The mood was tense as, one by one, the team left the conference room, making their way back towards the kitchen and dining area. Each of them let Secretary Ross's words wash over them, taking in the weight of everything he had to say.

While Elysia herself was hesitant to agree with the man, she knew there had been times where the damage was catastrophic for the team, some way more than others. Sure, she hadn't been in New York during Loki's invasion, and had only seen the demolition of Sokovia from the news of a local coffee shop in Arizona, but she'd seen the damage in Lagos firsthand, even if they'd been stopping Rumlow from causing ten times the destruction in the process.

The Avengers were there to save the world, but even saving the world came with a price of its own.

"I think the answer's obvious." Rhodey spoke up as Elysia took a seat next to Steve, peering over his shoulder at the documents in his hands. "We sign the Accords, cooperate with what Ross has to say."

"Are you kidding me?" Sam scoffed. "What power does he have to know more about our authority than we do?"

"Secretary Ross has a Congressional Medal of Honor," Rhodey pointed out. "Which is one more than you have."

"So let's say we agree to this thing," Sam said hypothetically. "How long is it gonna be before they LoJack us like a bunch of common criminals?"

"One hundred and seventeen countries want to sign this." Rhodey insisted. "One hundred and seventeen, Sam, and you're just like, 'No, it's cool, we've got it.'"

"How long are you going to play both sides?" Sam asked, crossing his arms over his chest and looking back at Rhodey skeptically.

"I have an equation," Vision spoke up, pulling Elysia's eyes over to the android sitting next to Wanda on the chaise lounge.

"Oh, this'll clear it up," Sam said sarcastically.

"In the eight years since Mr. Stark announced himself as Iron Man, the number of known enhanced persons has grown exponentially," Vision began, gesturing first at Elysia before looking around the rest of the room. "During the same period, the number of potentially world-ending events has risen at a commensurate rate."

"You're saying it's our fault?" Steve asked, glancing up from the Accords book.

"I'm saying there may be a causality." Vision explained. "Our very strength invites challenge. Challenge incites conflict, and conflict breeds catastrophe. Oversight... oversight is not an idea that can be dismissed out of hand."

"Boom," Rhodey muttered.

"Tony," Natasha spoke up, looking over at where the billionaire laid on one of the loveseats, with a hand resting against the bridge of his nose. "You're being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal."

"That's because he's already made up his mind." Steve noted.

"Boy, you know me so well," Tony sighed, rising up to his feet and resting a hand against the back of his head, a grimace on his face. "Actually, I'm nursing an electromagnetic headache." he said, wandering over to the kitchen. "That's what's going on, Cap. It's just pain. It's discomfort." Tony picked up a blue coffee mug from the rack next to the sink, but stopped short as he looked down at the sink in front of him and picked up a French press. "Who's putting coffee grounds in the disposal? Am I running a bed and breakfast for a biker gang?"

Tony stopped at the kitchen island, falling silent as he set down a small device and stepped back. The device lit up and began projecting a small holographic image of a young Black man, likely a few years younger than herself, that Elysia didn't recognize. He wore a smile so youthful, so carefree, but the way Tony stared at the image was unsettling, even if Elysia couldn't quite put her finger on what he was feeling.

"Oh, that's Charles Spencer, by the way." Tony finally spoke up with a sigh. "He's a great kid. Computer engineering degree, three point six GPA, had a floor-level gig at Intel planned for the fall. But first, he wanted to put a few miles on his soul before he parked it behind a desk. See the world, maybe be of service. Charlie didn't want to go to Vegas or Fort Lauderdale, which is what I would do. He didn't go to Paris or Amsterdam, which sounds fun. He decided to spend his summer building sustainable housing for the poor. Guess where? Sokovia." he said, snapping the stirring stick in his hands with a frustrated grunt.

The room fell deathly silent at his words, as the same wave of guilt Elysia knew wracked through Tony washed over the rest of the team. Next to Elysia, she could feel Steve tense up, and as she looked across the room, she could see Wanda's eyes glass over with tears. Although Elysia hadn't been present in Sokovia, she knew the loss they must be facing of one of the many people the team had fought that day to protect, as well as her own loss when she'd tried to protect Jacob, and had failed on her own.

"He wanted to make a difference, I suppose." Tony continued. "I mean, we won't know because we dropped a building on him while we were kicking ass. Tony stopped for a moment, taking a pain reliever pill from a bottle off the counter and washing it down with his coffee. "There's no decision-making process here. We need to be put in check. Whatever form that takes, I'm game. If we can't accept limitations, if we're boundary-less, we're no better than the bad guys."

"Tony," Steve spoke up. "If someone dies on your watch, you don't give up."

"Who said we're giving up?" Tony asked.

"We are if we're not taking responsibility for our actions." Steve retorted. "This document just shifts the blame."

"I'm sorry, Steve," Rhodey joined in. "That is dangerously arrogant. This is the United Nations we're talking about. It's not the World Security Council, it's not S.H.I.E.L.D., it's not HYDRA."

"No, but it's run by people with agendas, and agendas change." Steve pointed out.

"That's good," Tony said. "That's why I'm here. When I realized what my weapons were capable of in the wrong hands, I shut it down and stopped manufacturing."

"Tony, you chose to do that." Steve insisted. "If we sign this, we surrender our right to choose. What if this panel sends us somewhere we don't think we should go? What if there's somewhere we need to go and they don't let us? We may not be perfect, but the safest hands are still our own."

Elysia's gaze went back and forth between Steve and Tony as she weighed the sides of their argument. She knew Tony had a point, that there was a possibility of them acting out in a way they couldn't come back from, a day where the world stopped seeing Avengers as heroes, but rather as vigilantes, as Ross had said earlier. She knew the pain of being responsible for someone you were trying to protect, and knew there had to be a way to prevent it.

