Game, Set.
Maybe it’s the way assassins move—soldiers trained to the brink of humanity—that allows them a sense of reciprocal understanding. Because after a few tense seconds of silence, everything descended into chaos.
Bucky made the first move, barely noticeable, his finger pressing the trigger. At that same second, Stiles dodged to the side and knocked Bucky’s arm slightly to the left. The stray bullet had hit a vase on top of a fridge, crashing down to the floor.
The younger man instantly threw his body to the ground, his leg shooting out from under him kicking the gun out from the soldier’s grip. Without a second to waste, Stiles reached for the fallen gun.
Despite being one of the most decorated and feared combatants in SHIELD, Stiles wasn’t so arrogant to know he’d fare well against the Winter Soldier without a weapon. Not only was the Winter Soldier an enhanced human, but he was also specifically trained as a killing machine.
Stiles could have easily held the balance with Captain America, but that was purely due to the Captain’s lack of killing intent and his classic war-trained soldier fighting methods. With a higher intelligence and an adept prediction of moves, Stiles had a good chance of defeating the Avenger.
But Bucky was different.
Bucky was the longest standing prisoner of war, as a legendary assassin. He might’ve been out of the mind control, but that had nothing to do with his fighting prowess. That kind of conditioning, the exposure and familiarity of ruthless lawless killing, even if it didn’t have permanent effects to his mind (which Stiles called absolute bullshit when reading the report filed by Captain Steve Rogers, talk about biased assessment), it inevitably had a dominant impact over his fighting.
The mind is flexible, but fighting—that was all motor reflexes, all automated strength and brutality.
To prove his point, the moment he grabbed the gun and made a move to get up, Bucky used his steel arm as a clasp on Stiles’ ankles and threw him to the wall.
Fucking Christ. His body slid to the ground hard, shards of the broken mirror he’d hit upon impact stuck to his back. He could feel that his ankle was dislocated. Should he be grateful that at least it’s not shattered? Probably. But Stiles was way beyond pissed at being thrown like a ragdoll to pay attention.
With his hands moving faster than his mind, Stiles opened fire against the soldier.
To his benefit, Bucky wasn’t quick enough to avoid the first round, the bullet embedding itself on his upper thigh. But that did nothing to the supersoldier’s movement as he leapt over the dining table, knocking it over in the process to act as a barrier.
Deciding not to waste his bullets, Stiles slid the gun against the belt of his pants and grabbed the knives off the kitchen counter. This only took a moment, when his back was turned to grab the weapon, five seconds top.
Yet the instant he turned back around, Bucky was charging at him. Stiles braced as best he could, bringing one arm up as a deterrent whilst his dominant hand gripped the knife.
Bucky knocked Stiles against the wall, trapping his neck in a chokehold. With ease unparalleled in human strength, he lifted the intruder up by his neck. But before he could grab the gun from the younger man’s belt, he felt a cold sensation against his neck. A knife, he thought in a split second.
One wrong move and this rogue agent wouldn’t hesitate to slit his neck. Bucky knew the signs of a murderer, having stared a lot of them down in his time, and Stiles—his eyes—was as cold-blooded as they come. So, he paused.
Stiles, noticing this, took the moment to gain leverage so that he wasn’t actively losing his breath. He brought his legs up, one wrapped against the soldier’s torso and the other braced against the man’s chest, trying and failing to push him away—to which he’d expected, because if anything, supersoldiers are sturdier than reinforced steel walls.
The two men stopped in this position, with Bucky’s hand tightening around Stiles’ neck and Stiles pressing the blade against the soldier’s jugular hard enough to draw a slit of blood. Bruised, bloody and tense. Each glaring at the other, breaths just tinged with the slightest hint of pain and a world of killing intent.
This was a battle of nerves. And when it comes to that, Stiles has never lost.
“Are you done?” He gritted out, without much thought to the neck hold he was in.
Bucky glared at him even more, refusing to say a word.
