11.

1988

Pierce slept lightly, and the bathroom was next to his bedroom. The sound of running water woke him. He glanced at the radio clock and went from drowsy to alert in one cold second. It was almost two in the morning. Abby wouldn't be in that bathroom, and there was no one else in the house. He got up in silence, took his S&W from its case, loaded it, and edged towards the bathroom door, which was ajar. The only light inside was a dim haze from the moon and the city, but even so he could see a large, shadowy shape. He raised his gun.

He was looking at the asset, he realised. Pierce could recognise him anywhere, even with the goggles and the mask, even in the dark. He lowered the gun, nudged the door open and stepped into the bathroom. 'What are you doing here?' he said in an angry whisper.

The asset didn't answer. There was only the murmur of running water. Pierce sighed, returned to the bedroom to put the gun back in its case, then went back to the bathroom. There was a tang of blood in the air. 'I'm going to switch the light on,' he said, only slightly louder than the sound of the running water. 'Do you understand?'

No answer.

'Stay where you are. I don't want to hear a sound from you.'

Pierce flicked the light switch on. The asset remained sitting on the bathtub edge, motionless. He didn't even flinch. He had taken his gloves off and his right hand was inside the tub, fingers dipped into the rising water. Hot water: the air was starting to thicken with steam, and there was already a border of fog on the mirror.

'Why are you in my house?'

The asset didn't react. Pierce sighed to himself, stepped around the asset so he could turn the taps off, then stood in front of the asset and pulled away his goggles and mask before putting them in the sink. Blood drops speckled the white ceramic.

'Why are you in my house?' he repeated.

The asset's eyes were dull. He reminded Pierce of an animal who wasn't quite sure if it'd just stumbled into a trap. He shook once in a while, the tremors almost too slight for Pierce to see. There were mud streaks across the floor, Pierce noticed with some annoyance.

He dragged the bathroom stool next to the asset and sat down so they could be eye-level.

'Come on. Answer me,' he said, gentler than before.

The asset's lips twitched, as though he were about to speak, but no sound came out.

Pierce sighed. 'Mission report.' The asset reacted well to these familiar forms. They reassured him, no doubt.

'I—I have to clean,' the asset said, low and hoarse. His eyes were turned to Pierce, but whatever they were seeing, it wasn't anything inside this room. 'Wipe it off.'

'Calm down. Look at me. Look at me.'

The asset's eyes grew a fraction more focused.

'Take your boots off,' Pierce ordered. The asset obeyed, but his hands, even the flesh one, fumbled with the laces. The metal arm made little whirring noises, like a hiccuping machine.

'Oh, for Christ's sake,' Pierce snapped, and reached down to slip the asset's boots off. 'Be quiet. This is my house,' he said, in a voice that could cut diamond. 'Where my daughter sleeps. You don't come here when she's home.'

As if on cue, there was a footfall in the corridor. Pierce got up to lock the door, stumbled on one of the boots on the floor, and had to grab the sink to steady himself. His elbow struck a glass bottle. It teetered for a split-second—Pierce tried to catch it, but his body seemed to be stuck in slow-motion—then shattered on the floor.

The crash must have been heard throughout the house. The whole street.

'Dad?' Abby, just out of her room.

The asset opened his mouth, pulled his hand out of the water. Before he could move, Pierce grabbed a handful of his hair and slammed his face against the side of the sink. There was a fleshly slap and a faint crunch, but Pierce knew that he hadn't really harmed the asset. Just a sting of pain to snap him out of his nonsense, that was all.

'Dad, is everything OK?' she was walking to the bathroom door.

'You, corner. Now,' Pierce hissed to the asset, who looked like he was about to spill onto the floor, then took three strides towards the bathroom door and grabbed the handle just before Abby could open it.

He drew a breath and opened the door a fraction. Abby stood outside in the darkened corridor, wearing ridiculous bunny print pyjamas that made her look seven instead of seventeen. Why did you have to get up? Pierce thought. A dash of heat ran through his chest. It wasn't anger.

