New York
February 2011
"No, I will not force her to speak with you," Tony Stark snapped.
The man on the screen scowled. "Stark-"
"Fury, I highly recommend investing in blood pressure medication, but right now I have other things to do."
"Stark!"
"Please hold," Tony said in a fake-polite voice, and cut off the SHIELD director's next words as he dramatically slapped a button on his desk.
"I have told you, sir, it would be much more efficient to transfer the holding command to my network," JARVIS said.
"Yeah, but the button is so much more satisfying," Tony said, leaning back in his chair. "If I don't get to dramatically slam my flip phone closed anymore, I'm definitely keeping the button. What's next?"
"Ms Potts has informed me that you have a meeting in eleven minutes with the financial team."
"Yeah, no thanks. What else?"
"Sir, I get the distinct impression that you wish to cancel any remaining appointments today and continue working on the Mark II."
Tony paused. "Damn, I did a good job programming you. Yes. Do that. I'll be in my lab." He stood up and began to walk out of the room.
"Tony!"
Shit.
"Pepper!" he said, smiling wide and turning to embrace his girlfriend.
She dodged him neatly, looking sleek and perfect as always in her business skirt, matching jacket, and heels. "Tony, have you prepared to meet with the financial team?"
"Ah, about that-"
"No," she said.
"Come on. Just - it's one day."
"And you do this every day. You are going to that meeting."
He eyed the red-headed woman cleverly. "Well, what if I skipped?"
"I'm locking down the lab," she said instantly. "I'm CEO. I can do that."
"And I own a stock majority, so…"
"Go to the financial meeting and I'll let you off the hook with Merges and Acquisitions this afternoon."
"Done. JARVIS, find me a suit."
"In your office, sir."
"Excellent. Pepper, we're going to dinner tonight."
"Tony, I have-"
"JARVIS, cancel whatever of Ms Potts' appointments is clashing with my dinner plans." Tony spun and walked backwards while pointing at his girlfriend, whose face was caught somewhere between smiling and angry. "Seven o'clock. There'll be a limo out front. Be there."
"Tony-"
"Enjoy Merges and Acquisitions!" he fired over his shoulder, and disappeared down the hallway.
As he walked, the dark-haired man couldn't help whistling, hands stuffed in his pockets. He'd shut down Fury, gotten out of half his meetings, and arranged things with Pepper. This was the happiest he'd been in a long time, since-
The flashback came on fast and brutal, slamming into his senses. In less than a second he was back in the desert.
Blistering wind. Hot as hell. Staring a missile with his name on it in the face and thinking with hysteria that this had to be the biggest irony in a life littered with them.
Tony snapped back to the present and found himself leaning on the wall, breathing hard.
"Sir, are you-"
"I'm fine, JARVIS," Tony growled, good mood effectively ruined. "And find me a restaurant with a table for two at seven-thirty. Something expensive."
"Consider it done."
He absently rubbed his fingers over the arc reactor through his T-shirt as he stepped into his other office to change.
Washington, D.C., United States
February 2011
Nick Fury pegged the phone across the room.
It slammed into the far wall, bounced off, and hit the floor. It was the latest in smartphone tech, a piece that was far from available to the general public, and luckily did not break.
"Agent Hill!" he bellowed.
The brunette woman was in his office in seconds; she'd been waiting for the call to finish. "Yes?"
"Pull Coulson off Widow watch and kick him over to Stark's place. I need to speak with Jane Foster yesterday."
"Yes, sir. Who would you like to replace him on Widow watch?"
"Pick someone. And send Agent Barton to track Banner's exact location; you can take his place with Selvig's team." Might as well fulfill a request while he was punting people around. "No contact, surveillance only. He's to stay undetected at all costs."
"Barton is Romanoff's partner."
"She doesn't get a say. Her choice to drop off the grid. I want it done yesterday."
Hill's face tightened, but she gave him a sharp nod, spun on her heel, and left.
Fury sighed and rubbed his forehead.
Everything was so unstable right now. The Widow had dropped off the grid two weeks ago, as she occasionally did, and though she'd given him almost a decade of extremely successful service, it still made him jumpy every time. If Barton knew where she was, the Hawk wasn't telling.
Then there was the erratic and narcissistic Stark, the matter of keeping track of Banner without revealing his location, the question of Captain America, and now this whole mess with the Foster woman. He knew she was distraught about her alien boyfriend but he had no patience for the sentiment. Fury needed answers.
And then there was the cube.
"Agent Lang," he said, sticking his head out the door.
The agent who served basically as a secretary looked up from his computer. "Sir?"
"Get me a progress report on Phase Two, stat."
