Hi everyone just wanted to apologize for the delay. I recently got a job and I hardly have any time for anything. And I hit another snag of Writer's block for this story. after writing and deleting it three times i think i got it me know what you think. Thank you and enjoy.
I teleported to the Tower where both my dads were sitting on the couch watching Kill Bill while Wren was sound asleep on Dad's chest.
"Uh… why are you watching Kill Bill with my infant son?" I asked.
"It's guys night." Dad said.
"Yeah but the little guy isn't even one yet." I said taking Wren out of dad's arms. He stirred a bit before cuddling back into the crook of my neck.
"You take out the old guy?" Rhodey asked.
"Seduced him, got him to buy me expensive diamond earrings, then knocked him out and handcuffed him to a safehouse bathroom sink." I said. "Piece of cake."
"Where's Aiden?" dad asked.
"Watching him." I said.
"You sure that's a good idea?" Rhodey asked.
"We need him alive and he's not going to talk while he's unconscious so he should be safe until morning. We're dropping him off at the compound for a few hours while we go run an errand." I said.
"Need me to watch the little man?" Rhodey offered.
"No, Sam wanted some uncle time. He keeps saying Aiden's been hogging him." I said.
"If you need me I'm just a call away." Dad said.
"I know. Love you guys." I said.
"Love you kids." They said before I teleported to the house. I put Wren down in his crib and went to go look for my journal. I went up to the attic and looked through all the boxes. I saw the box of Wren's things I had brought over and immediately moved it to look over some of my childhood mementos.
I saw old albums, my first rocket skates, my mickey mouse ears, I even found Ellie the elephant, my old bed time buddy but the one thing I couldn't find was the damn journal. I had Aya make a list of any event I needed to warn anyone off when I was programming the Cronus protocols but I don't remember checking the notebook.
"Where the hell is that thing!?" I said annoyed.
"What are you looking for?" Aya said appearing behind me.
"The red journal." I said. "The one that I write all big events in."
"You only write Time Jumps in there, it's not going to help you this time, you're going to have to dig a little deeper." Aya said.
"I can't exactly go much deeper Aya. The only person alive from back then is Peggy and the woman has dementia." I said.
"And you happen to be a time traveler who used to work for an intelligence organization that operated globally." Aya said.
"Yes and said intelligence organization ended up being Hydra." I said.
"Which is why you prepared for that scenario." Aya said.
"I know I just…Uh!" I groaned. "I just, I thought I left that all behind."
"I thought we were over this." Aya said.
"I understood the lessons and I understand why it had to happen it's just something I still occasionally wake up in the middle of the night crying about." I said.
"You can't run away from your past, Nora. It's time you face it because your past and present are about to collide and ignoring it is only going it make it worse." Aya said before disappearing.
"That's never a good sign." I said sitting down and looking at the chest from Wren's old room. I couldn't bring myself to throw away any of Wren's things so I just put them in the attic. Including the old trunk I was currently staring at.
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Wren, thankfully, was not a hoarder. He always traveled light. Anything he truly cared about keeping he kept in that trunk. I never opened it and as strange as it sounded I was kind of scared to. If Wren ever asked about his father, we'd look through it together until then it stayed here.
"I could really use one of your get your head out of your ass talks right about now hell It'd be nice to hear you lie and tell me it was all going to be okay." I said sighing as my phone started ringing.
"Hello." I said.
"You at the house?" Aiden asked.
"Yeah, I'm going to drop off Wren in a bit then we can go drop off Abernathy at the compound so we can go on our errand." I said.
"What exactly is our errand because a walk down your memory lane is still very vague?" Aiden said.
"I think it's just easier if you wait until I show you." I said.
"I'll be waiting." Aiden said before hanging up.
I went back downstairs and went to check on Wren who was wide-awake.
"How's my little man?" I said picking him up kissing his cheeks making him laugh. "I really hope you fell asleep early last night and don't remember a thing from that movie."
Wren just blew a raspberry at me.
"Yeah, I'm going to hear about this when you end up in therapy in a few years." I said sighing before getting him dressed for the day. Then I got myself dressed in a pair of comfy blue jeans a black tank top and a brown jacket.
