Post-Winter Soldier and -Thor the Dark World. Post ME 3. Infiltrator, Colonist, War Hero, Paragon Shepard (with Renegade tendencies). Not canon compliant.
Disclaimer: Neither Avengers nor Mass Effect is mine.
"" – talking
'' – inner thoughts
Steve reached into his pocket as he heard his phone go off. Judging by the alert tone it was a call, not a text. The sound immediately put him on edge, as he'd yet to receive a phone call that yielded anything except trouble. His apprehension only worsened when he saw that it was an unknown number.
"You getting any ID off of this, JARVIS?" Steve asked warily.
"No, sir." JARVIS replied in a tone of puzzlement.
Several heads snapped up in astonishment at the AI's sheepish admission.
"Well, that can't be good." Steve murmured in trepidation as he accepted the unknown call. "Hello?"
"I don't know who you are, but I was given this number by a friend in the case of an emergency. Does the name Bucky mean anything to you?"
Steve felt himself tense in shock before his heart started beating double-time with a sudden surge of adrenaline. The voice on the line continued to speak as Steve signaled to JARVIS to start recording and backtracking the caller. Tony, nosey bastard that he was, remotely activated his speakerphone so that the rest of the Avengers present could listen in as well.
"He's been going by James recently, but I don't know if he has any other aliases you might recognize. Can you help me?"
Now privy to the conversation, both Sam and Natasha perked up at hearing the name of their quarry from the anonymous caller. Steve shot them both a significant look before answering the query.
"Yeah, Bucky's a friend of mine. Or James, whatever he's calling himself now. What kind of trouble has he gotten into that you're the one calling instead of him?"
"I'm pretty sure he just got captured by Hydra."
Steve felt the blood drain from his face and the armrest in his grip creaked alarmingly as his hand clenched convulsively.
"What happened?" He barked into the phone, all pretense of calm stripped from his voice. "And when?"
There was a pause from the other end of the line before the stranger spoke up again in a markedly cooler tone, "James called me about half an hour ago, said he'd stayed in one place too long, that Hydra had tracked him here. He was certain we'd been seen together and that Hydra would make an attempt to capture me to force his compliance. He gave me instructions to escape and this number to call for help, but I was forced to hang up after I heard someone breaking into my apartment through the window. Long story short, the agents in my home came down with a terminal case of being very dead and by the time I made it to James' place, it was on fire and surrounded by people. And he has not answered his phone since he called me this morning."
The end of the stranger's report was punctuated by a whine of equal parts outrage and frustration from Tony. "Look, I get it's very important that your buddy is probably in deep shit right now, but can we talk about the fact that JARVIS and I cannot track the location of your phone? What the hell kind of tech are you using?"
Another pregnant silence permeated the room as the stranger presumably absorbed the fact that there was more than one person on the line. Pointedly ignoring Tony's interruption, they said, "You still haven't answered whether or not you're willing to help me find James. If your next sentence isn't a clear statement of your intentions, I will hang up and you will get nothing."
"Yes! Yes, we'll help get him back! Don't hang up, I should've mentioned more than one person was listening in. We work as a team, more than likely a few of us will be working together to help you." Steve glared at Tony from across the room for antagonizing the best lead he'd gotten for finding Bucky since he'd learned his friend was still alive.
Tony pouted, clearly unrepentant.
"Good. I'm sending you the coordinates of the crime scenes now along with photos of the agents that invaded my apartment. Let me know if you can identify them or glean any pertinent information from their identities. Facial recognition will probably be tough for most of them, sorry about that, but it's all I have. I'm gonna check the security and traffic cameras around the apartment, see if any of these Hydra bosh'tets got sloppy. Send me your ETA, and call if you find anything."
"Wait!" Natasha called out before the caller could hang up. "What's your name? How will we identify you when we meet?"
"Call me Shepard," a note of longsuffering entered the stranger's voice as they continued, "and I'll be the woman carrying guns, in her pajamas."
JARVIS estimated that it would be approximately three hours before the quinjet could reach the coordinates given by Shepard. In the meantime Steve, Natasha, Sam and Rhodes looked on in poorly concealed interest while Tony and his AI took the opportunity to comb through the recent security footage surrounding reports of a recent fire in the area.
"I believe we've located your mystery caller, Captain Rogers." JARVIS announced to his rapt audience.