'Everything is all right,' he said, his tone light. If the asset made a noise… 'I just dropped something. Don't come in here, the floor is full of broken glass. Just go back to your room, I'll take care of it.'

She stood still for a few moments, the gloom in the corridor darkening her red-gold hair.

'I told you to go to your room, Abby,' Pierce said.

'Sorry.' She turned around. 'Night, dad.'

'Good night, dear.'

He waited until she'd padded back to her room to close the door, draw the bolt, and let out a breath of relief before turning around.

The asset was standing in the corner, where Pierce had told him to go, his back to the room. There was blood on the floor. The asset had stepped across the broken glass in his bare feet, was standing on it even now.

How long would he keep standing if Pierce asked him to? Hours? Days?

Forever?

He felt everything but calm drain away from him. He was no longer angry at the asset, if he had ever been.

Right now he just wanted to get things back to where they should be.

'Turn around,' he ordered. 'Sit down. No, god's sake, step around the glass.'

The asset obeyed, eyes downcast, motions rusty. He sat on the bathtub's edge again, his cheek swollen and dark red where his face had hit the sink. Pierce looked away from it. Even though it had been necessary, perhaps he had lost his temper after all, just a little bit. But who could blame him?

The asset raised his head, his eyes half-hidden by curtains of hair. 'I'm sorry, Mister Pierce,' he croaked.

He picked up a towel and dipped it in warm water before handing it to the asset. 'Calm down. Here,' Pierce said, gently. 'Clean yourself up and give me your report.'

The asset took the towel and started wiping the blood off his feet, his motions mechanic. Drops of pink water and tiny slivers of glass fell to the tiles. 'The woman… the target. She's dead.'

'Good. You did well. Finish cleaning this up and wait for me here.'

The asset's eyes were still vacant but he managed to nod.

Pierce stepped out of the bathroom, taking care to shut the door behind him. He walked down the corridor, making sure he avoided the squeaky spot, and pressed his ear against Abby's bedroom door. When he was certain he heard nothing, he opened the door, just a crack. She was lying on the bed, face to the wall, one arm curled over her head. A wave of fierce protectiveness filled him, but there was no time to waste. He closed the door again, slid the bolt home, and went to the kitchen before returning upstairs.

The asset had put his boots on again and sat with his hands on his knees, looking at nothing. He was thinking, Pierce knew. He knew that expression, as intimately as he knew all of the asset's expressions. Things were ticking away behind the asset's eyes. He didn't even shift a little as Pierce stepped into the bathroom. The floor was clean, the dirty towels folded and laid neatly in a corner.

'Here,' Pierce said, and pressed some ice wrapped in a dish towel to the asset's face. 'Hold it there. Take this.' The asset opened his mouth for the pill.

Pierce could, he knew, have fed him rat poison, arsenic, strychnine, and the asset would have taken it without hesitation or complaint. It was only aspirin, of course. It would probably have no effect at all, given the asset's extraordinary metabolism, but perhaps just the act of taking it would be soothing.

The act of receiving it, and who he was receiving it from.

'Did you plant the things I gave you?'

The asset blinked thickly.

'The woman I killed.' Getting each word out seemed to be like spitting nails. This frustrated Pierce, but he didn't let it show. 'She did something bad.'

'Yes, she did. I wouldn't have given you the assignment otherwise. Did you complete it?'

The asset nodded, then looked up. In that light, his irises looked oddly damp. 'Did I see her before?'

Pierce edged a little closer to the asset. 'She was a traitor. You're the one who told me that. You don't remember?'

He had been wiped twice before this mission, just to be on the safe side, but Pierce knew it had been an unnecessary precaution.

What would the asset do, if Pierce asked him?

Anything. Anything at all.

The asset looked down at the floor, then shook his head, just once. 'Was it me?' he said after a few seconds. 'My fault?'

