The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 45

Leipzig, Germany

Spring 2016

Nadine turned to Steve, a wide-eyed, stricken look on her face that had him immediately frowning with concern.

"She's Enhanced..." Steve's gut clenched at how broken Nadine's question sounded. But it wasn't a question. Not really. He could see the truth in her wide, frightened eyes.

"Nadine," he murmured, faltering. What could he say?

Nina was...she was Enhanced...but not just Enhanced, Powered. He'd suspected Nina was more than an average girl almost since he'd first learned Nadine had a daughter—known since Sokovia—but this?

This was more than anything she'd inherited from either of her parents. He fought not to look to Bucky.

Bucky, who was looking between him, Nadine and Nina with an intent and painful mix of bewilderment and wary consideration before his features grew guarded, his haunted eyes starkly vivid on his pale face.

Steve should've known. Hell, looking back? He already had all but known. Not definitively, perhaps, but he'd known it was a possibility even if he hadn't consciously given it much thought. Or at least he should have.

The Maximoffs had informed him back on the way out from Seoul that it was a possibility, after all. But...he'd all but forgotten about it given the other revelation that had come crashing in on him in the course of that conversation, hadn't he...the one where he'd learned why Strucker had wanted Nina for his experiments.

He had let the revelation about Nina's paternity overshadow nearly everything else the Twins had revealed in the course of their explanation about Strucker's interest in Nina.

Including that he had, in fact, begun his experiments.

How could he have let himself forget about that?

Except he knew exactly why. And the reason—indirect though it may have been at the time—now stood on the other side of Nadine:

Because of Bucky and the revelation that he was Nina's father.

The idea that Nina might have come out of Sokovia with genuine powers of her own had fallen to the wayside, soon to be buried and effectively forgotten in the wake of everything else that had happened in the aftermath of the Ultron Fiasco. And life had gone on.

He'd barely even considered—no, he wasn't even sure he had truly considered at all that Nina...could she have been the one truly responsible for saving herself, Clint and Pietro from Ultron and the Quinjet that day? His stomach lurched at the idea...and the idea that he hadn't considered it then, already.

That he hadn't truly considered Wanda and Pietro's suspicion that Strucker's experiments had been successful on a third subject. On Nina.

Not until he was confronted with the inescapable reality that she had, indeed, developed powers of her own.

Powers he, that all of them, had just seen with their own eyes.

"Nadine, this doesn't change anything," he said carefully sparing a wary look toward Tony and his team of Avengers; for the moment they all mercifully seemed just as unsettled as he felt. He looked back to Nadine, fixing her with a sympathetic look, "she was already Enhanced." That they both knew Nina had been born that way and why went unsaid. It didn't need to be said.

It was the root behind Nadine's conviction that Nina couldn't sign the Accords; because of the very real fear that Nina's heritage could come to light.