"Bringing it up on-screen now." Tony mumbled to himself and flicked his wrist.
The Avengers watched the screen come to life as a blurry figure on a motorcycle just barely graced the peripherals of a series of security clips played one after the other until the final scene where the figure stopped and abandoned their bike as they headed for the nearest alley. Their armor was bulky enough to conceal any feminine features, and the mask completely disguised their face, but the rocket-ship printed pants poking out from between the plates of the armored legs were a relatively damning identifier. Not to mention the intimidatingly large gun prominently displayed on the back of the figure's armor.
"Here are the results for the license plate, sir." JARVIS shunted the security footage to the side and brought up a driver's license beside it. A stoic-faced woman with piercing eyes peered out at them. JARVIS proceeded to read off the information listed. "The motorcycle appears to have been registered to a Jane Shepard, 41 years old, female, 5'5" with graying red hair and green eyes." Various files listed in connection to Shepard popped up sporadically next to the license on screen. "Records show that there is no next of kin or emergency contact listed in her paperwork. Identifying features include severe scarring that covers much of her torso and neck. Housing records have her down as an official resident as of a little more than fourteen months ago. It is highly likely that her personal information is forged. She is currently listed as a missing person wanted for questioning in connection to the deaths of six suspicious individuals found dead in her apartment."
Tony broke the contemplative silence as everyone compared the voice on the phone to the woman on the screen. "Alright, I can't be the only one seeing what I think I'm seeing, right?"
"If you're referring to the first solid lead we've had since this whole Winter Soldier mess started – "
"No no no," Tony cut off Sam impatiently, "I'm talking about the uncanny resemblance this 'Shepard' has to our very own Black Widow." Turning to Natasha, Stark gleefully rubbed his hands together and theorized, "So what is she? An escaped SHIELD clone? Maybe Hydra? Your illegitimate half-sibling spawned from a brief but torrid affair and left on an orphanage doorstep?"
"Do all redheads look the same to you, Stark?" Natasha asked dangerously while examining her perfect nails for a perceived fault. "I wonder what Pepper would think of your uncanny identification skills."
Multiple chuckles echoed around the jet as Tony paled and crossed his arms petulantly while leveling a glare at the Widow.
"To be honest, I'm more curious about how Barnes became friends with this girl, assuming she wasn't making that part up." Sam spoke in Steve's direction bemusedly. "I mean, he didn't strike me as the friendliest guy when he was ripping the wings from my back or pounding your face into the concrete. And the one-man-war he was raging against Hydra up until recently doesn't really scream 'amiable' either. No offense, Steve." Sam shrugged at his friend ruefully.
"This is just a theory mind you, but I'm gonna take a wild stab in the dark and say that Shepard here isn't the friendliest person around, herself." Rhodes deadpanned while idly paging through printouts depicting the Hydra corpses from Shepard's apartment. "Each of these guys was taken out with a single shot to the head, two from close up, the rest from a distance. And I'm not seeing any out-of-place bloodstains that look like they could belong to our girl. She's good. Real good. This is not the work of an untrained and inexperienced fighter." Rhodes looked to Tony with a troubled expression upon his face. Tony's brows scrunched in concern before he cleared the expression from his face and turned thoughtfully to Steve.
"Well Cap, what've you got to say about our mystery girl? You're the only one who hasn't joined in on our little gossip session. Chop, chop, what's the verdict?"
Steve sat hunched over on a seat with his hands clasped in front of the lower half of his face. He briefly glanced up at the team before continuing to stare at the floor broodingly. "So long as she isn't secretly Hydra and genuinely wants to help Bucky, I don't give a damn who she is or what kind of threat she poses." Steve ground out, eyes hard and flinty.
"We'll see about that." Natasha responded ominously while studiously dissecting the images of Shepard on-screen.
The security footage Shepard had pulled from around James' apartment and hers had revealed very little information that made sense. For her, the goons had pulled right up in front of her place in your stereotypical kidnapper van before they proceeded to split up into two groups that broke in from the window on the fire escape and her door, respectively. Obviously, she knew how that encounter had ended.