"Yes, sir." Lang stood up and jogged out of the room.
Fury stepped back into his office, shut the door, and pulled up the live feed and updates about Captain America's status. The man was in a medically induced coma, vitals stable.
On another screen, Fury saw the live window from Widow watch, the task force he'd assembled to try and keep track of the Widow every time she went off-grid between ops. They were only nominally successful. The last word of her had been a reported sighting in Chita in southeast Russia, and that had been thirty-one hours ago. She could be anywhere by now, if it had even been Romanoff - the report was unconfirmed.
And Barton was acting odd. Fury tapped his fingers pensively on the desk, examining the file with the latest psych analysis of the agent known as Hawkeye. Barton had been withdrawn, less talkative than previous years, and more close-lipped, particularly when asked questions about the Widow. There was nothing concrete, nothing certain, but Fury had years of experience managing his agents, and there was a niggling suspicion that Barton had been compromised in a permanent way.
The clock on Widow watch switched from thirty-one to thirty-two hours since the last suspected sighting.
Fury moved decisively, taking three sharp strides across the room and snatching his phone from the floor. He flipped through his contacts and made a call.
"This is Director Fury. Authorization Delta nine zero Omega black." He paused. "It's time to wake the Captain."
New York, United States
March 2011
"Enough. With. The. Moping."
"Darcy, I am fine. "
"You are not fine. You haven't left your lab in four days - what, I take take a promo and suddenly you turn into a freaking zombie? Have you even slept?"
"Yes!"
"When?"
"Ah…"
"Exactly. Don't make me regret switching to PR."
Jane didn't answer.
Darcy rolled her eyes, walked over to Jane's desk, and closed her laptop.
"Darcy!"
The brunette sniffed. "You're ridiculous. Okay? This is exactly why I didn't want to accept Stark's promotion. Come on. You're going to eat and put on lady clothes and we're going out."
"Don't you dare turn down that promotion, I know you missed your weird soft science stuff. Also, the last time you tried to get me to go out, Thor showed up and dumped me!"
"So maybe this time he'll come back and say you were right and he's defied his daddy," Darcy said agreeably. "We're going."
"No." Jane turned away and started going through papers.
Darcy hopped up onto the counter and dramatically flopped down across Jane's piles of papers.
Jane threw up her hands. " Seriously ?"
"Yes, seriously, " Darcy said. "You're done. You need food and-" She sniffed and made a face. "Dude, when was the last time you showered?"
Jane looked away.
Darcy sat up and felt her face pinching slightly with worry. In front of most people, she would've hidden it behind her joking, irreverent mask, but not Jane. Not her best friend.
"Fine," Jane sighed. "But we're not going out."
"Deal," Darcy said. She was a poly-sci major; she knew how to take a compromise. "Though it is a shame to waste this sexiness on a couch, I will concede to a movie night. With lots of ice cream. We will watch terrible horror flicks and eat sweet things."
Jane heaved a sigh and started powering down the computers and machines. Darcy hid her relief; she'd been getting worried about Jane. The scientist tended to cope with any sort of emotional turmoil in her life by throwing herself into her work with a fanatic and, honestly, kind of scary focus.
Jane stopped at the door when she realized Darcy wasn't following. "What are you doing?"
"I'm going to clean up a bit," Darcy said. "Your new interns are clearly nowhere near my genius. And if you think I'm going to share my twenty-dollar fuzzy blankets with you until you've showered, you are dead wrong. Come to my place in forty minutes. Bring popcorn, I ran out last week."
Jane heaved a sigh, but she must have decided it wasn't worth arguing, so she went on her way.
As soon as the doors hissed shut, Darcy kicked off from the desk and spun wildly across the room, whooping as she went. She'd have to thank Stark for the soundproof lab. And the spinny chairs. This thing was like suitable for a starship captain.
Hey. That could be fun.
"All hands on deck!" Darcy shouted, sweeping a hand across the table. "Land ho!" Papers flew up into the air, and she shoved the chair again, grabbing them as she went. Her old organizational system from before the days of working in Stark's PR department - a promotion that had come her way just two weeks before - came back to her easily, and she started sorting Jane's scattered messes with ease into piles near their respective instruments.
Spiky Box of Doom readings, definitely, none of the other graphs have so many colors… This is probably related to the Icy Death Tornado in Canada last year, I know that address, where was the rest of that data? Oh yeah, blue filing cabinet… Shit, the idiots moved her papers on anomalies… And this is that weird formula thing she cracked last year… for tracking energy anomaly things...
Wait.
