Out of Time.
In the backseat of a black and bulky truck, Warren sits with his knees curled up to his chest. He's been preoccupying himself with chewing on all that gum he collected earlier and attempting to blow a bubble, like Natasha had at the hospital. It's not as easy as it looks, turns out. He keeps accidentally spitting pieces out and having to toss them out the window. He tried asking Natasha how exactly she did it, but she says it's a magician's secret, whatever that means.
Unfortunately, the boy's bubble-blowing bash doesn't do much to distract him from the fact that he's been in this car for hours. He's getting very sick of being crammed into the backseat of cars for hours on end, and he has an inkling that this isn't going to be the last time he has to sit through it, considering the trip to New Jersey is just that—a trip. They have to go back to DC at some point or another. This isn't a one-way expedition.
Another problem with this long car ride is that the more time Warren spends with Steve and Natasha, the more comfortable he gets with complaining to them.
He has figured out quite quickly that Natasha and Steve do not punish him for any of what other people would consider misbehavior. With HYDRA, complaining wasn't something Warren had the luxury to even think about doing. In some foster homes, the parents would scold him if he gave it a try, telling him it was disrespectful and that he should have been grateful that they welcomed him into their home. Some punished him in one form or another. Warren learned what the dos and don'ts were for each and every family he ever lived with. And now, he's beginning to figure them out with Steve and Natasha, too.
When Warren complains, Natasha rolls her eyes and shakes her head. She doesn't acknowledge his boredom because she has more important things to think about.
Steve, on the other hand, is quite sympathetic when Warren complains. So far, he has said things like, "I know, buddy. It's just a bit longer," and "I'm sorry. I know you're bored."
During another attempt to blow a bubble, Warren's gum once again falls out of his mouth. With a frustrated huff, he picks it up out of his lap, presses the button that makes the window roll down, and tosses it out before rolling the window back up again. "I cannot do it," he grumbles, slouching down in his seat and crossing his arms.
Natasha looks at him through the rearview mirror, pulling a teasing smirk. "You should keep trying, anyway. It keeps you quiet."
"Nat," Steve scolds lightheartedly.
"What? I'm kidding," Natasha says, shaking her head. Then, she points out the window at a big, blue sign. "Look. We're almost there, Warren."
Warren presses his head against the window, looking out at the sign. It has fancy-looking white text on it and it passes quickly by them as Steve continues down the highway. Warren twists around in his seat to watch the sign as it fades away into a small, blue dot in the distance. "What does it say?" he asks.
"New Jersey," Steve answers. "That's where we're going, remember?"
"What's New Jersey?"
"It's a state."
"What's a state?"
"Hey," Natasha interrupts—listening to Steve be Warren's own personal dictionary sounds less than entertaining. She lifts her feet up and rests them on the dashboard. "If you wanna play the questions-and-answers game, I've got a question for you. Where did Captain America learn how to steal a car?"
At first, Warren didn't understand the point of stealing a car. They drove Natasha's car to the mall, and he didn't understand why they couldn't just take it to New Jersey, too. But, apparently, driving Natasha's car would make it a whole lot easier for SHIELD to find them. Because of license plates, car types, and other identifiable features. Taking someone else's car was the safer option. Warren didn't mind in the end because it was pretty interesting watching Steve hotwire the truck. He didn't even know cars had wires in them like that, but they're pretty complicated and fascinating machines.
"Nazi Germany," is the answer Steve gives Natasha. "And we're borrowing. Take your feet off the dash."
Natasha looks over at him like she can't believe he's bossing her around. Despite the look on her face, though, she still drops her feet back down to the floor. A playful smile appears on her face. "Alright, I have another question for you, which you do not have to answer. I feel like, if you don't answer it, though, you're kind of answering it, you know?"
"What?" Steve pushes.
"Was that your first kiss since 1945?" Natasha asks. She's talking about how they kissed on the elevator during their escape from the mall, which Warren was not a big fan of. It worked, though. They got out without getting caught.
And 1945 is the year Steve must have gone into the ice that Warren learned about at the museum. Steve had been buried in ice for ages until they finally found him and defrosted him, and he was perfectly fine. It reminds Warren a bit of the cold chamber they keep his papa in when he's not of use.
Warren leans forward to see the look on Steve's face. He wonders if this kissing thing is the same sort of thing Papa would tease Steve about if they were still friends today.
Steve looks a little bit embarrassed. "That bad, huh?" Warren didn't even know kisses could be good or bad. They're just kisses. They all look the same in movies and shows.
