Chapter 2: Opening Moves
The sun coming in through the room's blinds woke Sean the next morning. After landing in New York he had rented a car and driven to a town called River's End on the shores of Lake Ontario. It was here that he would find the Lighthouse, hidden under an actual lighthouse of course. Plus he had plenty of time before he needed to get directly involved in anything, there was no reason to rush. He decided to take his time to relax and wrap his head around everything that was happening.
Just a day ago he was an average nobody, now he was waking up in a hotel a stone's throw from a secret underground base. He was going to be meeting with Nick Fury to warn him about Hydra. He had killed several people. Terrorists yes, but people nonetheless. There were pieces of the very first Iron Man armor waiting for him in his Fortress. Talk about a surreal experience.
Shaking his head to clear it, Sean hopped out of bed. After a quick shower he made his way downstairs and across to a small cafe for breakfast. He sat back and thought about his next move as he enjoyed his pancakes and tea. There were a lot of things he could take care of. Just off the top of his head there were the Monoliths down in the Lighthouse, there was the Darkhold sitting in the basement of some guy's house, Ghost was currently being used as a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative but slowly dying, and the Inhumans were running about. Of course Hydra was also an issue.
Things with Fury would go much smoother once Sean gathered some proof. Looks like he needed to get into the Lighthouse sooner rather than later. He paid his bill and made his way out to the street. Finding a small bookstore Sean bought a couple books on programming and computer hardware. It might be a secret base, but it was built in the '70s so modern technology should be able to get him inside. Sure enough between the books and his enhanced learning rate from Blessed by the Gods it took him only a few hours to understand the security system and bypass it.
Once he made his way down the elevator to the first level, Sean pulled up the mainframe and registered himself as the CO for the base. This gave him free access to everything on the base. Sadly there was no internet connections or outside hook up other than a link to S.H.I.E.L.D. satellites, which Sean didn't want to mess with and alert someone to his presence. He put that down as another thing to look into fixing, but it wasn't a priority. What it did have was hard-wired access to S.H.I.E.L.D. servers, though not all of them and he still had to be careful.
Using the little bit of knowledge he had picked up so far, and learning more as he went, Sean picked his way through files and gathered information. While he had insider information, it helped him to broaden the picture so he would be better able to relay it to Fury. The big thing he looked for though took him almost the rest of the day to find. It wasn't until after he took a break to get lunch that he finally stumbled on the encrypted frequencies Hydra used to communicate.
In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show, Ward had mentioned that Hydra made use of frequencies that were in between the standard S.H.I.E.L.D. ones. Now at first Sean had no clue what that meant, but after cycling through frequencies for hours he figured it out. Hydra had taken the standard channels and literally inserted messages into the data, you had to have the right equipment or know what you were looking for to even find them. Decoding them was a whole other task, and Sean decided to leave that to Fury, all he needed was the last two words of every transmission. In their arrogance Hydra didn't even bother to encrypt their signature 'Hail Hydra' at the end of each message.
Sean set the system up to record those channels that he managed to isolate, and moved on to the other reasons he wanted this base. He went down to Level 30. This was the level that all three monoliths were stored on. These monoliths - one for time, one for space, and one for creation - were designed to serve as a gateway to a fear dimension. Separately they had effects that might be useful, especially the Space one, but at the moment Sean wanted to keep them out of harm's way. Making use of his Fortress once more he put each of them in a timelocked room far away from anything else. Labelling these rooms 'Monolith Quarantine Space/Time/Creation' Sean decided to stay well away from them for the time being.
Once those were taken care of he moved through the storage room to see if anything else stood out, but nothing did. Everything here was either outdated, or just plain boring equipment that he could get anywhere. That done Sean decided it was time to close up for the night and head back to town. Making use of the tunnel system the base had led him to right outside the only pub in town. 'This must be a sign,' he chuckled to himself and went in for a drink.