.
"Okay Bud, let's go see Uncle Sam." I said before teleporting to Sam's house.
"Aunie!" Ellie cheered. "EN!"
"Hi princess." I said kneeling down to pick her up as well.
"Nora?" Sam greeted me with a bed head.
"Hey Sam." I said.
"How'd the mission go?" Sam asked.
"Seduced a rich old guy." I said.
"Gross." Sam said.
"Yeah, I was wondering if…" I started.
"You need me to watch Wren?" Sam said taking Wren from me and then Ellie wiggled so I'd put her down.
"If you don't mind? I could ask Natasha or Wanda if you have something to do." I said.
"Of course I'll watch him. What are godparents for if we don't babysit on occasion? Where you off to?" Sam asked.
"Need to go pick up Aiden then visit my old office." I said.
"Dallas?" Sam said confused.
"Other office." I said kissing Wren's cheek before teleporting to the safe house.
"About bloody time. Abernathy started telling old war stories." Aiden said.
"Then you're probably not going to like where we're going." I said walking into the bathroom to check on Abernathy.
"I was wondering when I'd see you again. You are the better conversationalist of the two." He said with a smirk.
"I'd wipe the smirk off your face if I were you." I said moving to undo his cuffs before lifting him up with my powers and not letting him move.
"You're not going to kill me, you need me." He said smiling confidently.
"For now." Aiden said. "Let's Go."
I put a hand on Aiden's shoulder and put one on Abernathy's back before teleporting to the compound.
Once we were there I released Abernathy and he collapsed on the ground. Aiden moved and pulled him up before handcuffing him.
"Nora!" Steve said shocked to see me.
"Morning, we need to borrow one of your interrogation rooms." I said.
"Who is that?" Sam asked.
"This pathetic waste of space is the division's lead trainer and Snow's right hand man." Aiden said.
"We need to keep him secure while we go run another errand and I didn't think it's be a good idea to keep him handcuffed to the sink." I said.
"Uh… right just take him downstairs." Steve said.
"Done." I said slapping my hand on his back and sending him to the interrogation room downstairs.
"He had a bathroom break about half an hour ago. Throw him a juice box and a granola bar in an hour and let him stew in his own juices until we get back." Aiden said.
"Where are you going?" Natasha asked.
"We need to run an errand. Shouldn't be longer than an hour or two." I said.
"Need help?" Rhodey asked.
"We're good." I said.
"Doll we need to talk." Bucky said.
"No we don't." I said.
"I know." Bucky said.
"You know?" I said confused.
"What do you know?" Steve asked putting a hand on Bucky's shoulder and Bucky shrugged it off.
"I was here last night." I said realizing what he was talking about.
"You just left with your dad." Wanda said.
"Oh shit." I said.
"What?" Rhodey asked.
"Whatever happens don't go on any missions the next few days." I told Rhodey.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Dad's going to need you tomorrow morning. Around 10 am at his favorite donut place." I said.
"You mean…" He asked.
"Yeah, and chances are he might not want to see me for a while." I said. "Tell him I'm sorry."
"What's going on?" Sam asked.
"Don't worry about it." Rhodey said.
"We'll talk when this is over." I told Bucky before taking Aiden's hand and teleporting to Massachusetts.
"What was all that about?" Aiden asked.
"Aya gave me a warning that my past and present are going to collide soon and the way she said it… it's the way she warns me something big is coming without giving it away." I said walking out of the alley.
"What does that have to do with your dad?" Aiden asked.
"A past version of me appeared at the compound last night and told Bucky everything which is why Aya didn't stop him when he said we needed to talk. This morning Dad came to the compound and took that version of me so I could help him propose to Pepper." I said.
"That was the sign you told him when he asked for your blessing isn't it?" Aiden said.
"Not exactly." I said, "I told my dad that because I couldn't tell him what was going to happen."
"Nora…" Aiden said.
"Dad is going to take Pepper out for lunch at their favorite restaurant. He's going to get flowers and rent the place out and he's going to propose or at least that's what he's planning on doing. Before he gets a chance to ask Pepper is going to break up with him." I said.