"I didn't say that."
"Well, it kinda sounds like that's what you're saying."
"No, I didn't- I just wondered how much practice you've had," Natasha defends herself.
Warren furrows his eyebrows, leaning further in between the front seats. "You have to practice kissing? When do I have to start practicing?"
"No, you don't need practice," Steve tells him. "You don't kiss people until you're older, anyway."
"Everybody needs practice," Natasha counters.
"You don't need practice, Warren. And, for the record, it was not my first kiss since 1945. I'm ninety-five. I'm not dead."
At that, Warren's mind explodes. Ninety-five years old? That is a big, huge number. Warren is only seven. He can't even imagine being ninety-five. That's the biggest number in the world. "You're so old," Warren breathes out in utter disbelief. Natasha laughs and Steve can't help but smile with amusement.
Caught up in the moment, Warren almost makes a huge mistake. He comes terrifyingly close to asking if that means that his papa is also ninety-five years old. He even opens his mouth to say the words. Luckily, he cuts himself off before he can actually ask it. Steve and Natasha are very good at making Warren forget he has things to fear them for. Almost too good. Part of him is beginning to wonder if he should tell them the truth.
Maybe not, though. It's just too risky.
☁︎
Luckily, it's only about twenty more minutes after that before they make it to their destination. The whole place makes Warren feel a bit squeamish. It's a lonely, desolate, and abandoned military base surrounded by nothing but forest. The grass is overgrown and plants are crawling their way up the fences, closer and closer to the sun.
The three fugitives walk together through the military base, Natasha leading the way as she uses her phone to try and find what they're looking for. Steve reveals that this place is the place he was trained, back when he was in the military himself. Warren wonders if his papa trained here, too. Maybe. He doesn't know if military people get split up or not.
Inside Warren's mind, a variety of questions like that brew. Questions about his papa and about Steve. He wants to know so much more than he does. He feels like he knows nothing in the grand scheme of things because all he knows are the few things his papa could remember. That and the small amount of facts he learned at the museum. But the museum was about Steve and only had one small section that mentioned Warren's papa. And on top of that, the only information he could get was the things his foster parents were willing to read out loud to him. He begged them to read it all, but they insisted it was just too much—that they'd be there all damn day.
It's endlessly frustrating not knowing how to read. Warren is sure that if he could read, he wouldn't be so ignorant. He would read everything he could get his hands on. He would know everything about his papa, everything about Steve Rogers, everything about SHIELD, and everything about HYDRA. That way, maybe he would be able to figure out who to trust and who not to. He would know who is good and who is bad. He would know things.
That's not how it is, though. All Warren can know now are the things people are willing to tell him about.
At the moment, Steve is telling him about his training. It's easy to tell that this place is incredibly familiar to him. He keeps stopping to stare at random places, and Warren likes to imagine that he's thinking about Papa. Maybe smiling and laughing together, when Papa looked so full.
"This is a dead end. Zero heat signatures, zero waves, not even radio," Natasha announces defeatedly. She lets her arm drop back down, shaking her head. She slides her phone into her pocket with a sigh, and Warren sighs, too.
"We drove forever and there's nothing?" he asks exasperatedly.
"Whoever wrote the file must have used a router to throw people off." Natasha looks over at Warren and Steve only to see Warren kicking the dirt beneath his feet, scuffing up his shoes, and Steve staring intensely at a building in the distance. "What is it?" she asks.
Steve suddenly starts walking very quickly toward the building, so Natasha and Warren follow. "Army regulations forbid storing munitions within five hundred yards of the barracks," he explains as they go. "This building is in the wrong place."
"What's barracks?" Warren asks.
With his shield, Steve busts open the lock on the door. "It's where the soldiers sleep."
Barracks. Must be where Warren's papa slept, too.
Steve heads inside and Natasha pushes Warren alongside her. "Stick close," she tells him warily.
At first, it's pitch black on the inside. The three of them walk down a steep set of stairs, careful not to trip in the dark, and find themselves in a large, open space. Steve flicks a switch on the wall and rows upon rows of lights turn on one by one. With all the plants overgrown on the outside, you'd think the place had given itself away to the Earth. Inside, it's different. A large SHIELD logo is painted on the wall and there are countless dust-covered desks with old telephones, papers, and typewriters stacked on top. Nothing grows inside. All it is is lonely.
Natasha states the obvious. "This is SHIELD."
"Maybe where it started," Steve adds.