“This little test.” Stiles slid the blade down from his jugular to the dip at the junction of his collarbones, nicking the skin as he did so. “How far are we going?”
There must’ve been something in his actions that convinced Bucky of something, because the next second the grip on his neck let off. With that, he fell to the ground for what felt like the fifth time that day alone.
Stiles couldn’t help the groan that ripped from his lips, feeling the wound on his abdomen bleed as his core clenched at the impact. He sat there, head leaning against the wall, and just stared at the other man.
Bucky had backed off onto a stray chair, sitting down to inspect his bullet wound. He ripped a good chunk of his pants that were blocking the site, then using the cloth to wipe away excess blood.
“So you’re not all talk.”
The supersoldier broke their tension with ease, hands reaching for a pair of scissors that fell on the floor. Stiles watched his movements, knowing full well that their little test fight was over, and sunk a little bit more into the floor.
“You really couldn’t think of a better way to test that?”
Bucky shrugged, using the scissors to dig for the bullet without flinching, “No.”
“Bastard.” Stiles whispered to himself, popping his ankle back in like it was nothing. The tension bled away from his shoulders, his muscles crying in relief. “So?”
“So, what?” The bullet was rudely extracted with no finesse, as he dropped it to the ground with a small clink.
“Are you going to help me or report me?”
Bucky resumed his silence like a shield, his glare still set on his face like a permanent feature. Stiles didn’t falter, taking the full brunt of the look. With a put-upon sigh, the younger took his burner phone out and threw it at the other man.
Before the supersoldier could ask, Stiles smirked at him.
“Contacts list.” There was a slight cockiness to the attitude in which Stiles exhibited, Bucky noted, “Under Spangles.”
The cheap plastic phone on his hands felt heavier by the second. He kept his eyes trained at the fugitive, while his metal fingers clicked away with the instructions. When he reached the contact tilted ‘Spangles’, he saw a number that he’d memorised over nights on a crumpled paper.
That paper was now burned into ashes scattered over some garbage pile in Texas. But the number—that number that haunted him all this time, with promises of home and safety, now came back to him.
His thumb hovered over the call button, the smooth metal gliding over the mass-produced plastic. Bucky repeated the movement, just to test the nerves under this too-young agent, and watched as his assailant relaxed into the wall, unbothered.
“Swear you won’t kill him.”
Stiles shrugged, “Only if he pulls his punches.”
A second later, Bucky grunted and slumped his head against the back of the chair. “Fuck.” He ran his metal hand through his messy hair, “You’re a right crazy nutjob ain’t you?”
“Oh, soldier.” There was a hint of playfulness that flashed across the room, from one fugitive to another, that seemed too out of place for their circumstance but felt right enough not to be disturbing. Which is to say, perfect for this new partnership. “You’ve no idea.”
***
Steve Rogers was jolted out of his sleep in the Avengers break room when the alarms flared to life. He jumped off the couch, looking up at the speakers and red emergency lights colouring the room. Grabbing his shield off the side of a coffee table, he was stopped by a crackle in the speaker system.
Then Stilinski’s voice sounded loud and clear, all clipped words and curling tones. A declaration of war.
You know who you are.
I’m going to let you feel every inch of fury that you’ve lit in me.
“Fury.” Steve looked up, feeling like things are actually starting to click into place.
He’s been running blind this entire time, missing information, lacking context. No one would tell him anything, not Clint who’s off running his own counter-investigation, not Natasha who acts in hesitation and nervous like he’s never before seen, and especially not Nick Fury. Nick Fury who couldn’t look him in the eyes in that briefing, not truly.
As used to as he is with Fury’s half-truths and misguided lies, he could depend on Fury to subscribe to the greater good. Their means and ways may not always align, but they’ve always had the same end-goal. He understood better now, after interacting with the world and the many lectures from both Tony and Natasha of how complicated it is to do the good thing.
How sometimes there isn’t a right way to do things, just a way that results in the highest ‘good’ net gain. How the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as Tony would repeatedly teach him through actions and outcomes.
