stands_for_hope | At Home with Clark and Jim

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house of am

At Home with Clark and Jim

[continued from here]

They'd fallen into a routine pretty easily.

Clark had managed to write up something about the church bust without incriminating either of them, which meant that his Perry had been pleased enough with his work for the day and had only yelled at him for five minutes about his failure to show up in the office the whole day. Lois had ribbed him a little, which had been remarked upon as she usually gave the new guy hell if he did anything remotely out of the line, and then she'd ribbed him a lot. He hadn't minded too terribly much since he had visited her afterwards at her apartment and she'd done plenty of kissing to make it better.

With a second person in the apartment, he'd started to fix it up a little, bringing home new linens, keeping the fridge stocked more regularly, and he'd even managed to find a new couch for them through a very kindly older woman and Craigslist.

True to his word, he'd gotten some rudimentary identification for Jim and he walked through the door with a spring in his step, closing the door behind him and plopping it down on the kitchen table with a smile.

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He was clean, still a bit damp, but had his hair tidied, pulled back out of the way. He wore jeans, socks, and most notably, a T-shirt that showed his entire left arm as gleaming metal. "Yes," he answered, offering his right hand for a handshake. "Jim Rogers. That's what I'm going by, anyway."

And after he took a breath, he went on: "My real name is James Buchanan Barnes."

Lois swallowed, because there was no mistaking that name and what it meant. She looked back at Clark, who shook his head and gestured for her to go in and sit to talk with Jim. She nodded firmly before doing just that, slipping around the table to sit across from him with a faint, amused smile.

"You know, the films and promotional materials for you and--" she glanced back at Clark who rolled his eyes a little before closing the door behind them, "-your friends back in World War II are part of just about every journalism curriculum around. I'm not easily flustered, but I'll admit I'm just a little starstruck."

Clark walked in and put the briefcase on the table, smiling over at Jim.

"He prefers to go by Jim."

"Don't... be starstruck," he said quietly, shaking his head. "I'm not that person anymore. I brought dinner."

He stood when he said that. "General Tso's chicken for you, vegetable chow mein for you," he looked to Clark, "and beef and broccoli lo mein for me. Also eggrolls and vegetable spring rolls."

The oven had been at a low temperature, just to keep everything warm, so when he doled them out left-handed, they were still steaming slightly. "From what experience I have, it's easier to talk over food."

Lois grinned and nodded pointedly at Clark.

"Someone told him my favorite," she said with a little smile.

Clark just spread his hands as he tucked in her seat for her and took his own.

"I just wanted everyone to be comfortable. Or as comfortable as this kind of situation can be."

"And you're monitoring the area around here? No one's listening?"

Clark nodded firmly before meeting Jim's eye and nodding again.

"I'd hear any electronics and no one within the range of any equipment is staying in one place that isn't sleeping."

At Lois's slightly widened eyes, Clark blushed.

"The breathing's different."

Lois nodded slowly before starting to open her food and turning to Jim.

"So Clark hasn't said much, and you've just told me your name, of course, but I'm not quite sure how you fit into things. He said you wanted to help, that you had good reason to want to help, but he didn't say much more than that."

"He said that you've discovered Hydra plants deep in the local government," Jim said, a bit of animation leaving his voice. "And you know who I used to be, seventy years ago. You... don't know that... I was a Hydra asset called the Winter Soldier."

From there, it was quite the story, from the fall from the train to being picked up by Soviet scientists allied with Hydra, the surgery to replace his arm to the cryo chamber and the mind wipes. He spared the worst details, since they were eating, but he didn't shy away from how much it had hurt, and still hurt at times. He did tug the neck of his shirt to one side to show scars, and admit to eluding - and eliminating - Hydra agents that were trying to reclaim him.

"So," he said once his story had reached the present, "I'm the easiest way for you to confirm your list of Hydra agents - and the easiest way for Clark and I to make sure they get what's coming to them."

