War Torn || Civil War

Chapter Twenty-Three: On My Watch

Music is "Leave Out All The Rest" by Linkin Park.

Picture is Lil James as Amelia Carter.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: On My Watch

{February 8, 1991 -- Twenty-Five Years Ago}

A M A Z O N I A

Peggy and I are stunned for the few seconds that follow the end of the recording. Everything we'd suspected was just confirmed by Amelia Carter herself in the most horrible way. What's worse is that we have no idea if she survived or not. We're as much in the dark as we were when we arrived, only now much more angry.

I look to Peggy, seeing her shoulders heave with heavy breaths. "Peg..." I mumble, keeping my voice low. "We need backup. This isn't a two-person mission. We need agents, soldiers, weapons. We need a whole bloody army to take on someone like Somodorov. You heard Amelia."

Peggy clenches her fists so tightly that her knuckles turn white. Her face is visible in the monitor's reflection, and her expression is pure rage. "What I saw was my niece being attacked by a bunch of animals," Peggy replies in a low rumble. "What I saw was a brutal attack on an American base." She turns and looks to me with fury in her brown eyes. "I'm going to blow them to hell."

I grab her wrist as she tries to march off. "Peggy, we need to think this through. They could still have hostages--"

"--Then we're going to bloody get them!" she exclaims, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "What else would you have me do? Wait for reinforcements? Try to contact another base for backup?"

"If we go in there half-cocked then we'll all die," I plead. "That might not mean anything to you, but it does to me. I've been through that. I don't want that for you, Peggy."

Peggy's lower lip trembles, fearful for her niece. "Emma, if they haven't already killed Amelia and the rest of the Manaus base team then they damn will soon, now that we're here. They already know of our presence. There's no move except for the obvious one. We break in, we attack, and we pray to god that we get as many out as we can."

"Then what?" I ask. "Where do we go? We have a boat that's one step up from a gondola that can fit four people, if we're liberal with the calculations. And if we can get everyone on there, where do we go at ten miles an hour? Manaus? They'll catch us before we get upstream, and you know it. You're too smart not to see that."

Peggy jerks her wrist from my grasp. "What choice do we have? We can't flee, either. They'll kill us both! The only option is to stand and fight."

I cock an eyebrow. "Is is?"

Her brows furrow in confusion. "What do you mean?"

I point to the monitor. "Amelia just told us that Yuri Somodorov is creating a new branch of his brother's Red Room in Manaus, that they're experimenting on humans--probably children--and that they probably discovered one of SHIELD's drones."

"I saw the video," Peggy retorts. "What do you see that I don't?"

I smirk at her, seeing so much of Steve in our behavior during this mission. He was both tactical and rash, thoughtful and impulsive. There's so much of him in both of us, even after all these years.

"We need to pull a Star Wars."

"Pardon me?"

"In the name of the King, Peggy. Haven't you seen Return of the Jedi?" Peggy shrugs, and I shake my head. "Okay, well, I'm suggesting we do something completely unexpected."