Pierce sighed and edged a little closer to the asset before putting a hand on his shoulder. His tactical suit was damp with night dew, but Pierce would just have to put up with it.

The asset leaned his chin towards Pierce's hand, stopped before their skin could touch, then stared straight ahead again.

'Listen to me,' Pierce said. 'Everything that's happened, happened for the best. Do you understand? Look at me.' It wasn't quite an order. He was being affectionate.

'Have I ever hurt you?' he said, once the asset had turned his face towards him. The blue-grey eyes had hardened back to ice flints. 'Have I ever lied to you? Asked you to do something you couldn't do?'

The asset shook his head, once, stilled.

'That's right,' Pierce said. 'I look out for you. And you look out for me. The two of us, together. Doing what needs to be done. Doing things only you can do. That's how it works. That's how it should be. You don't need to remember your past assignments. No one can use those against you. But you have to remember that. You'll always remember that. That's all that matters.'

'She had to die,' the asset said.

He was steel again, his jaw set, his eyes full of sharp edges. If Pierce touched the skin on his face, he would find it feverish with anger.

He could feel the asset's power, its volcanic intensity. The asset was dangerous. The asset could kill him.

The asset could kill for him.

The asset could die for him.

The asset was his.

And he would always be.

Was there a word for this? Closer than friends, or enemies, or lovers.

'Yes. She did. You understand.'

The asset turned his face towards him, said nothing. His eyes didn't blink.

Pierce squeezed his shoulder. 'Come on. We need to get you out of here.'

He drove the asset to the rendezvous point. It was only a matter of reassurance, of course. The asset was more than capable of getting there on his own. He would go nowhere else.

Where else could he possibly go, after all?

Once in a while Pierce looked at the slick of headlights on the asset's still and empty face.

A van with fake plates was already waiting for them in the parking lot. 'Tell them to wipe him once you get him back to the lab,' Pierce told the driver. The man had been smoking; the smell still clung to the cabin. 'Tell them to give him something to calm him down before they knock him out. I want him to be comfortable.'

After he drove home, he put a pair of rubber gloves on, bleached the bathroom floor, threw the bloodied towels into a trash bag, sealed it with duct tape, and drove five blocks before he threw the bag into a dumpster. It was nearly four a.m. when he returned home. It would be daybreak soon, and he wondered if there was a point to trying to catch a couple of hours of sleep.

He stood in the bathroom, where everything was tidy again, and there were no signs the asset had ever been inside. No, that wasn't true: there was a spot of blood on a tile.

Before the asset went to sleep, he got to forget everything. He got to start again with a blank slate every time he woke up.

He was in his twenties. He was always in his twenties.

Pierce supposed that was as close to absolution anyone ever got. Every time the asset woke up, he was cleansed, reborn. A new person, a new start, unburdened by memories, guilt, mistakes.

The asset was the luckiest being in the world. The only one for whom there was nothing that couldn't be washed clean.

He wiped the blood away until the tile was sparkling white again.

:=:=:=:

'You wanted to see me, Nick?'

Nick had secured the office so no one would peek in, even in the fiftieth floor, and after they shook hands he led Pierce to the chairs in front of a TV screen. There were papers arranged on a table. Nick pushed a button on the remote. Gerber's face showed up on the screen along with a few seconds of pop music before Nick pressed pause. Gerber was caught with her mouth half-open, lines of static slicing through her neck and shoulders.

'What's this all about?' Pierce said in his most nonchalant tone.

Nick pressed the play button again. On the TV, Gerber sprung back to life. The music had stopped and she'd launched into what Pierce could tell was a wedding speech. She was wearing a bridesmaid dress in a violent shade of purple and her hairdo looked like it must weigh several pounds.

'You're looking at S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most wanted,' Nick said.

Pierce pretended to be amused, then his expression turned serious. 'Is this some kind of joke?'