Lois listened, and it was almost amazing how easily she listened. She didn't take notes or pull out her papers until he was done and her eyes never wavered away from his unless he turned from her. When he was done, she nodded and pulled up her briefcase, opening it and pulling out a large stack of documents as well as a single notebook. She turned to the page she needed and held it out for Jim to look at.

"The left hand is the code names, the right hand is who my evidence has led me to. I've got all of my work here, all paper copies to keep it in one place only, so you can look through it and see if your conclusions lead you somewhere else. They're letter coded for correlation."

She swallowed.

"Thank you, James. Jim. I appreciate... I'm just going to say I appreciate your honesty."

Clark leaned over and squeezed her shoulder a little and nodded along, as he appreciated it too.

"Let me get us all some drinks. Jim, beer or pop?"

"Beer, please," he said, looking up from the papers to give him a nod. "I'll look at these, but names are kind of blurry. They never used names around me unless they had to. I know faces more than names--"

But he broke off immediately and shook his head. "This one, though... I know it isn't right. I know who he is and he's not governmental ops. He's SHIELD cover. Probably trying to get a bead on Fury right now. This is..."

He frowned slightly, but then held out his hand. "Do you have a pen?"

This one, he could fix. The others... The others, he wasn't sure of just yet, but more reading and he might be able to be more definitive.

She passed him a pen and started separating the stack. There were pictures connected to most of the stacks.

"You can see the faces here. Sorry some of the pictures aren't great. Wait. Fury? Director Nicholas Fury? I... I thought he was dead. My source inside SHIELD--"

Clark shook his head.

"You don't get better than first hand, Lois. You know how it goes."

"I shot him," Jim said. "After I blew up his transport. But from what I know about Fury, there's no way he didn't live. He's too tough not to - and the chips that disabled the helicarriers had to come from somewhere."

But even as he spoke, he wrote, making a note that one of her names was instead connecting to another person in handwriting that was blocky but legible. "Hill couldn't have done it on her own. She wasn't deep enough into that project for it, and everyone else was Hydra."

He paused. "Except for Steve's neighbor. She was just undercover."

Lois looked over at Clark.

"When he says Steve--"

"He means Captain America," Clark finished for her and she gave out a long, low breath as she considered that.

"Sorry. I get it, I'm listening. This is all just... kind of incredible."

"Says the woman who plotted with my father on how to get rid of an alien attack ship."

"That's different!"

Clark smiled and shook his head.

"Not really." And he couldn't help but kiss her cheek, happy and comfortable and content even with all of this happening. Because ultimately, this was good. What they were doing was good. And he was doing it not alone, but with people he loved and trusted and being a part of something instead of standing alone, aside, that was good too.

"Clark's exaggerating my assistance."

"No, I'm really not."

"Well, no, you're not, but I have to be modest sometimes."

"It is a change of pace for you."

That earned him a very light elbow to the side.

The banter brought a faint smile to Jim's face. He missed it. He did have a few, faint memories of conversations a lot like this and he missed it, even if he knew that he couldn't quite do it again. Not the same way that he had.

"Hydra is intentionally tricky," he said after giving them a moment. "There is a reason they say 'cut off one head, two more grow back.' They have redundant command branches everywhere. You've found one. They have at least two people you don't have on this list waiting to take over in case these get exposed and taken out. And they're people you wouldn't expect - moreso than any of these. They'll stay to their cover even when these people are under attack.

"Your hearing will help for that part, Clark. After the first wave is down, listening for spoken communication - they only trust spoken communication unless there are some very encrypted lines open, and those would be very visible. But..."

This was the part that Clark hadn't liked but Jim still thought was their best bet.

"If I show up at--" He looked at the list again, names, codenames, then pictures, finding the one highest-ranked in the Metropolis government before singling him out. "His office when he's working late one night, that should be enough to get all of their attention."

"If you can give me a couple of possible trigger words or phrases, I can make sure to catch them if they're spoken anywhere in the city," he said firmly, looking at the face of the man that Jim had pointed out.

