Turned out she had developed a healthy distrust of superior agents while in the Red Room, and liked to double-check that their orders were the same as what they were telling her.
This seemed eminently reasonable to Steve. Natasha had built a reputation at Shield for being mysterious, but looking through her records, she had a tendency to risk her life to prevent casualties, and the only times she’d directly defied orders were to ensure the safety of children (and one time a goat).
Hardly scary, in Steve’s opinion. So, he’d asked her out for tea.
She’d told him she didn’t date coworkers. He’d said he wasn’t looking for a date, but he might like a friend, and after a long pause where she glared at him like she might stab him and Steve focused on the fact that she had once saved a goat’s life, she’d agreed to meet him for tea.
For their friend date, they’d grabbed drinks from a coffee shop and sat next to a very large and lovely and also noisy fountain that would fuck with the sound pick-up of any surveillance equipment. Instead of friendly chit-chat, he’d held his coffee cup close to his mouth to prevent lip reading and laid out the ways that he was spying on her. He made it clear that he wasn’t planning on reporting her for his prior findings, because to him it made sense that she wanted to monitor the people who were making calls that could mean life or death for her. But at the same time, she didn’t have permission to do that, so if he kept finding evidence of her breaking the law, at some point, and he really was very sorry about this, but he would probably, definitely, really have to let someone know.
Natasha had barely moved or blinked the whole time he’d been speaking. When he’d finished, she’d said, “Either you’re the best liar I’ve ever seen, or you’re in the wrong business.”
Steve had shrugged. “I’m a pretty bad liar, but I’d say I’m doing okay for my little part in the spy business. I do what I’m asked, more or less. I just do it my way.”
“I could just drown you in this fountain and move on,” Natasha had said coolly. “It would look like an accident.”
Steve had barely resisted rolling his eyes. God, spies are so dramatic. “First, no one ‘accidentally’ drowns in a foot-deep fountain. Second, I asked you out in front of that secretary, Darcy, which means she’s told the whole office we’re sleeping together. If I die mysteriously, you’ll probably get caught, and if you don’t, you’ll still look like a jealous lover, which is hardly the reputation you’re trying to cultivate at the office.”
Natasha had blinked. “Huh.”
It was the foundation of a great friendship. They officially cleared it with their bosses; Steve was moved off Natasha’s data tracking as it was now a conflict of interest.
They never bothered to inform Darcy that it was not a romance.
Nat’s been promoted enough now that she has a lot fewer superiors to keep up with, but he’s pretty sure she still hacks her way into all of their correspondence as it relates to her work. As long as she uses methods he can’t trace, he’s comfortable with that.
…
He knocks lightly on her office door. It’s in a long, boring corporate hallway lined with the offices of a dozen other senior agents. More than half of the offices are empty as agents are out on deployment, taking post-deployment leave, or training in the gym.
Steve, for the record, does not get his own office. He works in an open floor plan with 24 other analysts, even though, unlike the agents that get their own private offices they hardly use, he is required to come to the office literally every day, but anyway. Whatever, cool.
Agents are gods, and he is the peon who monitors God from the basement.
Even though it’s unjust, it is kind of funny to think about a floor full of barely domesticated agents squirming in desk chairs, pretending they are office workers when they would much rather break the window and rappel down to the street. He’s pretty sure even the ones that bother to wear suits have full tactical gear underneath.
Natasha isn’t one to bother with an office cover; she wears stretchy black spy gear with practical boots and a tactical vest on the days that she isn’t wearing a slinky gown for some kind of fancy infiltration.
She’s currently watching him tap on her open door with an amused twinkle in her eye, her dimple almost showing. She lifts her chin in a small nod, beckoning him in.
He obeys and sets the tea and scone down on her desk. He’s still balancing the box of donuts.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” She asks, going for the scone first.
“I’m planning a caper,” he answers, and her smile widens enough that her dimple shows up all the way, just for a moment.
“You probably are, aren’t you? Am I invited?”
“I just needed an excuse to walk up to this level. But we should go on a hike soon; Wanda wants to go too. I was thinking of Harpers Ferry.”
“You two only want me to come so I’ll drive you out there,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “I need friends who know how to drive.”
“God forbid I invite you to hang out with me because I like your company,” he answers drily. “There're places to hike that a person without a car can get to, you know. I heard there were some good spots for rock climbing and thought it sounded like a pleasing recreational activity to enjoy with you, my human friend.”
Natasha smiles so that her dimple shows for real and stays. “Fine, fellow human friend. Name the human time and human place and I will drive us there,” Natasha says.
Steve smiles back. “Sounds good. Welp, speaking of human things, I have to go to the bathroom. See you later.” Steve hoists his messenger bag, adjusts his box of donuts, and turns for her door.
“That was a terrible segue,” she says.
“You wish you were as terrible at conversational transitions as me,” Steve tosses back easily.
She laughs. “I only like you because you’re weirder than me.”
Steve grins and uses the box of donuts to salute her. “But you like me.”
“Go do your actual job,” she calls after him.