'I've been working on this for the past three days and I'm still not sure.' He pressed another button and the images on the screen blurred forward. When he pressedplay again, he also turned the volume up. 'Listen to this.'

In the video, Gerber was now leading the wedding guests in a slightly drunken rendition of Ain't No Sunshine. The bride laughed and put her face in her hands in mock embarrassment.

Or perhaps real embarrassment, all things considered.

'I can see why she's wanted,' Pierce said. 'I hope you've got everyone in the musical crimes squad on this.'

Nick rolled his eye. 'This is Gerber's sister's wedding back in '85. They got the camcorders for free because she was marrying a crew member on Miami Vice.'

'That's—hang on, Gerber? Gerber-like-the-Baby? She's one of ours, isn't she? I met her a few years back. Wasn't she in R&D?'

Nick looked at him for a second before answering. 'She wasn't just in R&D. She was working on the GH projects. Only at Level 4 clearance, but… Four days ago she was found dead in her place up in Tenleytown.'

'You only call me down here whenever someone dies,' Pierce said. 'I take it she didn't slip on a banana peel.'

'Not unless she managed to slit her own throat. The police thought it was a B&E gone wrong, but this was done by a pro. The kind of pro who isn't interested in gold necklaces lying right there in plain sight.'

Pierce said nothing and waited for Nick to continue.

'We looked into it for the obvious reasons.' On the screen, the wedding guests had formed a conga line. One of the flower girls was excavating her right nostril. 'Whoever killed her didn't leave any prints. No usable fibres, either. There were hairs, but they're probably just from house guests. Not that we have a real DNA database to compare them to.'

'Not yet,' Pierce said. That wouldn't be a problem, of course. The asset's DNA would never be in it. He didn't exist.

'We did find this,' Nick's tone was still as cool as ever, but Pierce could tell he was warming up. Who could help it? Pierce knew what it felt like, the trail struck upon after hours of searching. Nick handed him a photograph from one of the folders. 'Notice something?'

Pierce put his reading glasses on. It was a photo of a body, lying on its side, one arm twisted underneath it in an impossible position. A tangle of hair covered the face, but one open eye was still visible. There was a dark gash across the throat like a second, obscene mouth. The asset had done a thorough job: the cut was so deep Gerber's clothes were soaked through with blood and a pool had formed underneath her. There was a trail across the floor, where she had crawled a couple of feet as she bled out.

Pierce let a few seconds slip by before he answered. 'The pictures on the table.'

You could hardly see them. They were on a side table next to the body, at the very top of the photo.

'One of them is out of order,' Nick finished.

'Third from the right. I'm guessing they're supposed to be arranged by date.'

'You can tell from the hairstyles.'

Had the asset done it on purpose? It didn't matter, but it bothered Pierce that he wouldn't be able to find out, now that the memory had been wiped.

'We figured the perp put them back in the wrong order without realising it,' Nick went on. 'Which means—'

'—he was looking for something. And didn't want us to figure that out. Otherwise he'd have just ransacked the place.'

A corner of Nick's mouth twitched into a smile of sorts. 'Just like old times,' he said, voice flat.

'Spit it out, Nick. You found something.'

'We found something. Fifth photo, hidden between the picture and the frame. No surprise the perp didn't find it, it looked just like lining paper. But none of the other photos had it, so we took a deeper look at it.' He picked up a black and white photo of a piece of paper. 'This is what it looks like under UV light.'

There were rows of numbers on the paper. Pierce frowned in feigned concentration. 'Are these… bank account numbers?'

'They are,' Nick said. 'We haven't gone through all the various shells and dummy corporate entities yet, but it looks like she was selling classified info. Probably anything she could get her hands on and wouldn't arouse too much suspicion. For God knows how long. Probably doing the drops on the way to her aerobics class. Look at her.' On the television screen Gerber was dancing to a jaunty pop tune, the disco ball and lights filling her face with glitter. 'It's like Cyndi Lauper had sex with Alger Hiss.'