Fury had no lost tears over collateral damage, didn’t lose any sleep over all the deaths he caused both innocent and deserved. Justification had no worth to him, only the world. As long as the world is spinning, he’d fight tooth and nail to keep it all from derailing, no matter the cost.
Trouble, no matter who wins or loses, still comes around.
So, Steve may not always like Nick Fury, may not always agree with him, but he always respected the guy with the limited understanding he could afford. And now.
Well, now. This mission. It was setting off all the warning bells in his mind, in tandem with the alarms ringing through the walls. He’s in the dark with no intel, and no way to get it. The only one with intel is the mysterious, dangerous and elusive Agent Stiles Stilinski, their target.
And he’s got a feeling that getting any information out of that man would be near impossible. He’s hoping someone will prove him wrong.
Natasha burst through the door amidst the fanfare of combat boots hitting the ground and panicked orders shouted across hallways, breaking his train of thoughts. “Steve.”
Steve nodded his head towards her direction, following her lead as she led the way down the hallway. “Update?”
“Stiles broke out of his restraints,” Natasha said, with her voice strained.
Frowning, the Captain pursed his lips in preparation for bad news, “Casualties?”
“None.” If Natasha noticed Steve’s haltering footsteps, she didn’t say anything and kept on walking. “Agent Ward, who was in the room with him, is banged up and unconscious but otherwise fine.”
Steve kept his eyes trained on the red-headed assassin in front of him. He couldn’t get a proper read on her, though she has never really been easy to read. But Steve liked to think that he’d known her enough to tell her moods, as he sometimes could.
“So you were right.” Remembering his conversation with Natasha, her implying that getting captured was his plan all along. “He was playing us.”
Natasha spared him a look, hating being right but couldn’t find it in her heart to fault Stiles for his actions. She knew better than anyone the life he’s living, having been on the run once herself.
“Do we know what he wanted here?”
“He wanted something from the file servers, intel, probably.” The assassin took her access card out and swiped the elevator access doors to open for them, “The fact that he didn’t kill anyone means he wasn’t here on the offensive.”
“What does that tell us?” Steve spared a look at the hallway as the doors closed, the elevator whirring to life as it ascended.
Natasha thought it over and over in her head. It tells her a lot of things: getting captured by SHIELD would be something that he wouldn’t have done unless he had no other option, which means he’s desperate. It also tells her that Stiles probably had nothing to go on, other than the item he stole, else he’d have no reason to come back here for intel. More frighteningly, it tells her that whatever Stiles was caught up in, SHIELD had something to do with. Something incriminating, judging by the young man’s Coup D’etat speech.
But she’s not sure what good it would do to tell Steve about it. It would complicate things further, and when Steve gets caught in a complicated situation, he fights back harder.
So hard, sometimes, that things get a little lost in translation.
And translation was exactly what they all needed. Because Stiles was willing to burn all his bridges and make an enemy of everyone he’d known, just for this. And they have no idea what this is. And that tells her something more sinister.
“I don’t know, Steve.” Natasha sighed, the elevator stopping on the intended floor, before stepping out into a jog. “But we need to get to Fury.”
The supersoldier matched her pace, avoiding the panicked personnel running the opposite way they were, his mind racing with Stiles’ word choice in his declaration of war, “Is that Stilinski’s target, Fury?”
“Maybe.” Romanov broke into a run once they rounded the corner of the hallway leading to Fury’s office, spotting the opened doors. “But it’s about time we get some answers of our own.”
They found Clint standing in Fury’s office, or at least the remains of what used to be Fury’s office. It was beyond recognition: the panel of glass walls overlooking the city was blown to shards, burnt papers and charred dented cabinets on the floor. The ceiling panels were raining electricity down on them, the carpeted floors a black smoking reminder of the fabric it was. A bomb, an altered one, high-intensity low-range one. They had one of those in the SHIELD armoury, courtesy of brilliant scientists.
In the midst of the destruction though, there were no dead bodies.