James' attackers hadn't shown much more tact than hers as they did much the same. What concerned Shepard was the fact that one of the cameras just barely caught sight of James later walking out of his apartment, unbound, unresisting, and surrounded by his captors who had gone so far as to put their weapons away in apparent unconcern for the armed man in their midst. Two of the eight Hydra agents were missing, but the fire at James' apartment had yet to die down enough for officials to determine whether or not there were any bodies among the wreckage. She assumed he'd killed them, but seeing how cooperative James was being with the intruders was throwing her off. Why wasn't he fighting them, dammit?!
She'd managed to track them in their van through traffic cameras for about forty minutes before losing them. Running the license plates through various databases just revealed that someone in Hydra knew how to properly forge information for vehicle registration leaving her high-and-dry with the last location and direction the Hydra agents had been driving with James as her only clue. Frustrated was not a strong enough word for how she felt. Regardless, she passed on her findings to James' people and hopped back on her bike to drive out to the last place she knew the kidnappers had been.
Intellectually, she knew it was smarter to have backup before she went after James wherever he was being transported or held, but every moment of seeming inaction on her part was another moment James had to spend with Hydra. Foggy visions of bloody needles and charred flesh flashed through her head. 'You were nothin' but meat and tubes.' Jacob's voice echoed in her skull. She still couldn't suppress a shudder of bone-chilling revulsion at the thought of what Cerberus had done to her while she was at their mercy. Her only consolation came from the fact that she'd been either unconscious or unresponsive for the majority of the operation.
Needless to say, Shepard was in a poor mood by the time she finally reached the location from the traffic cam. She found the van in question sitting pretty in a ditch to the side of the road not too far off from where it had last been sighted. Shepard hastily jumped from her bike after putting down the kickstand and jogged over to examine the doors and windows. There were a couple of dings and scratches on the exterior, but nothing that suggested a struggle. The windows were tinted to obscure the inside, so Shepard used her omni-tool to unlock the vehicle remotely and de-activate the alarm. She was still baffled by how useless basic security here was in the face of her tech.
The inside from the driver's perspective was painfully bland and normal looking. There was a tinted partition separating the front seats from the back, so Shepard made her way around to the rear doors after a cursory inspection of the anterior.
Opening the back doors revealed a scene distressingly similar to what Shepard had found in many of the Cerberus facilities she'd raided over the course of her career.
The walls, doors and windows were reinforced heavily enough to withstand maybe two hits from a YMIR mech. The floor was covered in scuff marks and the occasional drop of blood. Standing in the center like an unholy pedestal was a set of heavy restraints bolted to the floor. She recognized the design, it was meant to force a person to their knees and completely sheathe their hands behind them to prevent any tampering of the restraints. A separate set of cuffs nearby would have been meant to encase the lower legs to keep the victim pinned to the floor.
At the very least she could be certain now that James didn't go with them willingly, she mused grimly.
A closer inspection of the cuffs revealed a small, damaged device lodged underneath the hand restraints. Eagerly, Shepard scanned it with her omni-tool and confirmed that the apparatus was designed for communication. The ear-piece may have been inoperable due to damage, but Shepard was able to adjust her omni-tool to access the same frequency and channel listed on the tiny switches. After making certain that her end was muted, Shepard activated the voice channel.
The line remained stubbornly silent for the first few minutes, so Shepard pocketed the broken device and went back to her bike to settle in and wait. Almost fifteen minutes later, her patience was rewarded. Shepard stared with bated breath as unfamiliar voices stuttered to life over her 'tool.
"Current ETA approximately fifteen minutes. Asset is still in custody and remains compliant."
'A scheduled status report?' Shepard theorized excitedly.
"Has it given any explanation for the obstacle encountered by extraction Team Beta?"
"Negative. It still claims ignorance. Efforts to persuade cooperation have encouraged no further answers."
Shepard had the uncomfortable feeling that Hydra defined 'persuasion' much differently than she did. Assuming this Asset was James, it painted a bleak picture.
"Prepare the heavy restraints for transfer. The chair remains unfinished. The Asset will require constant monitoring until its completion. Re-conditioning can then proceed as scheduled."
"Affirmative." The line went dead.
Shepard stared ahead blankly as a haze of cold rage descended over her vision. Re-conditioning. Those quadless freaks were going to brainwash James. Had done it before, by the sounds of it. 'Were they controlling him now?' She pondered faintly, picturing the stilted quality to James' movement on the security camera as he was escorted from his apartment.