'Thank you for that image, Nick.' Pierce raised an eyebrow. 'You think she was working for—'

'I'm not sure of anything at this point. Of course the Soviets are going to stonewall us, but I haven't turned up anything with the KGB's fingerprints yet. They do bury everything deep.' He couldn't keep a slight note of admiration off his voice.

'And Gerber's security check?'

'She passed with flying colours.' Nick grabbed the remote again and the TV screen went dark. The room was silent again. 'I don't think she was working alone.'

'You mean in—'

'I mean in S.H.I.E.L.D.' His expression had turned fully unreadable again, but Pierce knew what he was thinking.

It was amazing how much more useful Gerber was dead than alive. Alive she had been a weak link, a squeaky wheel. Dead, she could be tied to all kinds of threads, the ones Nick would pull on. On the other end there would be ghosts for him to chase, and those with questionable loyalties, those who stood in the way.

There were no prisoners with Hydra.

Had Gerber had even the slightest inkling about what she'd set in motion once she'd sent that message to Nick?

Had Nick, when he'd put that tail on her?

'You think this was an inside job, Nick?' He gave the walls a quick glance, and his voice turned just a fraction lower. 'Was she in it?'

He didn't need to explain what he was talking about. Not to Nick.

'I hope so. I doubt she was the ringleader.'

'No.' Pierce looked at the opaque windows, at the place where the Potomac would be otherwise visible, a ribbon of muddy silver in the autumn sun. 'I think whoever you're looking for wouldn't let themselves be killed in a deal gone wrong. I'm sure they're still out there.' He turned back to Nick. 'You said she passed her security screening with flying colours.'

'That's right. No questionable ties or associates, no security risks. Nothing on later screenings either.'

Pierce knew all about how Nick screened current agents. It was random, it was thorough, and above all it was secret.

'She was a bit of a loner, apparently,' Nick added. 'Not the kind who gets recruited into bomb-making. I mean the regular kind. Ordinary.' He leaned back a little in his chair and shrugged. 'Of course, that's also the perfect cover.'

'I think there would always be something, Nick. Something that would give her away. Like… when you're dealing with a disease. A test that lets you know it's coming before anyone can see the symptoms. Put the pattern together and you'll know that some day a fresh-faced recruit is going to sell intelligence secrets to the highest bidder. You'll know about it even before they do.'

'With enough information.'

'With enough information,' Pierce repeated.

Nick steepled his hands. 'You know, this algorithm… If we ever get the technology to make it work, it will need access to everything. Banking information, school records, medical records. Some people might argue about privacy. Or freedom.' Nick's voice held its usual coolness, but Pierce thought he was making his opinion of such people clear nonetheless.

'True. Other people might argue about how freedom is never free. Personally, I think Gerber would argue that she'd much rather have been stopped and helped before things happened in the first place, instead of ending up with her throat cut. I'll leave the other arguments to people who can afford to bicker about them. Me, I'll stick to that one.'

Nick seemed to find that amusing, even if his eye was as somber as ever. 'That's quite the insight.'

Pierce's smile was weary, and knowing. 'Here's to insight.'

:=:=:=:

Above all things, Nick Fury was a man who could spot the lions.

At six, his mother had taken him to the doctor, and Nick had spent his time in the waiting room studying an old children's magazine. There was a puzzle showing a wildlife scene in black and white. Can you spot all the lions? the caption had asked, but Nick had known what to do even before he'd finished using his newly-minted reading skills. He'd seen a muzzle disguised in the ink lines of grass, a tail hidden in a bunch of leaves.

Later that day, his mother, who worked in a big building called Shield even though Nick hadn't seen any shields when she'd taken him there and who had medals from when dad had died, had lowered her head and hurried, gloved hand clutching his, past a group of white men crowding the sidewalk, and Nick had thought about the lions again.

Can you spot all the lions? Yes, he could. He had spent almost four decades doing it, and it was a skill he nurtured carefully. He owed it the fact that he had the director's suite in a building where his grandfather might have worked as an elevator attendant. More importantly, he owed it his life.

