Percy put the phone and crumbled chip bag back on his desk, and he slumped in his chair. They had lost all leads on the Winter Soldier, a famous assassin who they suspected worked for HYDRA. He let out a sigh. They barely even had proof of his existence. The man was a ghost, to the point that Percy wouldn't be surprised if someone from HYDRA had deleted everything SHIELD had on him.
He started when he heard someone clear their throat from the doorway to his office. A well-dressed man stood there, not looking in the least guilty about surprising him. Percy got up from his chair and motioned for the man to walk with him as he left his cramped office. Maybe a bit unorthodox, but his office was small enough with only him in it.
The agent fell into step beside him, and Percy realized that he recognized the man, Roger Browning; he had been in the same class as Percy at the academy. Browning had been infamous for nearly achieving nearly a perfect score on the obstacle course before stumbling and falling right on his face. He was never able to attain the same result again.
The man didn't say anything and only passed him a manila folder containing the word 'Top Secret' stamped on it. A bit stereotypical but hey, who was he to judge? He had done the same thing before, albeit he was doing so ironically.
He opened the folder and started reading, and the further he got into it, the paler he got. At one point, he nearly tripped, only barely managed to stop himself from face planting. He looked at the man who had given the papers to him, "Please tell me this is a joke."
Roger just shook his head, "No, it's real. I only know the basics, but the entire thing looks FUBAR."
"Oh, it is, just... damn." Any traces of his previous good mood left Percy, making him appear extremely serious, an expression that looked foreign on his regular optimistic face. The agent reflected the look. Their footsteps on the polished metal floor of the hallway were the only noise for a long while. He was too busy trying to get through the file he had received.
"They want you briefing room three." The agent said after a couple of minutes of wandering in the general direction of the briefing rooms. Percy thanked him and walked to the door with a small blue sign that stated it as such.
The rectangular room was pretty standard for SHIELD briefing rooms. There was a long wooden table in the center surrounded by black office chairs. A projector sat on the table, painting the wall across from it with the words 'Project Reprisal'. What that meant, he didn't know, but he was about to find out.
He saw Phil Coulson along with many other people he didn't recognize, which wasn't too surprising, even though SHIELD was a tight-knit group. Between the HYDRA infiltration, the high turnover rate, and the fact he had only been back for about a month after two years, he didn't exactly know many people.
"Take a seat please, agent," Coulson told him and pointed to a seat between two people in suits. Percy sat down in the rolling chair and had to stop himself from tapping the mahogany table with his finger. The atmosphere in the room was very bleak.
"We're just waiting for one last person now." A well-dressed woman hurriedly walked through the door and sat where Coulson had indicated. "Excellent, now that everyone is here, I must inform you all that SHIELD has just moved into DEFCON 2."
A few people whispered to their neighbors, but it ended quickly; they were highly disciplined spies, not school children. Besides him, maybe impatient spy was a better description of him, Percy thought wryly as he struggled not to tap his foot on the floor. It was a good thing they didn't hire him for his discipline.
Coulson let the talking die down before continuing.
"I understand that I grabbed all of you on terse notice," Coulson said, looking between each person in the room. "For those of you who didn't have the time to finish the file - which I'm sure is all of you - this is Project Reprisal."
He clicked a button on his remote, and a large picture of a powder appeared, it almost looked like sugar, but something seemed different. "It is probably the most advanced biological weapon in existence."
"It kills nearly every single person it touches, inhale or consume a single grain of it and you have a fifteen percent chance of survival." Someone sitting across from Percy rose their hand.
"Why do we even have a chance of survival? If you come into contact with it, shouldn't you just die if it is so advanced?" Some others nodded along with this, while Percy noticed a couple of people in lab coats frown. The question was wrong then.
"That is the weakness of biological weapons. It is nearly impossible for one virus to wipe out a population. There will be some who are immune." Another person asked a question, a woman wearing a lab coat.
"How does it work?" Coulson frowned.
"We don't know." He admitted. "That is the only photograph we have. All that we do know is that it exists, and it kills eighty-five percent of the people it touches. The man who gave us this information stopped responding to check-ins. Seven hours later, he was found dead in his home, a clean shot to his head."
