I wish for lots of rights that I cannot attain, Marvel is one of them. Enjoy :)

Steve sat on one of the rolling chairs in the meeting room. He'd never been to Washington, though he was invited once to receive a medal, but he met his frozen fate before being able to get it. The compound was different, definitely bigger.

"You don't have to be here, Captain," said the director.

"I'm taking it," he said, spinning the chair around—very dramatic—to face him. Fury didn't protest. I guess I'm Agent Rogers now.

"Good, because we could really use your help." The cyclops made his way to the front of the room where the television was. A few agents had occupied the seats, but Natasha was still missing. Last the soldier heard, she was making her way to the top floor to speak to councilmen. He didn't really know who those were.

The director briefed agents on intelligence, or lack thereof, sending many of them across New York and across all the destinations the Black Widow had walked. Clues were difficult to find when the people who could be leaving them were masters of clandestine service. Fury had an idea of who they were and he understood that they were specialized to leave no traces. Bodies were taken out of the site so quick that they couldn't even find one. If they had enough time, they probably would've cleaned the blood off, too. Their work was sloppy, considering that his number one agent was still alive, but he knows that Natasha and Steve coming out of that with two bullets each is enough to know that they were beyond average. "They rushed in," said the director. "Whoever commanded them saw a window of opportunity to come after Romanoff and didn't think twice. That's where they lost and we're thankful for that."

Steve thinks their leader may have been the mustached character. Despite his build and his strength, he was fallible. If he really was a part of Natasha's past, he assumed that the only reason mistakes were made was because of emotional attachment to their mission. The other spy entered that room. Steve was sure that she reached the same conclusion that he did, it didn't take a high IQ to understand that a well-oiled team of super—that's still up to question—soldiers trained for espionage making mistakes on the job wasn't common. The only reason they didn't get shot more was because the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents (he was one now, and he liked that thought) are good, but they definitely would've preferred getting shot less than they did.

Fury dropped a file right in front of him and Natasha. They were the only agents left in the room. She opened it to reveal the man in the simulation, the man Steve struggled to fight. The Mustache. "Yuri Bezukhov," the director said, pulling up a larger version of the file on the television. He zoomed in on the man's picture, it was of him walking down a street. He had no mug shots, passport photos, or ID photos. Just that one picture. "It's been very difficult trying to track him down. Thanks to the system that analyzed every single person that walked through the New York headquarters, though, we were able to narrow our search based on his characteristics." It explained how quickly they were able to get that dossier on him, the hologram that Steve and Natasha were looking at just a few hours ago in the morning.

The spy was analyzing the picture, but there was something off about the way she's behaving. Bad news from the councilpeople?

"He has other aliases," Fury swiped the touchscreen television to another picture. It was a really young photo of the man. "He went by Ivan Bezukhov during his work with the KGB. When the Soviet Union fell, he was Yuri one more time."

"I thought everyone from the Red Room Academy was terminated," Natasha said, not taking her eyes away from the file.

"That's the thing," Fury said. "He wasn't related to Red Room at all. There is nothing in his past files. We've extracted everything and it's turning out that he's just a regular cop. He was stationed at Leningrad before the fall of the Union and now he works a desk job at Moscow. His family died during a KGB raid, so he's more a victim than a perpetrator."

"Maybe it's the vengeance he's looking for," said the Widow, finally looking up from the file.

"Highly unlikely that he'd be coming after you for that," said Fury. "You had already been a fugitive of the USSR when his family died, it was months after you went rogue, and another month after Clint found you. Black Widow Ops and Red Room Academy were already in ruins."

Natasha set the file down and closed it, leaning back in her seat to brainstorm his motives. "It just doesn't make sense for his grievances to be projected towards Agent Romanoff," the soldier butted in. "Do you have any idea where he is now?"

"No, but—" he got a call over his telecom, switching his attention to the screen. "Alright, I'll pull it up," he responded to the other person on the line. Files upon filed popped up on the screen. Millions of documents were being listed as everything is downloaded. Natasha stood up from her seat, stepping closer to the screen to make sure that she knew what she was looking at. "That's-"

"That's Project Wolf Spider," she whispered. What does that even mean? The soldier refrained from speaking it out loud, knowing fully well that she's had enough of the question.

The spy suddenly lumped on a seat, her face expressionless but deep in thought. Steve couldn't read her, but it's not like anyone could.

The files that were uploaded were cases. Photos of unique men popped up with every single one, almost always having "deceased" stamped on them. The spy looked on, seeing the montage of dead men, some of whom looked familiar.

Steve watched with her, noticing that the Black Widow symbol, which he had seen on her belt and on the shirt she wore the first time around, was similar to the symbol on the file. The only difference was that it was horizontal. A bowtie, he thinks, finally having a word for the shape. Natasha's shape was a vertical one.

