Music is "Behind The Mask" by Ivy & Gold.

Picture is Tatiana Maslany as Emma Barnes.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: He's Like You

"How the bloody hell are you still alive?" I ask as the doctor takes a shocked Natasha aside. She sits on a bench, still looking at Fury in awe and surprise. The doctor begins work on her shoulder, ensuring she won't lose any more blood.

"I shouldn't be," Fury states. He turns to Maria, but still speaks to me. "I'm not the only one that survived that shouldn't have."

My brows furrow, and Maria nods to her boss. She motions for Steve and I to follow her to an adjacent room, just to the left of us. The door is already open, and I see another cot inside.

On the cot, I see Grant's body. He's hooked up to a lot of machines, as much as the doctor could find I'm sure. Among them, a heart-rate monitor, a brainwave detector, and a IV bag of fluids. Neither the heart-rate monitor or the brainwave detector are showing any signs of life. He still looks as dead as he did in the hospital.

"Why is he here?" I ask before even entering the room.

Maria replies, "I brought him here with Fury before SHIELD--or HYDRA--could take his body. I don't know why they would, but I owed you that much. But that's not why I wanted to show you Grant. Watch the monitors."

I force the tears from my eyes as I wait a few seconds. Nothing happens. "I know he's dead," I mutter to the SHIELD agent. "I don't need a reminder."

"Emma," Steve's low voice states. He points to the monitor, eyes widening. "Watch."

I look closer, waiting another ten seconds before something happens. A little blip on the heart-rate monitor, a little wave on the brainwave detector. It's not much, but it's something. I move closer, and thirty seconds later, it happens again.

"Grant!" I exclaim, falling to my knees beside his bed. I grasp his hand, finding it still cold. I cup his face in my hand, allowing a smile. I turn to Maria with many questions. "What's happening? Why is he responding? How is he alive?"

Maria tries her best to answer all of them. "I have no idea. I really don't. The doctor moved him in this room, just to be kept, but he swore he saw his chest rise and fall. When we listened for a heart-beat, the doctor heard a feint one. He's alive, somehow. But he's not alive like Fury." She takes a deep breath in. "Somehow, he's like you, Emma."

I look from her to Steve to Grant. "How? I'm the only one like me. I'm immortal. I never had children. How is he like me?"

Maria speaks again, "Again, I don't know. Somehow he's in a comatose state of healing, just like you go into when you're killed. Grant seems to be doing the exact same thing."

"How long will he be there?" Steve inquires. "Emma sometimes took hours, sometimes months. Any guesses as to how long Grant will be like this?"

Maria shrugs. "We've never been able to test Emma's immortality, so there's little to go on. The doctor guesses that it will be a few months, based on the injury and his progress this far. But your guess is as good as mine."

"He's like me," I mutter, still holding Grant's hand between my own. "He's going to be all right."

"How is he aging?" Steve asks another question. "He was fifteen when I met him, now he's seventeen."

Maria breathes out heavily, placing her hands on her hips. "My only guess is that maybe he won't stop aging until he's matured physically. Or maybe he has a variant of Emma's immortality, something that allows him to age but will keep him from dying. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. There are so many weird people in the world now, mutants and enhanced and such, who knows what he'll be able to do when he wakes up."

I stand, giving Grant's hand a squeeze as I finally let it go. I allow myself one last look to the monitors as they sound off signs of life before I turn towards Maria and Steve. "None of that matters. All that matters is that he's going to wake up someday. As an immortal, I don't much care when that day is so long as it happens."

Maria escorts us back to Natasha, Fury, and the doctor. I give one last lingering look to Grant, allowing the weight of his loss to be lifted from my shoulders. Sitwell's words come back to me again, causing me to wonder how Grant got this way. Was he born this way? That's most likely the case. If it is, is that how he survived the collapse of the Twin Towers? Is that why Peggy let me keep him, because he was an illegal immigrant and like me? I find that Grant's resurrection has gifted me with more questions than answers.

The doctor seems to have Natasha back on her feet. Color is refilling her face, and she gives me a smile. "Grant is alive?" Her voice is hopeful.

I take a seat beside her, facing Fury and the rest of our company. "He is. He's going to be all right."

Natasha places her hand on my knee, giving me a proud look.

"You look rough, Nick," Steve says from my right, turning his attention to Fury.

"Lacerated spinal column, cracked sternum, shattered collarbone, perforated liver, and one hell of a headache will do that to you," Nick replies in a slur of his usual voice, though more from pain that from drugs.

"Don't forget your collapsed lung," the doctor mentions.

"Let's not forget that," Fury mutters disdainfully. "Otherwise, I'm good."

"They cut you open. Your heart stopped," Natasha says, trying to put the pieces together.

"Tetrodotoxin B. Slows the pulse to one beat a minute. Banner developed it for stress. Didn't work so great for him, but we found a use for it."