“Where is he?” Steve found himself asking, not sure who he meant by the pronoun. Stilinski or Fury?
Clint shook his head, eyes canvassing the area. “I don’t know.”
“Stilinski did this?” The Captain stepped over the skeleton of Fury’s chair, turning to see the damage of the room. “To kill Fury?”
“He wouldn’t do that.” Clint closed his eyes for a moment, his shoulders tense, before looking straight at the supersoldier. “Until we see proof of a body, Fury’s not dead.”
Steve held the archer’s gaze, an unsettling feeling of dread growing in his gut. “So where is he?” He gestured a hand at the mess. “What’s the bomb for?”
There was a phone in Clint’s hand, he noticed. By the look of the ringing screen, the agent had been trying to contact their missing Director with no luck, watching as it flashed ‘Call Failed’ before blacking out.
“Did Stilinski take him?”
Steve saw that Clint stopped responding, choosing instead to keep his opinions to himself. Running a hand through his hair, the blonde changed his target of questioning to the assassin who had kept suspiciously silent since they entered the scene.
“Nat?”
Natasha wasn’t faring much better than Clint, her gaze stuck at the blown out wall. None of this made any sense. And Fury being gone is akin to throwing a Molotov cocktail into a warehouse of fireworks. Her jaw clenched, teeth gnashing against each other.
If this hadn’t already been the worst set of circumstances, it definitely was now.
***
Stiles opened the door to the rented motel room, opening it just enough for his guest to enter and he shut it just as quickly.
“That’s it?” He nodded at the medium-sized pack on the bulky mans’ back.
His guest simply stared at him, then at the small-sized duffel bag placed innocently on one side of the bed. “Like you’re one to talk.”
“Had to leave my 60 inch LED screen and feature fountain at home.” Stiles snarked, turning his back at the man to grab a bottle of water from the cooler. “Bit hard to stay inconspicuous otherwise.”
Bucky had not moved an inch since he entered the room, staying close to the exits, next to the curtained windows. He took his time to scan the place, feeling oddly familiar with the place. The barren room, the lack of sentimental belongings and the constantly packed bag.
It was how he lived. The drawn curtains, the open doors of the wardrobe and bathroom, how all the electronic devices were plugged out of its sockets—and he could bet that if he lifted the pillow, he’d find a weapon stashed under it.
Bucky may have not known much about this reckless man, but he understood him a little better now. He was brought out of his thoughts when a stray bottle came flying at him.
“Drink, you look awful.” Stiles nodded at the water in the soldier’s metal grip. “No tricks, promise.”
There was a part of him, the paranoid soldier, that told him not to drink it—that something was always at play. But Bucky thought poisoning him would be detrimental, after all the man went through to recruit him, so he twisted the bottle open and drank freely, “Still look better than you.”
Stiles was shocked, for a moment, but it wears off quickly to be replaced with a cold smirk. “You wish.”
Not that he was being arrogant, he knew James Buchanan Barnes was a good looking man. His pictures were memorialised and glorified in the museums and hall of fame. But compared to that dashing soldier, this battered man with long unkempt hair and scraggly beard lost at least a dozen points.
But then he took one good look at the mirror as he went to wash his face, and maybe he was selling himself too high.
He had blossoming bruises of purple and greenish-yellow on the side of his face, for when he got slammed into the table courtesy of the dickbag Ward. His eyes were sullen, and the skin underneath it was sallow, tender and dark. Prop it all off with a split lip and that really adds up to a dashing face—by prison standards.
Stiles watched himself in the mirror, feeling so lost in his reflection. Even when he’d been undercover within the worst bunch of humanity, he’d never looked this—this horrible. Lifeless, hopeless, villainous.
Derek used to say it was because he was filled with love, the love of the people around him and his love for the world he’s helped build. And nothing, not makeup nor blood, could wash that away.
He must be right, to some extent. Because now that his world was gone, now that everyone who loved him was gone, Stiles couldn’t recognize himself.