And he knew that there wasn't a surer sign of lions than the fact that you couldn't see any.

He looked at the Gerber case documents, laid out in neat piles on his desk, and wondered where the lions were.

He had received her message, of course, and immediately put a tail on her. After she'd waited in the Smithsonian—of all places; why?; he'd find out—she'd gone home and her tail had gone along with her. The agent had watched her house, seen nobody get in or out. And the next day, Gerber was dead.

He couldn't see the lions there either. Not yet.

He pressed the buzzer for his secretary. 'Chang, can you come in here?'

She entered the office soon after. 'Sir?' His secretary was old enough to look like a leather boot and had a disposition to match. She had been around since she'd ended up in the SSR's secretarial pool during the War, followed by a career typing for younger and younger people, knew everyone, and above all, possessed two of the qualities Nick valued the most: usefulness and discretion.

'You got any savings, Chang?'

'Not on the kind of salary S.H.I.E.L.D. pays, no.' She smoothed some invisible wrinkle in her jacket. 'Do you need me to make some coffee, boss? That's more my ballpark.'

The day she stuck to making coffee would be the day singing frogs started raining from the heavens. 'Humour me. You've got any valuables? Something in a safe deposit box?'

She pursed her lips in concentration for a second. 'Well, there's my grandmother's jewellery. That's in the bank.'

'Is it worth anything?'

'I hope so. My tell-all memoir will probably not be enough to fund my retirement.'

He didn't laugh. 'You've got paperwork for the deposit box?'

'Sure.'

'Thank you, Chang. You can go now.'

She pretended not to sound interested. 'What's all this about, boss?'

'That'll be all, Chang. Hold my calls.'

Just because she was useful, that didn't mean he trusted her. It was nothing personal. He didn't trust anyone.

There were levels of mistrust, of course.

Once she'd left the office, Nick looked at the files again. Maybe it meant nothing, and Chang had only confirmed what he already knew, even if sometimes you needed to hear it from someone else.

Still.

He picked up the evidence bag containing the key. It had no identifying marks, but from the shape it had to be a bank key, to some kind of safe or deposit box.

Gerber (like the Baby) had been the sort of person who kept her correspondence in binders with tabs arranged by year and her underwear organised by colour. She'd pencilled every appointment into her calendar in a neat hand, and Nick had begun to wonder if the days she'd marked with some kind of asterisk had been the days when she'd made her deals in some truck stop or out-of-the-way motel, written down for completeness' sake. You almost expected her to have died neatly, body carefully arranged on the carpet, but of course everybody bled the same, red and messy.

So what the hell had that key been doing in one of her kitchen drawers?

TBC…

Author's note: This entire chapter is an extended Breaking Bad homage, from Barbara Gerber (BG) as basically Gale Boetticher (GB), terrible music videos and all, to Pierce's Dramatic Irony conversation with Nick Fury, to Pierce fucking with Bucky's head a bit more (though I think Pierce manages to outdo Walt in terribleness? Idk, Pierce never throws a pizza on the roof, it's hard to tell—but seriously, let me tell you how much I loved the little bits in CA:TWS in which it's clear that Pierce manipulated Nick Fury by exploiting the latter's experiences with racism; I tried to get a little bit of that across here), to the surprise bit of evidence at the end. Of course, Breaking Bad is much better than my silly fic, so I guess what I'm saying here is that you should go watch Breaking Bad. Chang is a shout-out to Monica Chang from the comics (possibly they're grandmother and granddaughter?). Oh, and the bit with Pierce talking to Bucky in the bathroom? Remember that scan I linked of little comics!Bucky having a talk with his father in the bathroom? (ic . pics . livejournaldotcom / overlithe / 15266763 / 256675 / 256675 _ original . png) Once again, there is nothing in any of these universes that I cannot make terrible. You're welcome!