Fury sighed. "That's not possible." He grew angry, swiping the television to unravel his kill list from seven years ago. There were red strikethroughs on all of the one thousand names Fury had in the system. He was rummaging through them, trying to find any one that wasn't killed, except there weren't any. He had succeeded the first time. This onslaught ate away at the director, afraid that he might have missed something, but he personally went through every single person, evaluated each piece that the intelligence gave him.

"It shouldn't be, even before you killed them all," Natasha said, still staring at the screen. Fury turned to her in agreement. She turned to the only confused person in the room. "After the death of Erskine and Red Skull—" Steve could almost wince at the names, one caused him his life with Peggy and the other made him who he was. It only pierced because Erskine was only alive with his creation for two seconds before taking bullets to the chest in front of him. "—every super soldier serum was destroyed. The formula died with Dr. Erskine. Zola had tried to replicate it but it was unsuccessful. It resulted in a lot of deaths, which was a better outcome than most." She paused and sighed. "Some of his subjects ended up with malformations, physically and psychologically. Those who survived almost always killed themselves."

Natasha proceeded to talk about numerous cases. This one man had an already abnormal genome, which Zola had failed to test for. He grew large, like Rogers, but lost his hearing in the process. It was documented that he couldn't hear the outside world, but heard everything inside him, his heartbeat, the food in his stomach, his lungs heaving. It drove him crazy. He would shout when he spoke, but only heard the vibrations in his throat. Every time he sneezed his head spun because it sounded like an explosion in there. The man ended up gouging his own eyes out and tearing all his hair. "They never found out if he had abilities like yours. The subject was too difficult to control. One day, they just found him dead. He had to shoot himself three different times because he survived the first two." Natasha wasn't agonized with her storytelling. She was almost sad for them, though it didn't show in her face.

She told some other stories, how they lost limbs or grew extra ones. Someone lost their skin because the muscle fibers engulfed them. He survived for a minute.

"Zola called that project Ground Zero," Fury butted in, taking a seat next to the spy. "He was especially enthused after you killed Red Skull."

"He was under American custody, how'd he even do it?"

"HYDRA still infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D., they took him back to Germany," he said. Steve feels like there's a "but" following the sentence.

Natasha finished it for him. "But he was taken to work for Department X," she began. "Think S.H.I.E.L.D. but bad."

"That's where I got all of these names from," Fury said, pointing at the screen.

"They created unethical training programs and espionage projects in order to provide weapons for the KGB. Essentially like you, but multiplied and brainwashed," she paused again. Steve noticed that she was trying to pick her words carefully. He didn't know why. "Some of them didn't actually need to be brainwashed because they take orphans and raise them that way. Even so, those children's minds were still played with in some way or another."

"Department X is the origin of what we call The Red Room Academy," Fury got up from his seat to uncover all of the files he has about the Soviet Union, everything the department has been gathering since Peggy created it. He flashed a picture of barracks in Stalingrad.

"In here is the Wolf Spider Ops," she said, pointing at a window on the brick building. Steve felt like this place was so familiar to her. "Professor Grigor Pchelinstov head-speared everything in the Red Room Academy, especially the Wolf Spider program."

"He ordered for the extraction of Zola," said Fury, "and under our noses, Soviet spies outmatched our protections."

"Zola was taken to try to recreate the super soldier serum," said the spy. "And he began on Patient Zero for the Wolf Spider Ops. He was a little Russian kid who they trained for fighting. The serum wasn't for making anyone larger or stronger like how they made for you to be. They were trying to give the boy abilities that no one could have." She paused, opening the file on Patient Zero. "When he turned twenty, they graduated him from the program. He was the only one who was a part of it. Zola was successful with the serum, enhancing almost everything about him." She zoomed in on his face. Niko Constantin was his name. "They couldn't control him. He wasn't a soldier, he was a rogue assassin. So, they killed him. And then Zola underwent the same project on numerous other men, but ended up killing all of them, whether they did it or the subjects did it to themselves. This all happened a couple of decades after you went in the ice."

"The Wolf Spider program didn't see the light of day after their thirty-eighth try," said the director.

Steve stood up, pointing at the men that had attacked him. "How did they manage to do it again?"

"They shouldn't have been able to," said the widow. "Zola burned the serum formula after all his tries and it died with him. S.H.I.E.L.D. killed all of them a week after this project was disbanded." Natasha looked through the files of the new Wolf Spider Ops again. "They probably tried doing it again, but it's not like it's giving different results." The files of the men said that they all died in different ways but all under the same thing. Malformations and genetic mutations almost always ended in suicide. The ones who turned out alive were deceased because Steve and the spy killed as much as they could at the compound the day before. "There's still so many more," said Natasha.