Or maybe he was this way the entire time, and that love he’d collected inside him was all just a temporary fantasy. A dream he’d woken up from entirely too soon.
The sound of the running tap was the only thing tethering him to reality, and he grabbed at it before he could be drowned away. Splashing his face with cold water, Stiles shook himself off and taped his mind back together.
He left the bathroom to find his new partner-in-crime looking out the window through the slits of the curtain. If Stiles didn’t know any better, he’d think the man was looking to escape. But he knew, from his own tendencies, that the soldier was just on the lookout.
“You wanted to look for the Commissioner.”
Stiles raised his brows at the sudden conversation starter, grabbing a towel off the wardrobe he patted his face dry. “Well, that is the mission.”
“It’s a suicide mission.” Bucky spared a look at him before going back to lookout, the sight of his silhouette grim and dangerous, “The minute you start hunting them, it’ll burn everything in your life.”
“There’s nothing to burn.” Stiles went around packing the last of his belongings into his bag, shaking it to prove a point. He sat on the edge of the bed, taking a stray burner from the bedside table, sending a text off. “What, Barnes, you getting cold feet?”
At the ridiculous insinuation, Bucky turned to the man occupied on his phone, shrugging his bag further up the metal joint of his shoulder. “This is serious.”
Stiles, to his credit, stopped all the joking pretenses and met his gaze with matching intensity. For someone of the Winter Soldier’s calibre to sound this dreadful over a target, says a lot about how fearsome the Commissioner was. Solemnly, he nodded, “I know.”
He pressed the send button on his burner, checking the address he got as a reply before that one last time, before slipping it into the backpocket of his pants. Grabbing the gun from under the pillow, he tucked that under his belt and stood up with his duffel slung across his back.
“Then, we’re gonna need a lot more than your wits to catch the bastard.” Bucky repeated his warning, watching the man do a last round-up of the room before meeting him near the door. “We can’t do this alone.”
Stiles looked up at the taller man with a challenge in his brows, tossing the keys to a car he hijacked to the soldier—who caught it in quick precision.
“Who says we’re alone?”
***
Tony Stark has never been a patient man. With his resources and his genius, it was understandable why. He could do anything he wanted, built everything he couldn’t get and set gigantic plans into motion with hundreds of hands helping him. So, patience was a virtue lost on a man who lacked nothing.
So, sue him, he was halfway geared into his Mark 47 suit when the text from Stiles came and halted his progress.
The text, infuriatingly, only said: meet up, where?
Kids these days are getting more annoying by the minute. Granted, the mid 20’s Agent Stiles Stilinski was no kid by his standard—but, god, the man sure could act like one. JARVIS made some quip about pot calling the kettle black, but Tony made good to ignore the outrageous lie from his AI.
Tony, ever the prepared planner, had set aside a warehouse bought by one of his secret subsidiaries untraceable to his person, and had equipped it enough for a makeshift headquarters. The rest of the tech will be sent in due time.
He sent the address for the warehouse as a reply, deciding to keep his interrogative outburst for when he could face the infuriating man in person. Tony took his compact Iron Man briefcase suit, and donned his multi-functional trademark glasses, JARVIS whirring to life near his ears as he did.
“JARVIS, prepare a boat load of coffee in the warehouse, pronto.”
To no surprise of his own, his jackass British AI replied, “Protein smoothies were already ordered and on their way, Sir.”
“I think your english is broken, I said coffee.” Tony frowned, he really needed coffee if he were to survive this day.
Though JARVIS technically had no face, the smirk in his voice was plenty evident. “My english is fine, Sir.”
Tony glared at the four empty coffee cups that littered his worktable, before giving up entirely. “Traitors, the lot of you.”
He glanced at the program running the cleaning on the corrupted notes for Howard’s briefcase blueprint then shifted his eyes to the impending black cube of doom, as he’s so appropriately named.
“Even after all these years, dear old Dad’s still holding things over my head.” The spite in his words was uncalled for, since the man did try his level best to do the right thing and destroy any information related to this cube, Tony knows that.