Every step has an echo and every breath feels a bit chalky, but they still wander the basement until they find what they're looking for, which comes in the form of an apparently suspicious empty bookshelf. Warren wouldn't have guessed that the suspicious bookshelf was a secret door leading to a secret elevator, but as it turns out, that's exactly what it is.
Steve watches as Warren squeezes himself as far into the corner of the elevator as he possibly can. He raises his eyebrows at the boy. "Not a big fan of elevators?"
"No," Warren answers.
"I haven't been lately, either."
The elevator takes them down to another dark and dusty room. This time, Steve doesn't have to flip a switch for the lights to turn on. They just turn on by themselves, and along with the old, chunky cameras around the room, it gives Warren that squeamish feeling again. The old, chunky camera comes along with other old, chunky pieces of technology. Aisles upon aisles of computers fill the room front to back, their only job being to power the few screens in the center of the room above a control panel.
"This can't be the data point. This technology is ancient," Natasha says with a scoff. Her gaze wanders all over the room, hoping that something might stick out to her and make this all make sense. And one small piece of technology catches her eye—a solid black box juxtaposing the pale gray of the rest of the machines in the room.
Warren watches as she sticks the little, shiny device from Fury into one of the plug-ins. It fits like a puzzle piece and causes all of the old technology to blink to life. One of the cameras starts to move, which Warren catches almost immediately. He hides himself directly behind Steve, but it doesn't make any of the unease go away. In fact, the unease only gets worse when the computer begins to speak in a muffled and distorted voice, reading out the words that appear on the screen in blocky, green letters. Warren can't make out what it's saying.
Hesitantly, Natasha hits three letters on the keyboard. "Y-E-S spells yes." The computer whirs and a satisfied smile grows on Natasha's face. "'Shall we play a game?'" she says in a weird voice. She looks back at Steve, amused with herself. "It's from a movie. It's-"
"I know. I saw it," Steve tells her.
"I didn't," Warren mutters, still hiding behind Steve.
When he peeks his head around Steve's back, he can see green lines appearing on the screen. They continue to appear until the shape of a face has formed, which gives Warren the creeps. However, that's nothing compared to the feeling he gets when the computer starts to speak.
What is with technology and talking these days?
"Rogers, Steven. Born 1918. Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born 1984," the computer says. Warren's heart drops down to his stomach. The voice has an accent familiar to him and he doesn't like the way it's announcing each of their names. It even seems to chuckle when it acknowledges him. "Subject 956. Born 2006."
Steve's brows furrow and he instantly turns around to look at the young boy standing behind him. His eyes show a mix of confusion, concern, and care, but all Warren can think to sense is contempt. He shrinks in on himself, his head bowing in fear and shame. He looks like a puppy that's just been scolded.
Natasha, on the other hand, has already been secretly suspecting that Warren was a result of HYDRA. It makes sense of why he has that strange, amalgamated accent, where he got his abilities from, and why he is so unaccustomed to so many normal things. She can tell Warren doesn't want her to know, though, and she understands why. So she never really brought it up. Now, she figures it's better to treat it like it's normal than to make a whole big deal about it, for Warren's sake.
So, as if nothing had been revealed at all, Natasha furrows her eyebrows and says, "It's some kind of recording."
The face on the computer is quick to deny that allegation. "I am not a recording, Fraeulein. I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945. But I am." On another screen to the right, a picture of a man appears. Neither Warren nor Natasha has seen him before, but to Steve, he's a familiar face.
"You know this thing?" Natasha asks, gesturing to the screen.
It takes Steve a good couple of seconds to spit out an answer, considering he's busy examining the computer from all sides, but he does nevertheless. "Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull. He's been dead for years."
"First correction: I am Swiss. Second, look around you." Slowly, Warren does. All he sees are machines upon machines, which is exactly the scientist's point. "I have never been more alive. In 1972, I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body. My mind, however—that was worth saving on 200,000 feet of databanks. You are standing in my brain."
"How did you get here?" Steve asks as he returns to Warren's and Natasha's sides in front of the large screen. Warren slinks slightly away from him, choosing to stand on the other side of Natasha instead.
"Invited."
"It was Operation Paperclip after World War II," Natasha realizes. "SHIELD recruited German scientists with strategic value."
"They thought I could help their cause. I also helped my own."
Steve has this very confused look on his face because, to him, what the computer is trying to say is impossible. "HYDRA died with the Red Skull," he says. It sounds like he wants it to be a fact, but there's a sliver of doubt hidden behind the firmness in his voice.
Warren knows his words to be anything but true.