Darcy looked back over the papers and frowned. While many of the interns and scientists at Stark dismissed her as a silly, ditzy assistant that Jane had hired out of pity, she knew exactly how intelligent she was, and that she'd picked up on plenty during a year and a half as Jane's official employee. This data was definitely out of her field, but she could tell (vaguely) that there was a veeerrrry interesting energy thing happening out in the desert of the southwest.
Darcy cracked her knuckles, flicked open her Mac, and opened Google Maps.
Twenty minutes and a ridiculous amount of coding later, she had a few pieces of the puzzle. Hacking was only a hobby for Darcy, and she didn't know enough to put together everything , but honestly she was just proud that she'd managed to sneak past any of SHIELD's firewalls. Was that because Stark was already spying on SHIELD and she was in his network? Absolutely. Darcy was not too proud to accept help.
Because that's what she had found. SHIELD had a base out in the desert. And they were pumping a crapton of moolah into that little hidey-hole, not to mention the hack job she found lurking on Google's servers, writing over the satellite pics of the area. Darcy had only gotten blurry photos, but they told a damning story: SHIELD base, high energy readings, lots of funding, lots of personnel.
What are you cooking out there?
Darcy slipped into the SHIELD network and changed its log of her IP address, tore through Stark Industries' network and erased any record there of her hack, and wiped her laptop clean of any trace. She'd been subtle, and only skimmed the surface of their network. Probably no one would even notice she'd been there, and if they did, well - corporations and government agencies deflected low-level hack jobs every day. Hopefully it would read as just a Stark janitor getting bored and dicking around on a computer and stumbling into something he shouldn't.
Humming, Darcy carried her laptop out of the room and headed for the elevator. It was movie night. She'd sort all this out tomorrow. As the junior PR liaison, she had enough access to Stark's oh-so-valuable time to bring it up, once she figured out what she was going to say.
Washington, D.C., United States
April 2011
His fists were raw and aching.
Gunfire rattled. Men fell around him. Bullets pinging off the shield.
Burning lungs, racing heart.
"I've got to put her in the water!"
Sore feet, gritted teeth.
An impact that seemed to shake the world down.
His knuckles slammed through the punching bag. Sand exploded across the dimly-lit gymnasium, and the chain snapped, landing it on the floor.
Steve Rogers sighed, counted to ten and focused on the physical world and sensations, the way the oh-so-brilliant twenty-first century therapists had told him. It took a few seconds, but once he had himself under a tenuous control, he reached for the next punching bag in a pile of them.
"Can't sleep?"
In a millisecond, he processed the familiar voice and controlled his body's natural screaming attack now danger danger reflex, the souvenir of having lived in a war zone, and turned it into a simple turn. "Sir," he said, his army training eliciting the respectful greeting. "Not well, no. Too many memories."
"Steve-"
"We need you."
Steve resisted the urge to drop his shoulders. A mission would be excellent. He'd be able to get back to what he was good at, fighting to protect freedom and justice, and he could do some independent evaluation of this organization. He trusted Fury and what he'd seen so far of SHIELD, as much as he trusted anyone.
"Finally going to tell me what's going on?" he said, unable to hide the bitterness.
Fury blinked. Score one for me. "What makes you think there's something going on?"
"I'm not a dunce," Steve said coldly, beginning to unwrap the cotton from his knuckles. "You thawed me out in four days, but I know how much debate there was in SHIELD about whether to wake me up at all. If it was worth the risk of me coming back unstable, damaged, or wanting revenge. Something made you decide the risk was worth it."
The director's face was unrepentant. "We had no way of knowing what your reaction would be. Captain America is a formidable enemy."
Steve resisted the urge to say that's not who I am anymore . He was unsure about a lot of things in this strange modern world he'd woken up to, but he knew one thing for sure: the shield and the man remained, but Captain America was gone.
He'd be Steve Rogers now, or no one at all.
If only he knew who that was.
"I understand, sir."
"Here." Fury pulled a folder from inside his jacket and handed it over.
Steve dropped the last of his wraps into his bag, zipped it up, and took the folder. Inside were papers, detailing scientific readings and theories he didn't understand, but he didn't have to. He stared at the picture on top of the stack.
"Howard Stark fished it out of the Atlantic looking for you," Fury said. Steve could feel how closely the other man was watching him, that one dark eye burning into his blond hair. "We've been studying it. There's enough energy in that thing to power the entire world. Unlimited energy, if only we could tap it. But there's been a situation."
"Let me guess," Steve sighed. "Someone took it, or tried to."
"Got it in one." Fury's expression, when Steve looked up, was as lined as if he held the weight of the world on his shoulders. Steve felt an odd moment of kinship with this man, this soldier, fighting for the same dream Steve still clutched close in his heart. Freedom. Safety.