Lois frowned a little as Jim examined her research.

"Is there any other way to figure out the identity of the hidden operatives?

He looked at Clark, then at Lois, and he knew there was one answer to both their questions. One he suddenly felt unsure about saying. What if it--

Jim took a breath, turned to a blank bit of paper, and wrote two words, not watching his own hand, in case even that could trigger him. When he turned the page to both of them, the words were simple enough. 'Hail Hydra.'

Clark nodded and got up at that point, retrieving his laptop. He pulled up a map of Metropolis, switched it over to the street view so that he could see the actual buildings and locations, and then closed his eyes for a moment to focus. He'd spent most of his life learning how to block out the world, keep himself sane in an overstimulating mess of a planet that always seemed too loud, too busy, too wild to keep track of. But having something to focus on, he could actually look for something... and possibly find it.

"Keep going, Jim. I'm listening."

To everything, at the moment.

Lois watched him for a second before breathing out and nodding to Jim herself.

"Thank you. I wasn't sure if they'd use something so... well known. But I suppose it makes sense."

A second later, Clark's fingers moved on the keyboard and he zoomed into a particular building on a particular street and clicked down a marker.

"Someone just said it there. They're talking. Male. Younger."

Clark tilted his head.

"Slow, steady heartbeat. Very possibly hired muscle--"

He sat upright, obviously distressed, but he was too busy listening to say anything quite yet. After a few seconds, though, he opened his eyes again and looked over to the other two.

"Lois, you're staying here until we get this cleared up. They've tracked your IP back to your building and I'm sure it won't take them long to find out that Lois Lane lives there. And I prefer you without bullet holes."

"It's how it's said more than that it's said - especially now. It's whispered in a greeting, after a handshake." But he broke off when Clark started speaking again, listening intently of his own accord.

When he announced that they'd found Lois's apartment, Jim's face lost any expression he'd had. "Pereyti s vami ili ostat'sya s ney?" he asked, not even aware he'd lapsed into what he'd almost come to think of as his mother tongue. Go with Clark, or stay and watch Lois? That was all he really needed to know. Either way, he would need his weapons.

"My oba ostat'sya na dannyy moment. Oni yeshche ne doshli do yeye kvartiry. Pozvol'te mne prodolzhat' slushat'. YA skazhu vam bol'she, kogda ya znayu bol'she."

Clark rattled off his answer with only a small accent, the kind you can't help when you haven't grown up speaking the language, when your muscles didn't develop to the words and cadences that are so different from English. We both stay for the moment. They haven't gotten to her apartment. Let me keep listening. I'll tell you more when I know more.

Lois looked more angry than scared, though and her hand was on her purse.

"If you need to use my apartment to draw them out, you do it. There's nothing in there that I can't replace."

Clark's eyes said clearly enough that he was somewhere else, listening to something else, and his lips slowly curled into something very close to a snarl. It's probably the angriest expression either of them had ever seen on his face and Jim could probably see that the inside of his pupils was slowly shifting from black to red.

Lois definitely saw it and leaned back.

Jim saw it as well and shoved himself up from the table - unafraid, but on alert. "Clark. Vernis'. My dolzhny znat', chto vy slyshite!"

Already, Jim's mind was going to how long it would take him to dress, to put on his tac suit, to arm himself, to run to the address Clark had marked. Minutes, he thought, if that. He wasn't as fast as Clark, but he was still faster than a normal human. The most time-intensive of the tasks would be arming himself - but he needed to know if that was necessary first. Both he and Lois needed him to come back to the apartment where they sat and tell them what he'd heard.

The words snap him out of his anger, his eyes closing though the glow is visible around his eyes and faintly through his eyelids. He took a deep breath and shook his head before opening his eyes again.

"Lois, you stay here. They don't know where you are. Jim... you and I are going to head over to Lois's apartment. There's a small squad headed that way."

He looked at Lois, winced apologetically, and then nodded his head to Jim. Something in his eyes said that he'd be a little more forthcoming with details while they were heading over there.

