In Shadows
The Triskelion
January 22, 2015 – 6:35 PM
The war was reaching a boiling point. After the death of Goliath at the hands of Moonstone, the kid gloves were ripped off and both sides engaged in old fashioned bare knuckle boxing. The subsequent battles were blood baths. No one died, but no one walked away under their own powers. Neither side scored a crucial victory, as each battle ended in a stalemate of attrition.
One thing that no one expected was that many heroes were switching sides. Tigra, who had been on the registered side during the battle that saw Goliath's life end, moved to Walker's team, while Nighthawk switched to Osborn's. They were decisions that, despite it being their right to change their minds, led to them being seen as indecisive and wishy-washy.
But, for the duration of the war so far, the two sides seemed to be evenly matched. Powerhouses like Blue Marvel, Sentry and Spectrum opted to stay on the sidelines, and the Hulk was nowhere to be found, so the power dynamic was on an even keel. That was one of the reasons Osborn brought in a team he dubbed the Thunderbolts. A team comprised entirely of supervillains, all tagged with a nanites stream that would incapacitate them if the SHIELD team monitoring them found em attempting anything outside the parameters of their limited assignment.
Venom, Moonstone, Bullseye, Songbird, Radioactive Man, Lady Deathstrike, and the Mandarin. They were led by Baron Zemo. When Osborn proposed this team, literally everyone thought he was (still) insane. Baron Zemo, especially, as the man who took over the planet and killed Captain America, merged eyebrows with hairlines.
The team was only given the okay once Osborn swore that they were going to be kept on a short leash.
And, true to his promise, they were kept on an extremely short leash. And what they were allowed to do, they did well. Naturally, they played rough. The majority of the injuries suffered by the unregistered side were caused by them. Even still, the very legitimate fear of public outcry toward having three Masters of Evil on the team kept them in the shadows.
"What are the public approval numbers?" Sanders asked Trent.
"Approval ratings are up 13% over the past two days," he reported. "Out of all the Gifted teams out there, Osborn's public team seems to be the most popular."
She nodded with approval. Public approval was just as important, if not more so than defeating the unregistered side and eliminating Captain America. It didn't matter a whit if they were the only side standing if the people didn't want to submit to their protection. "Good. Has STRIKE reported in?"
"Yes. Still no sign of Barnes or Belova."
It had been eight days since Barnes went AWOL, and they still hadn't found even so much as a footprint. She knew that he was exceptional at staying hidden, but this was getting ridiculous. "Tell them to return to the nearest SHIELD office ASAP. We'll try and pick them up on cameras. Which direction were they headed in?"
"North. There was a possible sighting in Manhattan a few days ago, but it couldn't be corroborated."
She sighed heavily through her nose and stood to walk out of his office. Before she opened the door, she stopped and turned her head to face him. "Ready the helicarrier's long-range guns. As soon as we find them, I want to be ready to fire."
He hesitated, as if about to say something, but thought better of it. "Yes, ma'am."
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
After a week of ducking STRIKE agents and avoiding the Gifted Civil War, Bucky and Yelena arrived in Ottawa. In the meantime, Fury contacted them and filled them on everything Hand had reported to him. That compelled them to hurry and discover what it was that SHIELD wanted to hide. Fury told them that he was working on a plan to stop them before they launched their endgame.
"Five miles east," Yelena informed.
"Listen, when we get there, I'm not sure what we'll find, but he prepared to fight of SHIELD agents. They don't want us to see what's in there, so keep your head down and move fast."
Yelena didn't respond, but nodded quickly.
With those helicarriers, they could shoot them from miles away and no one would know what happened. There wasn't anywhere that was safe. Drones, helicarriers, cape killers; SHIELD had an army that few, if any, could match up against.
It was why they weren't afraid of backlash after starting the civil war. Who could stop them? Who could even get close enough to pose a threat before they were sniped out of the sky?
Spectrum? The Sentry? Blue Marvel? Probably, but it didn't matter.