"We believe HYDRA created the virus after we expelled all of their agents from SHIELD, hence the name of the project. We don't know what the purpose of it is. All we know is that they are producing a lot." Nobody spoke.
"All of you are being taken off of any assignments you were on previously. Someone else will be working on your old ones. I don't think I need to explain how important it is that you find out more information about this weapon as fast as possible." Percy had a bad feeling about this.
~0~
Why me.
That was the only thought going through Percy's mind as the freezing snow got into his pants. Here he was stuck in the middle of nowhere Siberia, cold, hungry, and miserable. Before this, he naively thought that because this mission was so important, it would, at the very least, be interesting. He realized how foolish the assumption was now, laying on his belly in the snow waiting for a truck to drive by. Not because he got to blow it up or hitch a ride to sneak into the base, no, so that he could snap a quick photo. Didn't they had satellites for this type of thing?
The worst part was that everyone else got FAR more entertaining missions. SHIELD sent one woman to seduce one of the workers. They sent another agent to shadow a worker and steal a sample from him. SHIELD had even sent someone to check if the Russians even knew what was happening on their soil, and they were permitted to do anything necessary, bugs, bribes, threats, anything.
Percy, though, yeah, he can photograph a truck for us. In all fairness, the vehicle he was supposed to photograph was important. It seemed to be the vehicle they were transporting the weapon inside. They needed to know exactly what type of truck it was and all that, but that didn't make it any less boring.
Percy spent the next ten minutes trying to stay warm in the thick camouflaged jacket that SHIELD had provided from him, not that it did much when the snow had found its way inside of it. At least the mottled white and gray surface helped keep him concealed. Although at this point, he wouldn't be upset if someone spotted him, the running he would have to do would help warm him up.
He heard rumbling and brought his camera up to his face; after what had been hours of waiting, the truck had finally-
The trucks had finally arrived?
Beyond the trees in front of him, Percy watched as several large white trucks drove along the icy road. However, they weren't alone; Percy realized that many black SUVs closely followed the trucks, and he started snapping as many photographs as possible. For a solid minute, there was no noise except for the clicking of a camera and the rumble the engines created. Soon all the vehicles had driven past him, and Percy carefully stored his camera in his white bag.
The briefing he received didn't say anything about there being more than one truck. Somewhere there had been a mistake.
He pulled his radio up to his mouth, "This is Jackson, something's wrong."
Percy held the radio up to his ears but couldn't hear anything besides the usual crackling the machine made. He tried again. "Do you copy?"
Again no response. That wasn't good. Percy reached into his bag and pulled out the phone that would send an SOS to SHIELD, "My exfil team isn't responding, can you hear me?"
"We can hear you. What is your code?" The calm voice spoke of professionalism, and it brought Percy a considerable amount of composure. Without realizing it, Percy mirrored the tone himself.
"Oscar foxtrot bravo victor echo." A moment of silence.
"Confirmed Agent Jackson. What's the situation?"
"Something somewhere has gone wrong, my intel was inaccurate, and now I have lost communication with my backup," Percy stated, sounding far calmer than he felt.
"Destroy anything that could link you to SHIELD. If you get caught, we will disavow you." Percy wasn't surprised; this was standard procedure. He had already started, "Make your way to your secondary extract point. Do not make any further attempts to contact or check on your team. If they haven't been captured or killed, they won't check on you either; I don't think I need to explain the standard procedure to you, though. A team will pick you up the point."
That was all Percy got before the line went dead. He crushed the phone in his hands and dumped it in a hole along with all his other SHIELD equipment. What if Percy had forgotten standard procedure? Just assuming he remembered wasn't very friendly or safe. Oh well, he did, remember, so there was no use to think about what-ifs.
Besides, he still had a standard radio, and he could get help with that. He filled in the hole he made with dirt and stood up. Many loud cracks followed the action.