“I’m always doing my job,” he says back solemnly, and then slips away quickly, because it annoys her when he gets the last word.
He’s spent enough time monitoring Code Name: Winter’s phone to know his schedule and desk location. He’s never met the guy, doesn’t know his real name, and doesn’t know what he looks like, but he has a clear picture of the man’s digital footprint.
So he strolls, oh so casually, away from Natasha’s office, mentally picturing the floorplan of the building overlaid with the signals he knows to be Winter’s.
The office closest to the southwest bathroom is labeled James B. Barnes. Steve makes note of that as slips into the bathroom.
He carefully sets the box of donuts on top of the hand blow-dryer so the donuts stay as un-bathroomed as possible. He pulls out the equipment, sets it up to run some scans, tests that it’s working, and then gently sets the scanner back in his messenger bag so it will continue to monitor while he walks around.
He then unrolls and stuffs half a roll of toilet paper into the toilet. He flushes and watches to make sure the paper has created a satisfactory clog. The toilet bowl fills so high that a little water runs onto the floor.
Check.
He very thoroughly washes his hands, dries them, and then picks up the donuts to head onward.
Steve taps lightly on James B. Barnes’ open door, and then forgets what he was about to say.
Most of the agents are annoyingly good-looking, but sometimes it still catches him off guard. James B. Barnes has long, deep brown hair that goes just past his broad shoulders. The dark of the hair is contrasted with striking, slate-blue eyes that are currently piercing straight through to Steve’s soul.
Haha. Not really. But maybe. Jeez. What guy needs that much jawline and that much cheekbone? Excessive, honestly. James B. Barnes’ lovely sculpted eyebrows narrow in a frown, making a cute little notch between them.
He doesn’t look like a robot.
Right. Caper. He’s in the middle of a caper.
He starts talking. “Um, hey, this is embarrassing, and I know it’s not your job to monitor the bathroom just because you have the closest office to it, but do you know whose job it is to monitor the bathroom? Cause it definitely needs, uh, monitoring?”
Steve doesn’t have to fake the awkwardness. Talking about overflowing toilets to handsome men is one of those things that will always be embarrassing. Steve is ready for James B. Barnes to be a dismissive dick, but instead he just blinks his beautiful blue eyes, and says softly, almost kind of sad, “I don’t know the answer to that.”
“No worries, I figured it was a long shot. I’ll just tell Darcy at the front desk,” Steve says. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
Instead of answering, James B. Barnes continues to frown at him.
“So. Anyway. Have a good day,” Steve says. The stare continues.
Yep, Steve does not have to fake the awkwardness. He raises his hand in a half-wave and finally remembers how to walk. Geez.
He shakes his head at how weird that interaction was. Maybe the guy is so quiet and sort of sad-seeming because he is secretly a robot.
More likely, James B. Barnes is yet another stupidly handsome super spy who forgets how to talk when they aren’t in Charm and Disarm Mission Mode. Steve’s worked at Shield long enough to know that agents are so attractive it’s stressful for normal people to look at them, and that agents are often incredibly bad at small talk with civilians.
He just. Forgets sometimes how intense that combination can be.
Right. Okay. Onward. He clicks off his scanner and wanders off down the long hallway of agents’ offices.
When he passes Darcy in the lobby he says, “Some asshole clogged one of the toilets in the southwest bathroom, you should call maintenance.”
“You should call maintenance,” Darcy grumbles in annoyance, but she’s picking up the phone. “Is that a box of donuts? Do I get a donut?”
“I’m not supposed to be on this floor,” Steve shrugs. “You never saw me.”
Darcy pouts. “Then you should have brought me a coffee too, and not just your spy girlfriend, if you want me to cover for you two meeting up to flirt on office time.”
“It was tea!” Steve calls out, as the elevator doors close.
Steve hits the button for the second floor, bouncing on his toes as he waits for the next phase of his operation.
When the doors open, he pulls out his phone ostensibly to work on a crossword puzzle. When he reaches the locker room and the gym the agents use, he lets himself get caught up in the puzzle for a minute. He idly leans against the wall outside the locker room as he ponders the prompt, “Subject for a thermodynamicist.”
He types in the answer, “H E A T,” and, assuming that was enough time for a good scan, he then picks up the pace so he can drop off the box of donuts at the front desk for the maintenance team, also on the second floor.
He can only assume their office is located so close to the gym for strategic reasons.
Ms. Gladys, who manages all the maintenance calls and is probably personally responsible for the building not being condemned, coos at him in appreciation for the donuts. As always, she tells him he needs to eat more butter so he can gain some weight. Ms. Gladys is nearing eighty and is the only one who is allowed to tell Steve that. She asks about his mom and he gets an update on her grandkids while she eats a donut.
The donut delivery means his caper is complete, so he heads back up to his own office to get caught up on his work.
He’ll have to wait until he’s home to assess what he’s found.
Even without the data, he’s learned a few things. James B. Barnes, Code Name: Winter, is a big, hulking, handsome guy with long hair, sad eyes, a cute, grumpy face, a soft voice, and very weird phone habits.
Interesting.