The difference was that Fury didn't care who got in his way.
"It's gone missing," Fury continued. "Taken by an unknown foreign entity, surmised to be from Asgard - you remember the briefing on the Puente Antiguo incident?"
"Vividly," Steve said drily. It was hard to forget the footage of a seemingly invincible metal monster and five armed warriors with brilliant weapons, far stronger than ordinary humans.
Fury's lips twitched. "Yes, I thought you might. The working theory is that our thief is of Asgard, simply because it's highly unlikely that there's another alien race out there that looks more or less identical to humans. SHIELD is mobilizing. The world needs you again, Cap."
Steve examined his new commanding officer. "But that's not the reason you woke me up, is it?"
Fury raised his eyebrow.
"This says the Tesseract was stolen two days ago," Steve said, tapping the folder and fighting the images that swam in his head. He was already on edge from his flashback of a few minutes ago, and it was all too easy to remember the sinister blue light that permeated the ship and lit his battle with the Red Skull in that cruel glow. "You had me pulled out of that coma six weeks ago. What else is going on?"
Steve wasn't the best at reading people's faces, but he was no amateur, either, and he definitely picked up on a trace of irritation before Fury tucked it away. "Soldier-"
"Don't give me that," Steve interrupted.
Fury glowered. "Fine. If you must know, there was a… situation with another of our agents. The Black Widow."
Steve thought back; his memory was nearly perfect, but what came to mind made him frown. "That file was almost empty."
"That's because she's one of our most clandestine operatives. Not to mention her past isn't something she's particularly inclined to share," Fury said. "All information we have on the Widow is kept strictly confidential. Meaning no one sees it but me, Coulson, and Hill."
"Sir, such compartmentalization will limit my effectiveness," Steve said, trying to stay calm. He hated when COs withheld information, tried to sideline him and box him in. He was a super soldier, for crying out loud.
"Which is exactly why I'm about to fill you in," Fury snapped.
Steve glanced around.
Fury waved a hand. "Don't worry, this place is clean. I had it swept weeks ago and it's under constant surveillance. Don't give me that look. Of course I'm keeping tabs on the gym one of our most valuable agents uses."
"I'm flattered. Tell me about the Widow." Her name had been blacked out of the forms.
"A woman by the name of Natasha Romanoff," Fury said. Steve noticed that the man's voice dropped several levels despite his surety that there were no listening ears. "She was born in 1921, as best we can tell, and went into a Russian experimental espionage program known only as the Red Room. She was their best student, their prize and greatest accomplishment, and a massive pain in the ass for SHIELD for decades.
"Sometime in the nineties, she defected and played contract killer for a few years. Then in 2001, she had a run-in with Agent Barton. Hawkeye." Steve remembered that file, too; he'd been impressed, and still wanted to meet the man. "He'd been sent to kill her, and made a different call."
Steve definitely wanted to meet this man. There weren't many soldiers - call them Agents, that's what these people really were - who'd have the guts and confidence to defy orders in such a major way.
"She came in with him, and we spent two years picking apart the psychological triggers and brainwashing of the KGB. She's been one of my best agents for almost a decade now, and as such, she gets a little latitude in between assignments. She went off the grid two months ago. We lost her about a week in, and since then, it's like trying to track a ghost. I got worried. And here we are."
Fury made it seem like he'd given a lot of confidential details, but Steve noticed several gaping holes in the story. He ignored them, saying only, "Are you pulling together the Avengers Initiative over one woman?"
"One woman? No," Fury said. "In fact, she was originally considered for the team. That may or may not be an option. Depends on her story when she resurfaces." Something in the man's scowl made Steve decide to shore up the drop package he'd hidden in case he ever had to run. Fury obviously had no qualms eliminating agents who had become liabilities. It was equal parts impressive and chilling. "But given the theft of the Tesseract, yes. Barton is pulling in Dr. Banner as we speak, and Coulson is speaking to Stark."
Steve grimaced. He did not like what he knew of the billionaire.
"I know, he's not your type," Fury said. "I expect you to suck it up and work with him. He brings unique resources and abilities to the team, and trust me, he's been carefully vetted. Might not seem like it, but he'll do what it takes to protect this world."
"Hmmm," Steve said noncommitally, and slung his bag over his shoulder. "I'll be at headquarters in the morning, sir."
"Is there anything useful you can tell us about the Tesseract?" Fury called as Steve walked for the exit.
The blond man didn't pause or look back as he spoke in a hard voice. "You should've left it in the ocean."
Fury didn't reply, and Steve kept right on walking.