Battlefield ★ Bucky Barnes

XXXVI. Wheels Up In Ten

Phil and the rest of his team sat quietly in the common room as they listened to the argument taking place a level above them. Steve and Connie had been going at it for about ten minutes now, and no one else knew what to do except sit and listen. Skye had originally suggested trying to break the two of them apart, but Phil informed her that it would only further aggravate the two of them, especially Connie, and two aggravated super-soldiers was nothing any of them wanted to deal with. They just hoped the the confrontation between the two of them remained verbal.

"So, Coulson, you're the one responsible for this super-soldier smackdown?" Skye asked with a sarcastic smile on her face as Steve and Connie continued yelling at each other upstairs. "What the hell did you do to make them so mad at each other?"

Phil shrugged and glanced around at his teammates, all of whom were staring at him with rather displeased looks on their faces. They were happy that whatever Phil had done had brought the world's greatest soldier onto their flying base, but they weren't happy knowing that whatever Phil had done had angered the world's greatest soldier tremendously.

"You see, the thing is, Connie was keeping a major secret from Steve that I told her not to keep from him," Phil told his teammates. "I felt that this secret was one he deserved to know, so I told him."

"But is it really your place to reveal that secret?" Simmons asked curiously.

Phil chuckled and shook his head. "No, it's not. I mean, of course I feel bad about going against Connie's wishes, but if you knew the secret you would understand exactly why I had to tell him."

A crash sounded from upstairs, startling the team slightly.

"Are you sure we shouldn't go up there and do something about them?" Fitz asked Coulson.

"I'd be more than happy to shut them up," Agent May added nonchalantly.

Phil glanced between her and Fitz and shook his head. "If anything, that's the last thing we want to do. And May, I'm sure you'd be happy to do that, and I have complete faith that under different circumstances you could with ease, but an angry Connie is not a Connie you want to mess with. Trust me."

"Then what the hell are we supposed to do about it?" Skye retorted.

"We let them hash it out."

Upstairs, Steve and Connie were most certainly hashing things out, though it was being done in the least civilized way possible.

It was very rare for Connie and Steve to get into an argument about something, but when they did, all hell broke loose. After knowing each other for such a long time, there weren't many boundaries between the two of them when an argument broke out, but because the topic of this particular argument was so crucial and sensitive, boundaries were nothing but nonexistent.

"How could you not tell me about this, Connie?" Steve exclaimed angrily as he picked up the small shelf Connie had just knocked over. He'd been mad at Connie a good number of times, but he'd never ever been so livid with her.

Connie rolled her eyes and ran a hand through her tousled brown hair. "I told you why!"

"Please," Steve scoffed. "You may be an expert at pretending to be a compulsive liar, but remember that I know you better than anyone, Constance Mae. You can do much better than what you've been telling me, so why don't you just tell me the real reason why the hell you didn't tell me about Bucky."

"Because he didn't want me to," Connie snapped. She knew Steve meant well, and she most certainly didn't mean to snap at him, but she was growing rather perturbed with the man she called her brother. "I was going to tell you, Steve; I was going to tell you everything that day at the hospital, but he didn't want me to."