"Why all the secrecy?" Steve inquires, both his tone and eyes accusing. "Why not just tell us?"

Maria, standing to our left and beside Sam, answers for Fury. "Any attempt on the Director's life had to look successful."

"Can't kill you if you're already dead," Fury agrees.

That much I can understand. From faking deaths to changing names, I've spent a lifetime pretending to be a dead woman to avoid those who'd want to hurt me or my family.

"Besides," Fury continues, "I wasn't sure who to trust."

"Have we passed your test?" I ask, arching an eyebrow. "Or do we need to pluck Sitwell's guts from the interstate?"

Fury ignores my bitter comment and starts to sit up. "Um, no," the doctor says, getting up after stitching Natasha's shoulder. "You need to sit."

"What I need is a way out of this hole," Fury retorts, continuing to sit up. He pushes the blankets off him, grabbing his coat from the nightstand. "I'm no groundhog. We need a plan to stop Project Insight."

"You know who's leading the charge for that, don't you?" Steve asks. "I know he's your friend, but Alexander Pierce has been behind everything: Insight, your assassination, us being outlaws, Bucky. He's the man behind the curtain for all of it."

Fury gets out of the bed, slowly and aided by Maria, and moves to a chair nearby. "Yeah, I know." He nods to Maria. "Get what we know up on the computers. Show 'em what we're up against."

"Yes, Sir." Maria moves to another chair at a metal table where several SHIELD laptops are open.

I help Natasha take a seat around the same table where Fury sits. Sam and Steve continue to stand, and I join them once my friend is comfortable.

From a file on the small table in front of him, he pulls out Alexander Pierce's picture. It's labelled as the Joint Chief's of Staff meeting from September 18, 1992. "This man declined the Novel Peace Price. He said peace wasn't an achievement, it was a responsibility." Fury throws the picture down with mild rage. "See, it's stuff like this that gives me trust issues."

"We have to stop the launch," Natasha says, coming back to her wits after going through a traumatic experience, one I'm sure wasn't her first.

Fury turns to her with sarcasm filling his response. "I don't think the Council's accepting my calls anymore." He opens the briefcase that Maria placed before him. Inside are three, silver data chips.

"What's that?" Sam asks.

"Once the helicarriers reach three thousand feet," Maria turns her laptop around, showing us a tactical map of the tri-state area where the Insight carriers and satellites are, "they'll triangulate with the Insight satellites, becoming fully weaponized."

Her schematic moves to a diagram of the carrier, showing the dome-like underside. "We need to breach those carriers and replace their targeting blades with our own."

"One or two won't cut it," Maria states. "We need to link all three carriers for this to work, because if even one of those ships remains operational..." She hesitates, visibly swallowing. "A whole lot of people are going to die."

"And who do you think is going to be first on their target list?" I ask rhetorically. "All of us, all of the heroes, and every last good SHIELD member still alive. Peggy...Rose..." I move my eyes from her to Steve, gauging his reaction to what we're being told. His face is a blank slate, focused on what we're hearing.

"We have to assume everyone aboard those carriers is HYDRA," Fury tells us. "We have to get past them, insert these server blades, and maybe--just maybe--we can salvage what's left--"

To that, Steve interrupts the former-Director. "--We're not salvaging anything." His tone is that of authority and determination. "We're not just taking down the carriers, Nick. We're taking down SHIELD."

"SHIELD had nothing to do with this," the former-Director fires back, equally as passionate.

"You gave me this mission. This is how it ends. SHIELD's been compromised. You said so yourself. HYDRA grew right under your nose and nobody noticed."

"Why do you think we're meeting in this cave?" Fury accuses. "I noticed."

Steve glances to me with a stern expression on his face. "How many paid the price before you did?"

I turn to look at the room where Grant lies, practically in a coma. I can't bring myself to agree verbally, but I know Steve's right. It doesn't matter that Peggy, Howard, and Phillips created SHIELD almost a century ago. It doesn't matter that it's their legacy. Their legacy has been transformed into a weapon of HYDRA. It needs to be destroyed.

"Among them, my nephew is lying in a coma because you noticed a little too late," Steve chastises. "A seventeen-year-old kid, only not dead because of some miraculous immortality."

"Not to mention Bucky," I mutter.

Fury lowers his gaze for a moment. "Look, I didn't know about Barnes."

"Even if you had, would you have told us? Or would you have compartmentalized that, too?" His words hit home. "SHIELD, HYDRA, it all goes."

"He's right." We all turn to Maria, surprised by her agreement. She nods to her old boss, insisting he agree.

Fury takes turns looking to each of us. I stare him down, Natasha leans back in her chair, and Sam says, "Oh, don't look at me. I do what he does, just slower."

Fury chuckles once under his breath, finally giving in. "Well..." He leans back and sighs. "It looks like you're giving the orders now, Captain."

END CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: He's Like You.