The computer does, too. "Cut off one head, two more shall take its place."
"Prove it."
"Accessing archive." The computer screen glitches, the head splitting into two, before going completely black. After a moment, a black-and-white image of a man with a chiseled bone structure, pale, pasty skin, and wearing a soldier's uniform appears on the screen. This image soon goes away, replaced by visuals of thousands of soldiers brainlessly saluting and running through wargrounds with large, lethal weapons in their hands. "HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. What we did not realize was that if you try to take that freedom, they resist. The war taught us much. Humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly. After the war, SHIELD was founded, and I was recruited. The new HYDRA grew. A beautiful parasite inside SHIELD. For seventy years, HYDRA has been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war, and when history did not cooperate, history was changed."
Warren's skin feels so static-like that he feels like he's going to pass out. Freedom. The word encapsulates everything HYDRA ever took from him. Now they want to take it away from not just their experiments, but from everyone on the planet. Warren brings his hand to his forehead, pushing his hair away and rubbing his eyes as if that will make his feelings go away. He wants to leave. He doesn't want to see any more images of HYDRA or SHIELD, or HYDRA-slash-SHIELD, and he especially doesn't want this scientist inside the computer to get the chance to say anything else about him.
Natasha is starting to get that static feeling, now, too. "That's impossible. SHIELD would have stopped you," she breathes out, her body tense and brows furrowed.
"Accidents will happen," the computer tells her. A picture of a man with a mustache appears on the screen, soon to be replaced by images of Fury with x's over his eyes. "HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security. Once a purification process is complete, HYDRA's new world order will arise. We won, Captain. Your death amounts to the same as your life. A zero-sum."
Steve's fist smashes straight into the computer screen and Warren flinches, vanishing for a moment so quick it's almost unnoticeable. Natasha squeezes his arm. Somehow, it's comforting. The glass screen shatters and momentarily silences the scientist inside. It's a useless effort, though, because if you cut off one head, two more will take its place.
On the two smaller computer screens, the scientist's face appears once more. "As I was saying..."
"What's on this drive?" Steve asks so loudly he's nearly yelling at the machine.
The sound of him so angry makes Warren's stomach churn. He doesn't want to know what it will be like for that anger to be turned on him. It might be, though, when they leave this place and Steve thinks a little too hard about what the scientist said. He'll start asking questions. He'll ask who Subject 956 is and why Warren had been keeping it a secret the whole time. He'll ask all sorts of questions until he's so angry that he'll hurt Warren the same way he hurts other HYDRA agents. Warren is sure of it. He's absolutely, positively sure of it. Warren did bad things, and Steve Rogers is the epitome of good.
For now, though, Steve's anger remains precisely focused on the machine and the machine only as it continues to speak. "Project Insight requires insight. So, I wrote an algorithm."
"What kind of algorithm? What does it do?" Natasha asks.
"The answer to your question is fascinating," the computer screen says. The picture of his face is so blurry it's almost impossible to make out what it looks like, but if Warren squints his eyes, he's sure he can see a smile. "Unfortunately, you shall be too dead to hear it."
Behind them, the doors leading to the elevator slam shut. Steve throws his shield to try and stop it, but the doors close too quickly, and his shield only bounces right back to his hands. All the while, Natasha's phone begins to beep frantically in her pocket. Warren leans over her arm to see the screen, but it doesn't make any sense to him.
"Steve, we got a bogey," Natasha says breathlessly.
"Bogey?" Warren asks in a whisper.
Natasha doesn't have time to explain to him what it is right now, and she doesn't want to have to be the one to tell him that they're very likely to die in less than a minute, anyway. "Short-range ballistic. Thirty seconds tops," she says solely to Steve.
"Who fired it?"
"SHIELD."
"I am afraid I have been stalling, Captain," the computer says. Natasha grabs the little, shiny device and shoves it back into her pocket before pulling Warren closer to her by the arm. "Admit it. It's better this way. We are, both of us, out of time."
Warren presses his hand against his chest and his heartbeat is like a hammer. His head feels foggy and he wonders if this is some kind of bad dream. Maybe he's back at his foster home, asleep in bed, and none of this ever happened. It doesn't feel fake, though. It feels all too real. With blurry vision, he watches Steve rip a grate from the floor and toss it aside. When Natasha picks him up and starts to run towards Steve, he doesn't fight her on it. In her arms, he looks over her shoulder. All he sees is orange, all he hears is crumbling, and all he feels is buzzing. Then, all of that orange fades into a lonely and empty black.