"And you couldn't interfere without screwing up the timeline." Aiden said figuring out why I said Dad wouldn't want to see me for a while.
"Yeah, he's also going to try and talk past me into doing something she's not ready to do which I'm obviously not going to do and now regret not doing." I said before stopping at a bar.
"I know you're having a rough day but it's a bit early for drinks don't you think?" Aiden asked.
"Come on." I said going inside.
"Nora we are on a bit of a time crunch." Aiden said. "Any chance Natasha leaked all these files online along with all the other files?"
"I technically didn't exist and anything I did was kept off the record. The only hard copies of those missions would be here in my old office." I said.
"Wouldn't Shield have moved those years ago?" Aiden asked.
"They wouldn't know about them." I said sitting down on the second to last booth from the back. I put a hand on the napkin holder and suddenly the entire booth shook and started sinking.
"Whoa." Aiden said jumping up a bit in surprise.
"Yeah, Gramps loved surprising people." I said with a smirk remembering the first time I was brought here. When we were finally all the way down we were greeted with and entire armed squad pointing their guns at me.
"Shouldn't this place be abandoned?" Aiden asked.
"I thought so." I said.
"Hands where we can see them. Now!" One of them shouted.
"Great." Aiden said putting his hands up. I slowly raised my hands before blasting everyone against the wall and knocking them out.
"Move, move move!." I said grabbing Aiden's hand and running down the hall to the stairs.
"Hey! Stop!" Someone shouted and I didn't stop to see who it was before I saw a familiar Asian woman and a man point a gun at us.
"Coulson?" I asked.
"Doctor Martell." Phil said lowering his gun. "or should I say Stark?"
"I'm off the clock, stick with Nora." I said. "What are you all doing here?"
"I should be asking you that." Phil said.
"Nora you know these people?" Aiden asked.
"Shield agents at least they were last time I saw them." I said.
"Nora?" I heard someone say behind me.
"Skye," I said.
"Sir the suspect is…" A tall buff man said.
"It's alright Mack, stand down, they're friendlies." Phil said.
"They don't seem friendly." Mack answered.
"Neither did your men pointing guns at us." I retorted.
"How did you find us?" May asked.
"I didn't I was here to look for something in my old office." I said.
"Your office?" Phil asked.
"I'm one of the founders of Shield." I said.
"You're twenty three." Skye said.
"She also happens to be a time traveler." Aiden deadpanned.
"Come again?" Phil asked.
"It's complicated." I said.
"My office now." Phil and we were marched down to his office or as I knew it as Peggy's old office.
"Hm… Like what you've done with the place." I said.
"It was originally…" he started.
"Peggy Carter's old office when she was Director of Shield." I said. "I lost count of the amount of times Dottie and I got yelled at in here."
"Dottie?" Aiden asked.
"Partner back in the day." I said.
"Right." Phil said. "We came here after the fall of Shield."
"So you took up the mantle, kept fighting the good fight?" I said.
"Someone had to." Mack said.
"Why are you here?" May asked.
"I need to get to my office in Block E." I said. "There's some files there we need to help crack a case we're on."
"Natasha put up all of Shield and Hydra's files on the web. I'm sure your dad can help you find what you're looking for." Phil said.
"Not these files. These were off record. Hard copies only." I said.
"What's on them?" Skye asked.
"It's personal. Need to know only." I said. "Nick Fury didn't even get to see them."
"You're lying. There is no Block E only goes up to D and you'd know that if you were telling the truth." Phil said.
"There is a Cell Block E it's just not on the blue prints." I said. "And I can show you if you let me."
"Why should I trust you?" He said.
"Because I could have blasted my way in here and taken out anyone who stood in my way but instead I'm in here trying to convince you to let me go down there." I said.
"Okay." Phil said.
"Meet me in Block D." I said putting a hand on Aiden and teleporting us downstairs and we tripped on a box. "Ow."
"You couldn't have done that earlier?" Aiden said.
"Sometimes it pays to play nice." I said.