But Howard Stark has always been something that’s furled itself deep into his space, filled up every nook and cranny of the darkest places. Like a benign tumour, sitting there, pressuring everything around it without ever directly causing active harm.
He was a man who kept a lot of secrets, and even more schemes. You’d be hard pressed to find a project that the man hadn’t weaselled himself into in the prime of his days. Never without an ulterior motive, whether it be money, prestige, intelligence or women.
Everyone says that Howard Stark left his son, Anthony Edward Stark, an empire. Less are those who know the truth.
Which was that Howard never left Tony with anything, it was his mother who had created the will, and the man simply let it pass.
Obie—no, Obadiah had told him once that Howard was reluctant to see the Stark company fall into his hands. At the time, Tony thought it was about his worth, and set out to prove otherwise.
Now, he knew that Obadiah had only done that to use Tony and his complex to increase his productivity, to capitalise on his attempts of proving his worth to his dead father. It led him to create weapons far more destructive and deadly than anything Howard had ever mass produced, burying his morals, or what’s left of it at the time.
If Afghanistan had never happened, Tony would probably lose all his worth and become exactly what Howard feared he would be.
The Merchant of Death.
Until today, he wasn’t sure about his father or what any of it meant. But he was long past asking why, and he’d paid a therapist a very handsome fee to make sure he’s made his peace with it.
(JARVIS would probably make a comment about how he never actually ‘concluded’ his therapy sessions because of the whole Avengers Initiative and alien invasion thing that happened, but selective truths are beneficial for a reason. So, the AI could suck it.)
And here he is now, with something that his dad actually inadvertently left behind for him. Something that was dangerous enough to unsettle the infamous Howard Stark, the man who played with the tesseract like a stress ball.
“Sir?”
JARVIS’ smooth tone brought him back to reality.
“May I ask what you mean to do?”
Tony was about to retort in confusion until he realised his hands were holding the cube, fingers gripping the edges of it so tightly it pressed red lines on his flesh. He dropped it in an instant, taking a good two steps back.
“If only I knew, JARVIS.”
***
The address led them to a warehouse that, in secret intelligence standards, was perfect in location. It was hidden behind a mass corporation’s building structure, accessible by car through one alleyway but had multiple exit points by foot.
They ditched the car about two blocks out, and walked the rest of the distance in silence. Stiles had let the super soldier drive, taking that time to assess the man in a less tense manner. Their entire car ride was rode in even more silence, Stiles had an earpiece in his right ear that monitored the SHIELD frequencies—enjoying the panic and chaos that dominated the transmissions.
If Bucky knew or heard anything, he didn’t show—his eyes fixed on the road and the directions on the navigation system. That, and despite the sadistic joy he felt, Stiles kept a straight face and a hand pressed up against the ear, elbow resting on the windowsill of his seat.
Stiles stopped Bucky from opening the double doors to the warehouse, and motioned for him to follow through the back. It may be a paranoid gesture, but he really couldn’t afford any more mistakes.
He made the decision to trust Stark with the cube, but anyone with half a brain wouldn’t throw all his eggs in one basket. This new partnership between them was still tentative, after all, and he’d had his fill with getting stabbed in the back.
After finding an entrance point, Stiles slipped through the window with an assassin trailing behind him. The minute Bucky’s footsteps landed on the floor, the lights flickered alive with a greeting.
“Good evening, Agent Stilinski, Sergeant Barnes.”
Through his peripheral vision, he could see the assassin fall into an offensive stance—shoulders bunched up and his metallic arm geared back in anticipatory force. Bucky hasn’t yet met Tony Stark, he noted in the back of his mind, or encountered any of his advanced technology.
“Evening, JARVIS.” Stiles continued to walk into the building without much preamble, following the path of lit hallways. “Got to say, I didn’t really appreciate you calling the cops on me.”
The AI responded to him in a manner he would categorise as sarcastic, if that was even possible. “Likewise, my protocols didn’t appreciate the break-in.”