LINE BREAK
Two days of reading and generally abusing his enhanced learning speed later Sean received a knock on his door. Being cautious as his new spy training told him to, he moved quietly to the door and looked through the peephole. Standing on the other side of his door was a very stern looking Nick Fury. Sean took a moment to calm himself and then opened the door.
"O'Connor," was all the man said as he slipped past Sean into the small hotel room.
"Director, thanks for coming." He was very nervous right now, this just became a lot more real all of a sudden. Before this he was just doing whatever he wanted and vaguely planning to help. Now though, if he handled this wrong or had misjudged Fury then he would have all of Shield after him. Not dangerous per se, but annoying for sure.
"We need to talk," Fury said, straight to the point.
"Not here, sir. I have a secure location nearby, but you're going to have to trust me." As he said this Sean slowly removed his sidearm from the drawer it was in, ejected the magazine and cleared the round in the chamber. He put these back on the table in front of Fury, the man picked them up, reloaded the gun, and slipped it into his coat with a small nod. Taking that as permission Sean left the room, Fury following shortly after.
He made no sudden moves and was careful to walk at a speed that was neither too slow nor too fast. To the outside observer they just looked like two guys on a walk, a couple of the people Sean had met even waved to him. The two people walking though were tense. For what felt like the longest ten minute walk of his life, Sean could feel Fury's eyes boring into him. Thankfully they arrived at the lighthouse with no problems. He led the way down the stairs to the elevator hidden behind a wall in the basement.
"This is an old S.H.I.E.L.D. fallout shelter, it was built during the Hydrogen Crisis and commanded by Rick Stoner, once the crisis passed it was forgotten about." Sean made sure to stay in Fury's line of sight while in the elevator and took no offence at the caution Fury showed as they exited. Once they reached the main control center Sean gestured to one of the chairs and took one himself. "So I'm sure you have questions, fire away."
"What did you mean when you said Project Flerkin, and why did you want to discuss it with me? We have no Project by that name." Fury's voice was level and calm, but his eyes were like steel.
Sean took a deep breath, "No, you don't, but it was the easiest way to get your personal attention. A short time ago, I came into an abundance of information about both the past and the future." Seeing the disbelief on Fury's face he hastened to continue, "I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can prove it."
"Impress me," Fury crossed his arms and leaned back.
"Okay, let's start with Flerkin. It was a Flerkin, a kind of alien Cthulu cat, named Goose that damaged your eye. It happened in the '90s when you were dealing with Project Pegasus, Carol Danvers, the Kree, and the Skrull. You told no one how it happened, not even your rookie partner at the time, Coulson." Fury's glare had gotten progressively harder while Sean spoke.
"Carol is also where you got the name for the Avenger's Initiative you've been working on, the plan to bring special people together to defend the world from threats outside the realm of belief. Her callsign with Project Pegasus was Avenger. How am I doing so far?"
Fury suddenly became very intense and leaned forward, "There are no records of any of that. Where did you get your information?"
"During the mission in Afghanistan, I woke up and I just knew these things. I really don't have a better explanation than that. It's how I knew about this base, and your past." Sean held eye contact with Fury, projecting as much sincerity as he could.
"Even if I do believe you, what do you plan to do with this information?" Fury was very tense now, Sean knew the man was open-minded enough to at least believe that Sean had information even if he was skeptical about the source.
"I thought that would be obvious, I intend to help you prevent bad things from happening." Sean turned to the bank of computer screens and pulled up the folder of recordings from the Hydra channels. "These are encrypted transmissions that are buried in the standard S.H.I.E.L.D. comm frequencies, and they all end the same way." Pulling a few up at random he ran the last couple of seconds on each of them. A half dozen voices repeated "Hail Hydra".
"What the fuck is that?"
"Hydra isn't dead, never was. When the U.S. government started recruiting Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip, S.H.I.E.L.D. did much the same. Unfortunately some of the people they recruited were Hydra, namely one Dr. Arnim Zola. Since then they have grown, and subverted a lot of S.H.I.E.L.D. resources to Hydra's goals. Unless I'm mistaken you should already have heard about a Project Insight. A pre-emptive strike on dangerous elements of society?" Fury's eye widening was all the confirmation he needed, "Now what if the program wasn't targeting terrorists, but anyone in Hydra's way?"