If he knew that, so did they. If they felt that they were a threat, they could eliminate them without any trouble.
Which raised the question – if they had so much firepower at their fingertips, why start this Civil War? Why risk the lives of innocent civilians if they could have just killed all the Gifted's right away?
"What is it?"
Bucky didn't answer right away. "I'm just thinking that this isn't simple as we think it is."
Her lips quirked up slightly. "As if it's that simple now."
"Maybe." The next few miles passed by without another word being said. They were both on edge, for various reasons. Bucky, because he wasn't sure if he wanted to know what was hidden at these coordinates. Yelena, she was always on edge.
"Is this it?" he asked as they pulled up to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city.
Yelena checked the coordinates and nodded. "Da. This is where the file came from." Bucky parked the truck next to the entrance and climbed out. "You said you knew this place?"
He nodded. Something about the location jostled something deep in his memory. Seeing it agitated the latent memory even deeper.
A man was sitting across from him. Am older man, in a suit. Other men, some pointing semiautomatic assault rifles at him, were standing behind the man in the suit. There was a man standing beside him, something in his hand. He had been working on his arm.
"Mission report," the suit demanded.
Bucky was blank.
No, not Bucky. Because hair was stuck to his face. Bucky kept his hair short.
It was the soldier who was blank.
"Mission report, now." The suit slapped him across the face.
That knocked The Soldier out of his daze. "There wuzza manona bridge," he reported, voice raspy and his words fusing together from his addled mind.
"James?"
Yelena's sudden voice jerked him from the memory. "This is a Red Room facility?" He was still out of it, like he always was when these memories hit him. At least he was just confused and not confused and volatile.
"No. It's a SHIELD facility."
He frowned and entered the building ahead of her. Sure enough, a SHIELD logo was staring him right in the face. A perplexed frown sagged across his brow. "I… The Soldier was here, in the past."
She raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything.
It wasn't the first time that SHIELD enemies had used one of their facilities as a base. Hydra used a SHIELD base in New Mexico during their time with the Masters. "This place looks low-tech for SHIELD."
"Maybe where it started?"
"No, that's somewhere in New Jersey. This might be an early outpost, though." Bucky drew his handgun on reflex. The place looked empty, but if SHIELD enemies were using this base, there might have been someone, or something here.
"Probably. But, it is a dead end. No heat signatures, no waves, not even radio. Someone must have used a router to send that file to the Lemurian Star." She glanced inside an open room and saw a picture of Peggy Carter with Howard Stark and another man she didn't know. "Who's that?"
Bucky looked and allowed a wistful smile to quirk up his lips. "Col. Chester Philips. Hated that guy." He allowed himself a small chuckled and moved further inside the room.
It appeared to be a simple office, covered with a thick layer of dust from years of disuse. It was mostly empty, aside from the desk, a chair in front of it and a bookshelf behind it. His eyes focused in on the bookshelf. In particular, a book at was pushed slightly further back the rest on its row. He tilted his head and walked toward the shelf. "You said this was a SHIELD facility?"
"Da."
"If this is a SHIELD facility," he pushed the book in and stepped back as a hidden mechanism slide the entire bookshelf to the side, "why have a secret room?"
The room looked to be an ancient computer room. The computers were massive, and each one was covered in dust. Along the walls were huge servers of some kind, also covered in dust. "This is the data-point? This tech is more ancient than the stuff outside." She scanned the terminals and noticed a USB port. She raised an eyebrow and inserted the drive. The terminals all came to life, with all the screens displaying whether she wanted to activated the system. She typed in 'yes'.
Moments lapsed in a tense silence before a voice rang from a speaker somewhere. "Barnes, James Buchanan. Born, 1917. Belova, Yelena. Born, 1989."
"It's a recording," Yelena said. Bucky didn't respond.
Eyes wide, Bucky swallowed roughly and shook noticeably. That voice…
Sargent Barnes.
Bucky's head jerked around helter-skelter. His eyes were frantically jumping from one corner of the room to the other, as if looking for something that wasn't there.