"Does it?" Aiden asked sarcastically.
"Oh shut up. Find the light switch." I said turning on my phones flash light when suddenly it turned on by itself.
"Better?" May asked.
"Yeah thanks." I said moving over to the fuse box.
"That doesn't do anything. I've already checked." Mack said.
"That's cause it's not a fuse box." I said opening it. Each switch was numbered zero through nine. I flipped three of the switches, the ones labeled zero, eight and four in that order before pulling the lever next to the fuse box. Suddenly the ground shook and the wall moved back a foot before stopping it. "Damn it lags sometimes." I said walking toward the wall. I took a deep breath before blasting the wall open.
"Well I'll be damned." Mack said.
"Believe me now?" I asked.
"Seeing is believing." Phil said.
"Cool." Skye said.
"Come on." I said walking inside. The place was dusty and the lights that surprisingly still worked were dim. "Let's see, down the hall to the left and all the way down."
"You founded Shield." Phil said.
"I did." I said stopping at my office and opening the door. I looked in side and stopped looking at how everything was exactly the way I had left it except older and a lot dustier. There were boxes all pilled up everywhere and it was a bit of a mess.
"What are we looking for?" Aiden asked.
"Just grab everything." I said.
"Wait a minute, this is Shield property." May said.
"No it's not. It's my property. My office. And everything in here is off limits." I said.
"That's not for you to decide." Phil said.
"I wasn't asking." I said before blasting them all against the wall and knocking them unconscious.
"What happened to playing nice?" Aiden asked.
"It doesn't concern them. There are things in here that compromise the reputation of a lot of good people I worked with. It would be a disservice to their memories if certain things were to come to light." I said.
"Are you also talking about yourself?" Aiden asked.
"I did what had to be done." I said as I started teleporting boxes of files and everything I could find back to the compound. In a matter of minutes the entire office was empty. "Let's go."
"Are you sure that's everything? I'm not sure they're going to welcome you back next time." Aiden said.
"Anything important from my time in Shield would either be here or the storage locker Peggy set up for me. We're done." I said putting a hand on his shoulder and teleporting us to the compound common room.
"What the hell is all of this?" Clint said
"What thirty years of working for Shield looks like." I said.
"You worked for Shield?" Wanda asked.
"Help found it actually." I said grabbing a box and handed it to Aiden. "Everyone grab a box and start reading."
"What are you looking for?" Natasha asked.
"Anything from Crimea, Prague, Berlin, Saigon and Ferdows or anything that has the word Scourge on it, flag it." I said.
"What's going on?" Steve asked.
"Doll where did all of this come from?" Bucky asked.
"Long story grab a box and start looking for anything related to what I just said." I said.
"Does this have anything to do with the guy in the holding cell downstairs?" Rhodey asked.
"Yes." Aiden and I said not bothering to look at anyone as we were already in research mode.
"What is all of this?" Steve asked.
"Less talking more reading." Aiden said flipping through the file.
"Are we not going to talk about us?" Bucky asked.
"I can only tackle one thing at a time. The old guy in the interrogation room takes precedence." I said.
"No." Bucky said.
"Scourge." I said looking right at him and that made him tense.
"I'll start looking." Bucky said grabbing a box.
"Anyone going to explain that?" Sam asked.
"Box." Aiden and I said at the same time.
"Is that JFK?" Rhodey said breaking the twenty minutes of silence. I looked over and saw the photo he was holding.
"Yeah. Jack and Bobby those guys knew how to party." I said.
"You got a medal?" Rhodey said.
"Yeah, helped prevent nuclear war by sabotaging a Russian Missile Launcher." I said flipping through the files. "Didn't really see the point of it but he insisted and Peggy and Gramps dragged me to it."
"Who's the girl?" Natasha asked showing me a photo of my old partner.
"Dottie Underwood." I said.
"Underwood… She was mentioned in the Leviathan file." Aiden said.
"Yeah she tried killing Gramps, Peggy and I a couple of times. She was raised in a Russian child soldier program that was later known as the red room. I recruited her back in fifty one." I said.
