Captain America Is Dead. What Happens Next?

PART ONE: HIGH CRIMES AND TREASON

ONE

S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't give me a number and take away my name. That's not protocol in the U.N.'s Strategic Homeland Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate. I'm still Sharon Carter—even if all the suits, techs, and field ops call me “Agent 13.”

As a senior field agent, I am authorized to wear the distinctive black armored body suit with white accessories and carry the regulation advanced plasma pistol. But being an old-fashioned girl, I still keep the original-issue .30-caliber machine pistol and a 9mm Beretta under the floorboards in my closet.

I get my hair “done” in the East Village at a place that still charges less than twenty bucks for a cut, and where the languages of choice are Russian and Mandarin. They don't realize I can understand most of what they say, but that doesn't bother me at all.

Most of the guys who come on to me when I'm in civvies figure it's no great loss if I reject them. That doesn't bother me, either. I  was never a big one for casual romance. But I have known love, and I know that it comes with as much pain as joy.

I'm good at my job, even if I've made mistakes—like getting involved with somebody I work with. That's what got me in trouble with my boss, Deputy Director Hill. And that's how I got stuck with a mandatory psych eval. Minimum ten sessions—with the psychiatrist's report counting heavily toward whether I get benched, suspended, charged, or reinstated.

Hill will get her way, no matter what.

The shrink I was assigned at Admin turns out to be pretty cool. He doesn't steeple his fingers, and he doesn't display any tics when I purposely say things to rock his socks. I find myself liking him and trusting him for no discernable reason. Maybe that's a good sign. The fact that he looks like Martin Luther King Jr. with a shaved head helps, too. He makes me verbalize stuff I might otherwise suppress or deny. I get through nine sessions by holding my cards close and never even peeking. But the tenth session is the high-stakes pot, and both of us know it.

“So, Agent 13, can you elucidate your anger issues with Deputy Director Maria Hill?”

“She played me. She leveraged my relationship with Cap—Steve Rogers—because she wanted him to go against his own principles to support the Superhuman Registration Act. And this was after she sicced the Cape-Killer Squad on him. Some name, huh? Cape-Killers. Powered suits of armor to go after people who'd been ‘heroes’ before a lily-livered Congress passed the Registration Act to appease the paranoids.”

“Captain America is and always has been an active agent of the United States government, and you were the official liaison between him and S.H.I.E.L.D. You had a prior history with this man, and you were aware of the regulations forbidding such involvements, yet you blame hill—”

“I managed to work with Steve—Captain America—for a long time without any, um, incidents. We're both pros. I didn't expect anything more to come of it. Maybe I was naive to think it wouldn't go that way. But suddenly, it just was.”

I know if I tell the shrink what he wants to hear, he's going to submit a more positive report that will look good in my personnel file. But what's the use of that? I know Steve would disapprove, and the thought of that makes me feel all hollow inside. Everything is so complicated. At first, I was in favor of the Registration Act. That hero-related tragedy in Stamford that resulted in kids dying shocked me to the core. I've never had much use for costumed heroes except for Cap and Falcon. I stood by and watched as Steve built a resistance movement, and saw him fight tooth and nail against his best friends. He paid a terrible price for putting himself above the law. When I tell the shrink all this, he suggests that I didn't want to betray the man I love.

There isn't a whole lot of  use in explaining that every soldier knows two contradicting facts: Orders come before friendship, and there are few stronger bonds than those between comrades-in-arms. Most civilians don't get how we juggle those concepts because they've never been there and can't comprehend how people who have survived combat together feel about each other. It's why soldiers only tell real war stories to other soldiers.

It's the shrink's job to ferret all this out. So when he calls, I show him my hand. But I don't flip over my hole cards.

“In the end, Agent 13, you still betrayed him. Do you want to talk about that?”

“Steve had been underground for weeks. Every security agency and all the registration-compliant costumed heroes were searching for him, but we had a secret dead-drop for getting messages to each other. I arranged to meet him on a rooftop, and it just wasn't in his nature to suspect me of luring him into a trap. I'd never felt so dirty as when he kissed me there in the moonlight, and I kissed him back. Afterwards, in a tawdry safe room nearby, in the warm afterglow, he told me I wasn't going to change his mind. He said people had been turned into walking targets just for knowing him when he'd decided to make his identity public a few years ago, and some of them had been killed. It meant he could no longer partition his life or have any semblance of normalcy. ‘I accepted that because Captain America is who I am, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else,' is how he put it. So I told him it was still breaking the law, and the rule of law was what our country was founded on. He countered by telling me our country was founded on breaking the law, because that law was wrong. And then he quoted Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine.”

“And during all of this, you knew a Cape-Killer Squad was on its way to the safe room?”

“I thought I could win him over. I thought if I could just talk to him face-to-face, I could at least make him reconsider. It was a desperate move to buy some time. I should have known Steve was willing to die for what he believed in, and I didn't want the man I loved to die.”

“Agent 13, you have admitted to serious breaches of the Code of Conduct in your After-Action Statement. You did scramble the GPS tracer in your communications unit, and you did give the wrong address to the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents? You knew the agents would kick down the door of an empty apartment? You put love before duty. How do you resolve that ethical quandary in your head?”

“I'd planned to send a signal to the Cape-Killer Squad if I failed to persuade Steve. I really did. But when it came down to it, I just couldn't. I don't know why. It's not like me at all. I'm a good soldier. I stood up and swore all the oaths. But when I was alone there with Steve, I asked him to stay, and I told him that I loved him—God, I hadn't said that in years. It just spilled out, and there it was in the room with us.”

The shrink says exactly what I expect, that verbalizing what I'd bottled up was a healthy thing. His face is unreadable when he says it. I guess it's a basic requirement for psychiatrists. I'm a pretty damned good poker player, and I can usually spot some sort of giveaway, but there's not a glimmer there. Still, I trust the man, and I ask him outright if I'm no longer fit for duty. He tells me he doesn't know yet, and we should meet again in two days. 

I'm very relieved, because I love my job despite everything.

As I go out the door, he tells me one last thing: “I don't believe we're done with you yet, Agent 13.”