"...How many?" Fury asked.
"How many what?"
"How many would they kill? How many of my S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are Hydra?"
"I believe the number of targets was around 20 million, though I don't know for sure. As for your agents I don't have a number for you, what I do have is names. Both of those loyal to Hydra, and those loyal to what S.H.I.E.L.D. was meant to be. And to ease your suspicions a bit, Coulson and Hill are both above board."
"Who?"
"Well let's see. Gideon Malick, Alexander Pierce, Grant Ward, Jasper Sitwell, Brock Rumlow, and John Garrett are all Hydra. Admittedly Garrett is in it for himself and Ward is just a broken man who doesn't know how to do anything other than what he's told. Outside of S.H.I.E.L.D. there's also Daniel Whitehall and Senator Stern. On the other hand you have quite a number of agents that are still loyal. Romanov, Barton, Tripplett, Coulson, Hill, Carter, Mackenzie, Morse, Weaver, Gonzales, Hand, all the Koenigs, and the list goes on." As he said each name Sean pulled up their files and dropped them into two folders, aptly named 'Hydra' and 'Shield'.
Fury was very quiet for a long time. Eventually he turned and regarded Sean, "What do you get out of this?"
Sean was taken aback at first, but it made sense. Fury was a spy, he wasn't used to people doing things out of the kindness of their hearts. Not to mention that Sean's backstory here was effectively a mercenary, though one that worked for the good guys.
"I get to say I did the right thing, I get to save lives. And honestly what American doesn't want to say he kicked some Nazi ass?" They shared a chuckle at that, lessening the tension that had pervaded the room.
"So, saying for a moment that I believed all this, what's the next move?" Fury once again turned that steel gaze on him.
"I don't know. I have a lot of facts and knowledge, but I wouldn't know the first thing about putting together an effective plan for something like this. That's why I brought it to you. No matter what anyone else believes, I know that you are a good man trying to do the right thing. But not even you can act without information, and that I can help with." Sean typed a few commands into the main console saving all of the relevant files to a usb drive before turning back to Fury, "Or you can tell me to fuck off, at which point I would have to part ways with S.H.I.E.L.D. because while I can trust its Director, the people he answers to are Hydra. This will be a whole lot easier if we work together." He held the drive out to Fury.
The Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. stared intently at Sean for a long moment before pulling the gun he had been given earlier out of his coat. Sean was almost certain that he was going to be in for a fight, but then Fury reversed the grip and traded the gun for the drive. "I've had suspicions that something has been going on and this all matches up. I will need to verify everything though." With a sigh he stood, "I'll get a small team on this, only those listed in your loyal file. We'll be in touch."
Maybe he shouldn't have taken the risk to expose his knowledge to Fury, but however much the Jump Chain was focused on giving the Jumper freedom and power Sean knew that if he had just held his tongue it would have meant the deaths of thousands of people. 'The only thing necessary for evil to prevail, is for good men to do nothing. I really hope I did the right thing.'
LINE BREAK
After his brush with the legend that is Nick Fury, Sean decided that he should actually get to work on the stuff he put in his Fortress while escaping the Ten Rings. To that end he made his way back to his hotel room, locked himself in his bathroom and opened a portal to the entranceway he had seen before. Despite being called a Fortress it looked more like a large manor home on the inside.
His portal was placed right where a front door would be and there was a small end table next to it that had the tablet he used to make his Jump selections on it. The entryway had three doors and a set of stairs going to a second floor. The door on his right was labelled 'Storage Rooms', the one on his left 'Facilities', and the third one blank but looking like the kind of swinging door that leads to a kitchen. Heading into the third door first, Sean saw that it did indeed lead to a kitchen, as well as living room, dining room, single half bath and massive pantry. Only the kitchen and pantry had anything in them, all basic foodstuffs and nothing special. There wasn't any furniture in the other two rooms yet, but Sean wasn't bothered.