"Wait did you just say you recruited a widow from the red room in fifty one?" Clint said.
"Yeah. I was kind of pissed at Peggy and Gramps for hiring Zola so I recruited Dottie as payback." I said.
"She tried to kill you." Steve said.
"So? Everyone deserves a second chance." I said. "We were in the middle of the cold war and American intelligence were focusing on taking care of cleaning up Hitler's mess. Truman dropped the bomb on Japan hoping that would send a message to the Soviets and scare them off. Obviously that backfired on him and they went on the offensive. Shield was getting started and after Peggy and Gramps took over the SSR they came to the realization they were ten steps behind them so the started Operation Paperclip. They hired scientists who could maybe give them the next Captain America which they never did thankfully. They hired Zola without my consent so when Aya stranded me in 1950 and I saw him there I left."
"What do you mean left?" Steve said.
"I wasn't going to go to work everyday for who knows how long with the asshole who tortured me, who brainwashed my soulmate and caused your 'death'" I said. "I told them either he goes or I go they chose him. I walked."
"Peggy and Howard chose Zola over you?" Steve said.
"They said I was being irrational and childish. I couldn't tell them they were actually building the new Hydra so I left." I said. "Came back a year later and made Zola's life a freaking nightmare until the day he died and hired Dottie to help me do just that."
"And Peggy and Howard just agreed to it?" Steve said.
"I didn't get a say when they hired Zola they didn't get a say when I hired a former KGB agent. The SSR had the best scientists in the forties but in the fifties it was about who had the best spies. We only had soldiers and our training programs weren't giving us the results we needed. Dottie helped us reform our program and bring our agents up to par." I said.
"You two were close." Aiden said.
"She was a good friend." I said.
"What ever happened to her?" Natasha asked.
"I did." Bucky said and everyone stayed quiet.
"Bulgaria, the first ever sighting of the Winter Soldier." Natasha said. "One Agent KIA, other…RTL?"
"Returned to Life." I answered.
"What's Ferdows?" Clint asked and I quickly used my powers to pull the file out of his hands.
"We're not going there." I said and everyone just looked at me weirded out.
"I got something." Wanda said.
"Crimea." I said. "Yeah… nothing here."
"Are you sure?" Aiden asked.
"I'll know it when I see it." I said as Rhodey's phone started ringing.
"I have to take this." Rhodey said leaving.
"Here we go, Prague." I said. "Mid fifties. Chancellor of Austria. This isn't it. I was essentially an over paid babysitter."
"Ferdows." Aiden said reading the file I thought I had hidden.
"Aiden put it down." I said.
"Oh shit." Aiden said. "This is it."
"What?" I asked not liking where this was headed.
"Alexei Udinov." Aiden said.
"Is that name supposed to mean something?" I asked.
"Snow isn't originally British he's Russian. His real last name is Udinov. Somehow in the fifties or sixties he managed to leave Mother Russia and went to college in the UK where he stayed but left behind a wife and infant son named Alexei. He grew up to become a KGB Colonel who was later stationed in the Middle East, specifically Iran." Aiden said.
"No." I said.
"He died in a freak natural accident in Ferdows, Iran while on assignment." Aiden said.
"Nora… what happened in Ferdows?" Bucky asked.
"The Iranian Coupe was only half the story. The Soviets took advantage of the civil unrest and focus the rebels were taking away from them to move part of their weapons stockpile closer and American base. One of our guys on the inside got word they were moving and Peggy sent me and a small team. There was this small town, Ferdows. Really old, really beautiful, that had a network of subterranean caverns that were being used to smuggle the bombs in without being detected. By the time we got there they had enough nukes to devastate a small country. Peggy left me the choice and I made it." I said.
"What was the choice?" Steve asked.
"What did you do doll?" Bucky asked.
"If the Soviets had actually attacked the base like they had planned they would have started nuclear war, the fallout of which would have cause the death of millions. I buried the nukes along with all twenty five thousand civilians living in the city." I said. "The lives of thousands or the lives of everyone else on the planet. I did what had to be done."
"Snow isn't after me or trying to tie up loose ends. He's after you." Aiden said.