"We might be stepping up our timetable a little."

Lois reached over and put her hand to his arm and he gave her a half-hearted smile to reassure her that he was all right. And that he'd gotten himself under control.

"I'm sorry if I scared you both."

Jim nodded once, accepting the directive-- and then he gave a faint smile. "I wasn't frightened. I've seen worse."

But as he was standing, he headed back to his bedroom and started changing into his tac suit. It was a garment he was very used to, and he pulled it on with knowing hands. Boots, pants covered in holsters, the one-sleeved that left his metal arm bare except for a fingerless glove. Once it was on, he went about arming himself, putting blades in their sheathes, guns in their holsters, and then strapped on the makeshift mask and goggles he'd put together while he'd been on the run.

His hair was just enough too clean to make him convincing, but it did look like a completely different man stepped out of the room that Jim Rogers had entered.

Lois leaned back but it wasn't exactly fear that made her do it so much as deep surprise.

"Well, then. I'm making coffee."

She looked over to Clark, who was now sporting nothing but his 'Superman' outfit, complete with the cape. Jim's not the only one who wants to make a statement. He hadn't had a chance to tangle with HYDRA yet officially, but he has no problem with making it clear that he is nothing less than their absolute enemy.

And that Superman stands with the Winter Soldier.

"Keep the door locked."

Lois nodded as Clark walked over to Jim.

"I figured we'd fly there, come down from the top of the building. Lois is on one of the higher floors."

Jim nodded once, but then - even with his mask and goggles in place - he looked to Lois and pulled one gun out of its holster, offering it to her grip-first. "This is not a normal gun. The ammunition in this gun is charged. Electrical, like a stun gun, but with a projectile. You will cause no lasting harm with it. There are eight rounds. If anyone comes for you, shoot them with this, then tape them, hands and feet. They will be unconscious for around an hour. We'll deal with them when we return."

It was Hydra tech, but it was being used for the right reasons at last. "And I will try to keep collateral damage minimal."

"If I can figure out Kryptonian weapons, this will be a snap."

Lois took the gun without hesitation before looking at both sides of it thoughtfully and putting it on the table.

"Worry about yourselves and not my knick nacks," Lois said firmly with a sideways glance at Clark. She knew he was pretty tough, but she also knew he'd put himself out to take care of everyone but himself. And that if anything happened to Jim, Clark would be a mess.

Clark nodded and gestured to the window of the apartment, holding out an arm.

"I'm following their heartbeats so we should be able to time this," he said as he stared out the window, eyes picking through the city until he found the little crew traveling towards Lois's apartment.

"If you can get me into the apartment before they enter, I may be able to convince them not to look further into her actions," Jim said, but took hold of Clark's arm with his left. That grip would be secure. What wasn't secure was exactly what Jim meant by 'convince.'

He was ever so slightly out of practice. But so long as he retreated into instinct, he knew he would be fine. "I'm ready," he said, shoulders straightening, waiting for Clark to move.

Clark shared a look with Lois, who nodded.

Then Clark didn't so much jump as suddenly shift towards the window, floating until they were out of the building before heading up. The manner in which he flew was odd, almost like a hover craft of some sort, and the weight distribution Jim should have felt was odd, as if Clark was affecting how gravity worked in their tiny corner of the city.

As soon as they were at a good altitude...

"They want to torture her. See how many other names she knows, including but not limited to the name of the alien 'Kal-el'," he finally explained as they started heading towards Lois's apartment.

His goggles and mask kept the speed from bothering him - though the oddness of the flight didn't escape him. There were more important things at hand, though. "I can convince them that she's one of them," Jim said, "just a higher branch that isn't included in their orders. If that doesn't work, I'll take care of them."

He may have been short on ammo, but knives didn't require ammunition, and he did have his share of knives. The tac suit was armoured so he'd have more of a chance against bullets, but he was aware that walking into this might be the end.

He wasn't as blase about that as he had been before. He had reasons to live now.

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