Moving back to the entry hall he decided to try the 'Facilities' door next. Through this door was a hallway with more doors. These were labelled as 'Workshop', 'Medbay', 'Garage', and 'Laundry'. Peeking into each room showed that each was set up and ready to serve its function. He went back and tried the 'Storage Rooms' door, which opened into what looked like the kind of storage facility you would see in Storage Wars. There was one main hallway leading straight away from the door and every ten feet or so there were two hallways perpendicular to it that seemed to go on forever. Each of these side hallways was lined with rolling doors about five feet wide and ten feet high.
The very first door in the very first hallway had 'Sorting' spray painted on the front of it. The one next to it said 'Burial'. 'So they are labelled the same way I was doing it mentally, nice.' Looking around he didn't see the quarantine rooms, so he headed back to the front. Mounted on the wall next to the door was a screen that listed all of the rooms in the storage area. It only took him a moment to find the quarantine rooms, apparently the Fortress had listened when he wanted them away from everything else. They were all the way at the far end of the room, it was a good thing he could portal to them if he needed them.
Sean backtracked and finally climbed the stairs to the second floor. At the top was only one door, and opening it showed a nice sized bedroom with a walk-in closet and en suite. As he wondered where any companions were supposed to stay a post-it note fell from the door, it read 'More rooms will be added as necessary.' That answered that question.
Now that he had finished his explorations Sean went back to the storage area. He opened up the 'Sorting' room door and found the room was much larger than it should have been. That made sense though, the Fortress description did say it had as much storage as needed. He designated the door across the hall as 'Armory' and moved all of the guns and ammo he had picked up over there. He didn't have any racks or anything yet so everything was on the floor, but it hardly mattered at the moment. He made sure every gun was unloaded and every magazine full before closing that room up. All of the tech in the sorting room he moved to his workshop where he could work on it later.
Before he could leave two objects on the ground caught his eye. One was a box about a foot wide and half as tall, the other was a long silver rod. 'Oh right, my Vibranium and thunderstick, cool.' He placed the thunderstick with the rest of the weapons and marked another storage room as 'Materials', placing the box of Vibranium inside. That done, Sean exited his Fortress.
He had checked all his banking information the other day but other than having a decent amount of pay from his jobs he didn't really know what to do with it. However the thought of all of the Stark tech fresh on his mind gave him an idea. He went down to the electronics shop and picked up a nice laptop, nothing insane. He got in touch with a stock broker and outlined a pretty basic investment plan, opting for a slightly higher risk to reward ratio than he would have used in his old life. He wasn't too concerned about money, but he was laying groundwork, when Stark made his announcement in a couple of days to stop making weapons Sean was planning on capitalizing. While everyone else was jumping ship, he was going to buy as much Stark Industries stock as he could afford.
Thanks to his memories of life in this world before he 'arrived', he knew that he wasn't getting any money from Asgard. This was because his parents wanted to make sure he could handle his own problems and not be reliant on them. Sean didn't have any problem with that, iti was something that a lot of kids go through when they finally move out.
That really didn't matter all that much though, the money would be nice to have but it's not like he could take cash with him when he left. This brought Sean up short. Couldn't he though, maybe not printed U.S. dollars but things like gold. Any commodity really, even if he just bought a shit-ton of random crap he could likely trade or sell it in a later world. Not to mention if he picks up as much media as he can in each world then if he ever goes to a Jump he's not familiar with he can research it before starting. 'And now I want to be rich, balls.'
LINE BREAK
Putting aside any schemes to get rich for the moment Sean settled in to wait for Fury to get back to him. In the meantime he tried to gather his thoughts on what he wanted to do next.
Going after Ulysses Klaue was probably the highest on his list. It shouldn't be that hard to grab him and his stolen Vibranium, after that he would deliver them both to Wakanda. If he did so as a Prince of Asgard it might give the Wakandans contact with a culture that could understand them and treat them as equals.