"Do we know where they are now?"

"We don't know where Yuri is," the director said. "But we do know where he could be." He zoomed in on a map. "His last known location was Moscow, but this satellite photo was taken hours ago at Arlington metro. I'm gonna need you to take him alive, Agent Romanoff." She was about to protest but he wasn't hearing it. "This is bigger than just trying to kill you. They're running a new operation we need to know about. Are you sure you're up for this? This might be a little too close."

"No, I can do it. I don't even know any of these men," she said straightly.

The director nodded. He looked to the captain and slid something across the table. "Your jackets are already made of kevlar but I'm going to need you both to put this on before leaving." They were vests, really thin ones. "They're from vibranium. Howard Stark made sure to find more for you," he said to the soldier.

The pair left and Steve smiled on their way to the elevator. "They cared more for you than anyone else will ever know," said the spy, referring to Howard and Peggy. She gave him a reassuring smile as she helped him slip it on the same way she had with his shirt earlier. It didn't have the same effect as before, but Natasha felt the soldier quiver at the slightest as she placed her hand at his chest. She didn't make any expressions, but her mind was happy at the thought. Natasha was sure she wasn't using her seductress tactics on a partner, maybe that's just who she was around him. She didn't know. She knows that's not how she was with Clint, though. She slipped her vest on, too.

When the elevator opened to the ground floor where everyone's cars were, Natasha grabbed Steve's earpiece, concealed it in her jacket pocket and crushed it. She did the same for hers. "Why would you do that?"

"Shut up and follow me," she whispered as the two kept walking to their motorcycle. "I brought down two helmets. I'm gonna need you to wear one."

"We went on a three-hour bike ride with just sunglasses on."

She sighed, replying as covertly as she could, ensuring that they remain under the radar if anyone was listening. "Hate to break it to you, but there are more freeway bugs in Virginia. Lots of bugs." He didn't know what kind of bugs she was talking about, but both kinds make sense.

He followed her as she grabbed the front seat of the bike. He didn't protest having to ride behind her. His arms were going to hold onto the back handles when he heard her speak through a comm that was attached in their helmets. "This ride's gonna be bumpy, Rogers. You're gonna need to hold yourself around me."

He laughed. "If this ride is that bumpy I'll end up tossing you out of the bike with me." She was driving slowly in the garage.

"I'm gonna need you to trust me," said the spy as they entered the streets. He obliged and wrapped his arms around her waist. "I went to tech and made these helmets," said the spy. "We can talk at a frequency that S.H.I.E.L.D. transmitters can't hear and I put buffers in them so that even if they could hear, they can't make out anything. They're all over the streets." He was impressed, he didn't know the master hacker was also a hardware nerd.

"You wanna fill me in on what's going on?"

"I'm gonna need you to trust me, Steve, and I know deep down you do despite having known me for a day."

"Im ninety-five in a twenty-five-year-old's body who specifically told you that the hard determination of joining this organization was a matter of directing my loyalties to the correct people. It isn't easy to trust."

"I know," she said as she revved the bike faster. "S.H.I.E.L.D. can see us, but they can't hear us," she said. "I was up with the councilmen, briefing them on the supposed attack on me."

"What did they say?"

"They apologized that they didn't read it sooner," said the spy, though there's a tinge of anger in her voice. "You tell me, how the organization that's supposed to stop wars before they happen not see an impending attack on one of their own."

"I don't know how to answer that."

"We took down Hitler after you went in the ice. You are the reason HYDRA died. The remaining issue was the Nazi Reich," she said, the wheels spinning faster and faster and maneuvering the bike through cars like she was in a race. "S.H.I.E.L.D. had seen that Hitler's regime lived on past the end of the World War. You saw how many agents we have deployed. We have markers on everyone, especially in Moscow. If Yuri Bezukhov was really from there, we would know way more about him than just being a cop." She beat a red light, almost causing an accident. "The fact that they've encrypted the most important facts of the case is what threw me off. I asked the councilmen why they were after me."

"What did they say?"

"They said it's because the Russians wanted to take me so they could jumpstart a regime. They wanted to start the Red Room Academy again," she paused, "and they wanted me to surrender myself to get intel."

"What are you claiming?"

"After telling me that they've created super soldiers to come and kill me, do you really think the Wolf Spiders are going to take me alive? Think about it. Why would I surrender myself to a bunch of people who came here to kill me? The councilmen are smart enough to know that they shoot on sight, why would they make me surrender to perform an espionage mission that would be impossible in the first place? They're not here to use me for a neo-KGB operation. They're here to make sure I don't see it, and everyone else seems to be on their side."

The soldier didn't answer.

"S.H.I.E.L.D.'s turned on us, Steve."

Turns out that he wasn't a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent after all.