His left arm, his flesh left arm, was being cut off with a buzzsaw. His was awake and wanted to scream, but was too heavily drugged to open his mouth.
You will be the new fist of Hydra.
"N-no…"
Put him on ice.
"NO!"
"James?" Yelena touched his arm, but he jerked away violently. "James, what is it?"
"Tha-that voice… that's Zola." His heart was racing and he fought the urge to run away. Not that he could; his knees were shaking so fiercely that he could barely stand.
"A recording of him, yes."
"I am not a recording, Fraulein," Zola responded. "I'm not the man I once was when Captain Rogers took me in 1945, but I am."
Bucky stepped back. "How?" His teeth gritted in anger and frustration. "How are you alive?!"
Zola answered without an ounce of amusement. "In 1972, I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body, but it could save my mind. Within the confines of this room is two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing, quite literally, inside my brain."
Was this what SHIELD was so desperate to hide? This monster? "Why are you here? What the hell does this have to do with SHIELD?"
"Operation Paperclip," he answered. "After WWII, SHIELD recruited German scientists in to their ranks. They thought I could help their cause, but I helped my own in the process."
Carter and the founders of SHIELD recruited a Hydra scientist for SHIELD? How could they have been so stupid?!
"Hydra was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom," Zola continued. "What we did not realize at the time is that when one tries to take that freedom, they resist. We learned much in those days. Humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly.
"The war ended and Hydra appeared to have died when your friend, Rogers, sunk the Valkryie and killed Herr Skull. But, cut off one head, and two more shall take its place. After Herr Schmidt was killed, two men stepped forward to lead Hydra from the ashes: Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, and myself. Strucker's half has grown in power considerably, and is now the Hydra that you fought a few years ago. My half has been growing and festering within SHIELD since its inception. For seventy years, half of Hydra has been growing in the shadows, the other half growing in plain sight. Secretly feeding crisis, reaping war."
Feeding crisis?
Hydra was working with the Masters of Evil, which meant that they were the cause of that. Which meant, based on what Fury told him, that they had infiltrated the WSC. And Hydra was behind the Gifted Human Registration Act, and the subsequent civil war. They wanted to kill of the Gifted's because, without any of them around, they had a fast track to world domination.
They already did, anyway. The civilians, in the US at least, were throwing their safety and security into the hands of SHIELD.
"There's no way Stark or Carter would have let this happen," he said, for the first time sounding sure of himself and resolute.
Zola chuckled, a static-like rustle that sent a chill up their spines. "How right you are, Soldier. Of course, when history didn't cooperate, like with Stark, history was changed." A nearby screen came to live and showed mission reports that detailed the murder of Howard and Maria Stark, as well as the murders of Agents Hill and Coulson. The latter two were assigned to Taskmaster. The former was assigned to the Winter Soldier.
Bucky felt the air rush out of his lungs. "I… no…"
"Hydra has now created a world so chaotic, that humanity is now fully ready to sacrifice its freedom for security. Once the purification process is complete, Hydra's new world order will arise. We have won, Soldier. Soon, the world will be ours, you will return to your rightful place, as the Fist of Hydra."
In a burst of anger, Bucky smashed his metal fist through the screen. His breaths were heavy and labored, despite the ease of his action. The truth had finally been revealed, and it felt like a ten ton weight had been placed squarely on his shoulders.
The room felt hot and began to spin. "As I was saying –" he continued from another screen.
"What's on this drive?" Yelena asked suddenly, cutting him off.
"Project Insight's insight runs much, much deeper than just predicting disasters. I wrote another algorithm to go along with the one that SHIELD uses publicly."
"What kind of algorithm? What does it do?" she pressed.
"The answer is quite fascinating. Unfortunately, you'll be much to dead to hear it."
Suddenly, the door began to close. Bucky tried to jam it open with his shield, but he was too late. After they were sealed in, Yelena's phone began to beep. "James, I got a bogey incoming. Long range ballistic. Thirty seconds tops."
"Who fired?"