Beyond that there was only so much he could do other than bide his time. Most everything would move at its own pace and trying to speed things up might make things worse. He supposed he could try and talk the Ancient One into not letting herself die, or at least into handling the situation differently. It was unlikely though, she seemed pretty set on her path.
Sean used to hate authors who wrote time-travel fiction or self-inserts where the person refused to change the timeline. Their excuse always being 'but if I change it then I won't know what's going to happen'. To him it felt like a cop out, now though he was in much the same position. It wasn't that he wanted to maintain his future knowledge, but in this world he knows that changing any of the big points before Avengers could ruin everything. After that it was pretty much fair game, but until then he thought it best to take a back seat.
So that decided Sean went back to his reading. He was enjoying a small slice of his old life, although now he was reading textbooks and manuals instead of fiction. With his new learning speed it wasn't hard for him to pick up a broad range of knowledge. He probably wouldn't ever be Tony Stark or Bruce Banner levels of smart, at least not without a few intelligence perks, but he wanted to be able to at least understand what he didn't know.
The next morning Sean's phone rang, "O'Connor."
"This is Fury, your intel was confirmed." The man sounded very tired, "It's going to take time to do anything about it."
"I have a clubhouse if you need it," Sean offered.
"I think we will. I'll send a team over to start setting up, are you willing to transfer command?"
"Absolutely, as long as they can prove they're your people I have no problem with that." He never really intended to hang on to the Lighthouse for very long. It was way more space than he had any need for.
"Good, just ask them about my best friend. They'll give an answer no one but you and I know."
"Copy that, if you need boots on the ground don't hesitate to call."
"Count on it." With that the Director hung up.
Sean was curious who would turn up, but that wouldn't be for a while yet. Heading down for breakfast he saw the news clip of Tony shutting down the weapons manufacturing arm of Stark Industries. They had been playing that almost non-stop since he said it yesterday. It was only a matter of time until the stock price hit its floor and then Sean would try to scoop up a good bit of it. All things considered he would likely not even get a full percent, but anything he could get would be immensely valuable in a few years. He had already put in the call to his broker.
When the news changed to a statement from Obadiah Stane, Sean realized he might have made a mistake. By killing Raza and stealing the Mark I armor it was entirely possible, even likely, that Stane wouldn't create the Iron Monger. Tony would still make the Mark III armor in order to go after the weapons that the terrorists already had, and if Stane kept double dealing while trying to shut Tony out of the company then there would still be some kind of fallout. But without the big punch-up would Iron Man even be born the way he was originally supposed to?
At this point there wasn't much Sean could do about it, but he decided to wait and see what happens.
Almost exactly 24 hours after the call from Fury there was a knock on his door. Opening it presented him with the sight of Agent Maria Hill, Fury's right hand woman. Like her boss before her she had a no nonsense look on her face and greeted him with a simple "O'Connor."
Stepping aside to let her in, he shut the door behind her. "Good to see you Hill, did Fury send you?"
She surveyed the room before turning back to him, "Yes, and he says his best friend's name was Talos."
Sean nodded, that was the name of the Skrull that Fury worked with back in the '90s, "Confirmed. Your team outside already?"
She nodded, so Sean grabbed his few things and followed her downstairs. They stepped outside to see three black SUVs parked bumper to bumper on the curb.
Giving a whistle Sean couldn't resist the quip, "Do you guys know what subtle means? 'Cuz this aint it." Nevertheless he got in the middle car with Hill and pointed them to the Lighthouse.
It took nearly an hour to transfer command of the base to Hill and answer all their questions about it, but once that was done Sean was free to go. He didn't really have any reason to stay in River's End anymore, so it was time to take a trip.
'I hear South Africa is nice this time of year,' Sean chuckled to himself.
AN: Not really sure how I feel about this chapter, especially the characterization of Fury, but here you go! Things are going to move a little fast until we get to the first Avengers movie, after that it'll probably slow down a bit.
Again, let me know what you guys think! Either in reviews or in a PM, I'll try to reply if I can.