He covered his tracks well; his power over water allowed him to flatten out the footprints he caused in the snow. A moderate amount of snow had started to fall, too, limiting visibility. At one point, he thought he heard the baying of dogs, but he couldn't be sure. Eventually, after about four hours of walking through the forest, an exhausted Percy stumbled his way into a clearing. Soon after he did, the air above him shimmered, slowly a Quinjet revealed itself hovering in place a couple of feet off the ground, seemingly appearing out of thin air.
Two agents hopped out and put his arms over their shoulders. Percy just smiled at them as they practically carried him up the ramp and into the jet. Once he was inside, he grabbed the camera out of the white bag and handed it to the most prestigious looking person he saw. "Mission accomplished, guess that SERE training wasn't a waste ey?"
Then Percy passed out.
~0~
Thankfully, it turned out his support team hadn't been murdered or captured. They were spooked by a patrol that had wandered too close to where they were hiding out, and they had to get out of there or risk getting caught, which was not an option. They couldn't let HYDRA know what they were trying to do. He still felt as if they could have given him a heads up, though.
As a 'reward' for staying out in the cold for so long, he received a two-day break, his first since he had started working again, he would have preferred a nice vacation to the Bahamas, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Not with everything going on.
Percy was walking to the small house he owned surrounded by woods somewhere in the New York state. He raised his eyebrow when he saw some of the lights on. The dead leaves crunched under his feet as Percy took in the sight before him, the trees in autumn color in the background and the beautiful little house that was bathed in light from the setting sun. He almost wished he had a camera.
He pulled out the keys and unlocked the door before walking into the house. He was immediately pulled into a hug. "I thought you wouldn't finish your hunting trip for another week?" He asked, relishing the smell of her shampoo.
"Are you disappointing to see me then?" He laughed
"I suppose not, Zoë." She smiled at him.
"Come on. I made some dinner." She said, gently leading him to the kitchen.
"You, cooking? Thanks for the warning. I'll evacuate the house." Percy joked. In truth, she wasn't a bad cook, but compared to Percy, whose mother, the best cook he knew, forced him to learn before leaving the house? She didn't stand a chance. Unless it was over a campfire, he didn't know anyone skilled in cooking with an open flame like that.
She laughed and slapped him lightly; he forgot how much he loved hearing her laugh. "Don't be mean."
"To you? Never."
There was a pot of stew simmering on the stove; it filled the room with a fantastic smell. He was slightly confused why she had cooked so much, however, and when he had mentioned it, she just shrugged. "I was cooking, so I would have leftovers to eat later, but now I have you to cook for me."
"So I'm your chef now?" Percy asked. She stood up on her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
"Yes." Then she wrapped her arms around him again. "How long will you be back?"
Her slightly hopeful expression caused him equal amounts of grief and guilt, "Only two days, after that I have no idea. Things are not going great."
She nodded; she didn't know what he did, only that it had something to do with the military. In his defense, however, he wasn't hiding anything from her. She had never asked. "There aren't anymore hunts going on for the foreseeable future."
"No?" Although Zoë had left the Hunters of Artemis, she would still frequently join them for hunting down powerful monsters. It gave her something to do.
"We've hunted down everything more powerful than a cyclops left in North America. Until they come crawling out of Tartarus, there isn't much to do." Percy whistled.
"That's impressive; I know Zeus said he'd provide the Hunt with more recruits, but just how many did he find?"
Zoë paused for a moment, likely to do some math in her head, "There's a lot, at least five times more than there used to be. Although it doesn't feel the same as it used to, it certainly isn't as close as it used to be."
"I guess that is to be expected," Percy said, then; not liking the sad atmosphere, he spoke again. "Wow, this just got so depressing. Why don't we watch a movie? I don't think I've ever shown you the Lion King."
"Sounds fascinating." Percy frowned at her sarcasm; she would never have spoken like that when he first met her. He was a bad influence.
"It's a classic." Percy defended.
"If you insist."
She actually did end up enjoying the film, not that she admitted so to him. He could tell, though.
I wasn't in the mood to write more for my PJ/HP crossover, so here y'all go. A new chapter, please enjoy.
Also, let me know your thoughts on the direction this is heading. If anyone is interested, The Cobra Event did inspire me to write this first arc.
Stay safe.