"SHIELD."
"I am afraid in have been stalling for time, Soldier. Admit it, it's better this way."
It was a trap. Zola knew that SHIELD would know that they were there, so he explained Hydra's role in everything to buy time for them to destroy the bunker, knowing that the place was going to be blown up with them still in it, anyway.
Stupid!
"We have, both of us, lived on borrowed time that has just run out."
The beeping from Yelena's phone grew more rapid. The hidden bunker was sealed tight. There wasn't any way to escape and he wasn't strong enough to tank an explosion. Yelena certainly wasn't. Their only hope was to find some place to hide and pray that his shield held up.
There was a small ventilation shaft in the ground that was covered by a grate. Bucky ripped off the grate and pulled Yelena inside with him. A second later, a tremendous explosion ripped through the bunker, bathing every inch of it in fire. Rubble rained down from the ceiling and buried them inside the opening.
Bucky gritted his teeth and pushed his left arm to its maximum to keep the rubble from crushing them. More and more rubble fell on top of them until they were completely encased in darkness.
"Giant ants and bees?" Bucky asked, incredulity dripping from his voice. His question was partially covered by the glass of beer he had up to his lips.
Steve just smiled and nodded. "Wasps, actually."
Bucky waved his off. "Eh. Same thing. Man, you guys get into some crazy shit."
Steve laughed and drained his half-glass of beer in one gulp. "Comes with the territory. You know, that offer is still on the table."
"Me, join the Avengers?" He snorted in self-derision. "Nah. Don't think so. Though, the ladies you team up with are making me reconsider."
Steve rolled his eyes and elbowed his friend in the ribs – though whether it was because of the derision or the comment about his female teammates wasn't clear. "Well, the offer will remain on the table, permanently until you take it."
Bucky shrugged and finished his glass. "Better get going, buddy. Got a op in Bogota that Hill is up my ass about." He stood and watched Steve throw a twenty on the bar. "You owe me another drink, remember?"
Steve smiled and tapped his temple. "I haven't forgotten. When I'm done with this giant bug thing, I'll take you up on it."
"Great. And good luck. Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."
He smirked. "How can I? You're taking all the stupid with you."
Bucky smirked and wrapped his arm around his childhood friend. "You're still a punk."
"And you're still a jerk."
Bucky grunted and pushed a loose piece of rubble out of the way. Light from the fires around what used to be the hidden bunker filtered in through the thick cloud of smoke. What he found when he crawled out of their hiding place was nothing by destruction. One missile had managed to completely destroy the entire building.
He heard a quiet cough and found Yelena sitting on a slab of cement. She was breathing and conscious, but wasn't moving otherwise. He lifted her limp body into his arms and crawled out into the opened.
Immediately, he saw three quinjets heading in their direction to inspect the damage. Their truck had been destroyed in the explosion, so he had to run as quickly as he could toward the nearest parking lot to steal a car. The strain from protecting them from the explosion had taxed his body. Just moving by himself was more arduous than carrying a ton behind him, let alone with Yelena's added weight.
He found a nearby building and quickly hid inside. Once SHIELD passed through, he would find a vehicle and return to DC as quickly as possible. They needed a place to hide, and he knew exactly where to go.
The quinjets swept the area, and found no signs of life in the mile area. STRIKE operatives swept through the blast zone to look for bodies. They found nothing, but Rumlow found a set of footprints leading away from the bunker. They were large, probably a male's. "Negative at the blast zone, ma'am. At least Barnes escaped. Possibly Belova, but I only see one set of prints," he reported.
Sanders' sigh crackled across the comm. =Shit. She's probably injured, but they couldn't have gotten far.=
"Ma'am, with all due respect, this man just survived a bunker buster. It's going to take a lot more than us to take him down."
She paused for a moment before responding. "Fine. Return to base immediately."
"Roger that." He signaled for his team to return to the quinjet, then radioed someone else. "Call in The Asset."
One day they stopped. The farmers were no longer farmers.
A/N: Hail Hydra.