Shepard was only distantly aware as she put in yet another call to James' associates, anger and a sick sense of urgency throbbing through her veins. The line barely had time to ring once before being picked up. She uncaringly spoke over the voice that answered. "Don't talk, just listen." Something in her studiously blank tone must have given away the gravity of the situation because she didn't hear a peep out of the others as she started playing the recording she'd taken of the Hydra agents.
"What does this mean?" Shepard demanded apprehensively over the grim silence echoing from her audience.
"It means we've got a deadline," she heard her own deadly rage reflected unsteadily back at her from James' friend, "and if we don't meet that deadline, there won't be a Bucky or James for us to rescue after we find him." She heard his breath rush out of his mouth in a shudder.
"Nope, not gonna happen." The flippant man from earlier interjected suddenly.
"Tony…" The first man growled out warningly.
"No, see, we've got them now Cap!" Tony babbled insistently. "Thanks to our resident shepherd, JARVIS here can now track down Hydra's newest hidey hole. I've studies the remains of the bases you and your terminator boyfriend have torched. Let me tell ya, it takes some very specific and expensive materials to make one of those glorified brain-scramblers. And it's not exactly easy to hide the purchase and transportation of vibranium."
A calm, English accented voice interrupted the newly identified Tony's fervent ranting. "I believe I have located a probable culprit, sir. Our course will need to be adjusted accordingly to compensate for the new destination." Shepard felt a burst of desperate hope bubble up in her throat at the triumphant exclamation Tony made.
"Not even a minute, J-baby! What would I ever do without you?" Tony crowed in her ear.
"I hope to never find out, sir." The modulated voice intoned fondly.
"Where's James being held?" Shepard demanded insistently.
A telling pause prefixed their next response. "Don't worry ma'am, we'll get him back. You've already done more than your share of the work." Cap attempted to placate her.
"I'm sorry, what was that?" Shepard inquired dangerously, the tendons of her jaw working furiously in agitation.
A sigh of equal parts frustration and regret reached her ears. "Look, we appreciate what you've done to help find Bucky. I really appreciate what you've done for him. But Hydra doesn't mess around, and we're about to step right into their territory. And if you really are Bucky's friend, I know he wouldn't want you involved in this mess. It's not your fight, Shepard." Cap finished determinedly.
Something in Shepard snapped.
"Listen up boy!" She barked in her best Commander Voice. "I woke up this morning to the sound of my only friend in the world being taken from me. I then killed six men and walked away without a scratch. If I have my way, I'm gonna round out my afternoon by killing a few more idiots and having a nice, long chat with my buddy James about his questionable life choices. Don't you dare think I won't add you to my body count if you try to get in my way, Cap. " She eked out with a snarl of contempt. "I called you for help, not to be left high-and-dry right before battle! Now send me the spirits-damned coordinates!"
"Shepard – "
"Steve," the feminine voice from earlier interrupted knowingly, "you saw what she can do without warning. She could be useful."
The line dissolved into indistinct but harsh murmurs before resolving into agitated silence after a few seconds. "Sending the coordinates now, Miss Shepard." J capitulated as a corresponding notification popped up on her omni-tool.
"Excellent," a frazzled Shepard croaked out as she frantically scanned the location on her display, "I'll be in the base by the time you get there. Make some noise when you arrive to get their attention so that I can find James."
"No," Steve interjected, uncompromising, "you'll wait to join up with us in the base before going after Bucky. Scouting is fine if you can remain unnoticed, but Hydra most likely has control of him right now, and if they do, he'll attack you. He's too strong for you to take on alone, he'll kill you without hesitation. I won't let him have your blood on his conscious."
"Agreed." Shepard ground out grudgingly, teeth bared in irritation. She hadn't been this riled up by a simple chat since the last time she'd spoken with Udina and the Council.
"Good. Hit him hard, but aim to incapacitate. His body is more durable than most and he's got an advanced healing factor to boot, so remember that he can take a lot of damage before going down."
"The warning is noted and appreciated. I'll see you there." Shepard closed the line vindictively, mind thrumming with indignation, fury and relief in equal measure. She wondered if this was how Anderson felt after every time he talked to her.
"I've got a fucking headache." Shepard mumbled wearily as she scrunched her brows and rubbed ineffectually at her aching skull.