On the other hand, she knew that if they weren't allowed to operate without the approval of the United Nations, all the work they'd done to look for Bucky would be for nothing. All of the leads they'd chased, the casefiles that had come across her desk that she'd spent days on end poring over, she knew that would all come to a halt if there was no concrete proof the Winter Soldier had ever been there. They would need witnesses to be allowed to act, and the Winter Soldier never left behind a witness.

"If we don't do this now," Tony said, "It's gonna be done to us later. That's the fact. That won't be pretty."

"You're saying they'll come for me." Wanda concluded.

"That's not going to happen," Elysia insisted, looking over at her friend.

"We would protect you." Vision assured her.

"Maybe Tony's right," Natasha spoke up, causing Tony to look over at her with a bewildered expression. "If we have one hand on the wheel, we can still steer. If we take it off..."

"Aren't you the same woman who told the government to kiss her ass a few years ago?" Sam asked, his eyebrows narrowing together in confusion.

"I'm just reading the terrain," she explained. "We have made some very public mistakes. We need to win their trust back."

"Focus up," Tony said, setting his hands on the table and leaning forward to get a better look at Natasha. "I'm sorry, did I just mishear you or did you agree with me?"

"Oh, I wanna take it back now," Natasha sighed, causing the corners of Elysia's mouth to tilt upwards at their exchange.

"No, no no no no, you can't retract it." Tony insisted, and the sound of Steve's phone buzzing in his pocket pulled Elysia's attention to the man sitting next to her.

Elysia watched as Steve dug the phone out of his pocket, picking up the device and glancing down at the screen. She watched as something in his demeanor changed, his face falling for a moment before he steeled his features back into place.

"I have to go," he said in a low voice, shoving the phone back into his pocket and standing up without another word, walking out of the room as the team watched him go.

Elysia looked back over, her gaze colliding with Sam's as he looked back at her with an equally confused expression. She turned back to see Steve disappear through the door to the stairwell, and rose to her feet, feeling everyone's eyes train on her as she looked ahead at the doorway.

"I'll be right back," Elysia said, following Steve's path out of the living area, and back towards the south stairwell.

Elysia hadn't taken the stairs since the night of the attack on the compound, the former stairwell having collapsed in the first hit of the HYDRA invasion. She could still feel it as if it were only yesterday, rather than the year before: her and Bucky wandering down the stairs in the middle of the party, fingers intertwined and desperate for a few minutes away from the noise of the crowd. How naive they'd been to think everything had worked out, only for those same stairs to keep them separated from the others when they'd needed them most.

Elysia forced the thoughts out of her mind as she took a deep breath, pushing the door to the stairwell open and seeing Steve halfway down the stairs. Her friend stood slumped against the railing, his shoulders hunched and his head down, with a fist resting against the space between his eyebrows. She could hear him taking deep, shaky breaths, as if he were about to cry.

"Steve?" Elysia spoke up, causing her friend to look up at her, a fallen expression on his face as his eyes welled up with tears. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," he said, his voice cracking as he sniffled, and instantly reached up to brush his knuckles against his nose. "Yeah, I... no. No, I'm not."

"What happened?" she asked, hurrying down the steps as Steve once again pulled the phone out of his pocket, passing it to her without another word.

Elysia took the phone from his outstretched hand, studying the screen before her. While she didn't recognize the number the text message had come from, her heart dropped into her stomach at the words written on the screen.

She's gone. In her sleep. James is awake, he came to be by her side.

"Steve," Elysia breathed, looking back up from the phone screen and meeting the broken gaze of the man standing across from her.

"I just can't believe she's really gone." Steve sighed. "She had her good days, and her bad days, of course. I knew it was always a possibility."

"I'm so sorry," Elysia said.

"I need to get to London," he said, shoving the phone back in his pocket and moving to take the stairs up, and Elysia hurried after him, trying to keep up as his much longer strides took the steps two at a time. "I need to..." he paused for a moment, the weight of his own words beginning to sink in. "I need to be there for James."

"You're finally going to meet him." Elysia assured him. "Are you ready?"

"I don't think I'll ever be ready." Steve admitted, shaking his head as they exited the floor to the living quarters, wandering down the hall to his apartment. "Bucky's still out there, so James's mission isn't finished, but I have to meet him. And I can't let him go back under now, not when I'm here and he has so much to see. I won't do that to him."

Steve opened the door to his place, not unlike Elysia's, although where hers had added a few more personal touches over the past year of the belongings from her place in Arizona that hadn't gone into storage, as well as the mountain of casefiles that had any possibility of being related to the Winter Soldier, Steve's was minimal, with only the furniture he'd been given on his arrival aside from a couple of old photographs from the 1940s, of him and Bucky as well as Peggy. Only Elysia and Sam knew about the file he kept at the bottom of his t-shirt drawer, detailing Project Sentinel along with a picture of the sixteen-year-old boy who'd just come out of a twenty-five year long nap.

"We're here for you, you know that." Elysia assured him as Steve set a duffel bag on his bed, rummaging through his drawers as he meticulously folded each piece of clothing into the bag, along with the Sentinel folder, no doubt so he could catch up on the Quinjet even if she knew he read the file every night. "Whatever he needs, whatever you need, we'll take care of it."

"Thanks, Sparks," Steve said, giving her a soft smile. "It's just, everything going on right now with the Accords, I don't know how kindly Tony and the others will take to me bringing home a son they didn't know about."

"We'll deal with that when it happens." Elysia assured him. "You were doing what you thought was best, and protecting him. Now, it's time for you to go get him."