“Call it even?”
“So we shall, Agent Stillinski.”
The hallway led to an open floor-plan, with glass dividers and an industrial staircase hugging the wall leading up to an enclosed second floor. Even he could tell, by the haphazard state of most of the tech pushed up to the corner and the disarray of workbench and stools, that Tony had put this up at the very last minute.
“Since we’re planning a coup against the intelligence agencies’ world, thought we’d need a base of operations.” Tony’s voice popped up from the centre of the floor, surrounding him was a circular station, with holographic monitors surrounding the space. “At the very least, no one can accuse us of being disorganised.”
The billionaire swivelled on his office chair, wheeling himself to a stop when he registered the extra body accompanying his partner. His face contorted with suspicion, his pointer finger rising inquisitively. “Wha—”
Ignoring the shock Tony was quite visibly going through, Stiles walked towards him, “Stark, meet the Winter Soldier.”
With quite a sudden jolt in his movements, Stark turned to face the man, “That’s—wait, that’s—”
“Yeah.” Stiles was staring at him provocatively, as if daring him to say anything remotely challenging.
Tony took the not-so-subtle threat with grace, simply keeping to himself. “This is going to be much harder to hide from Cap.”
“Who said anything about hiding?”
Tony doubled back on the agent, eyes wide and disbelieving. “Are you kidding?”
“Dead serious.”
“No, you’re kidding.”
“First off, I see no reason to hide,” Stiles swept a glare at his direction before grabbing a stray swivel chair, “It’s not as if Barnes here is his property? His ward? Did I steal him?”
“Fuck no.” The soldier huffed, still standing at the junction of the two semi-circular workbenches that made up the centre station, effectively blocking an entrance path, “You just threatened me.”
“No, I proposed a deal to you.” Stiles kept his focus on the monitor, watching the scroll of information and data Tony was checking. “If anything, you were the one who held a gun at my head the entire time.”
Barnes shrugged, panels of his metal hand flexing as he did, choosing to canvas the room with his eyes instead of replying. Stiles took it as an admittance of defeat, allowing himself a small smirk of victory.
Before he could gloat, Tony Stark shoved the back of his shoulder, nearly sending him crashing into a desk.
“What the fuck was that?”
Stiles blinked owly at the genius, disturbed and confused at the sudden question, “Unwarranted violence?”
Tony rolled his eyes, “Your stunt in SHIELD?”
Sparing a short glance to the brooding soldier watching the entrances, Stiles raised a brow before darting out of the centre station, “Intel gathering.”
“By getting captured? You know, the one thing you weren’t supposed to do?” Tony followed him around on his heels, when Stiles shot an incredulous look at the billionaire. “Oh, don’t give me that look, jailbreak. I’m not the one being hunted down by Big Brother.”
“Am I captured now?” Stiles dropped his duffel bag at a stray empty workbench, turning on his feet to face the yackering man for a second. “No. So, shut it.”
Tony considered it for a moment but ultimately decided not to. Since when has Tony Stark ever followed a direct order? Never, that’s when.
“So, what did you gather?”
“Not much.” Huffing in annoyance and barely contained anger, the young agent rummaged in his bag for his water. “I found out who gave me up on a silver platter, though.”
A hand shot out next to him holding a plastic cup filled with a healthy-looking purple smoothie, Stiles looked back to find Tony sipping from his own cup of green goo.
“Who?”
Taking a wary sip from the straw, Stiles grimaced before answering, “Fury.”
To his credit, the billionaire audibly stopped slurping for a good three seconds before asking again, “You sure?”
“Yeah.” His voice was devoid of any telling emotion, though that could just be the purple vile-tasting protein sludge drowning it.
Stiles knew Tony had a suspicion, back from when they first formed their alliance. Granted, Tony was more paranoid than Stiles was, with good reason, when it came to SHIELD. And he knew that Stiles wouldn’t react hysterically even given everything that’s happened. Fury was just icing on the cake, but Stiles had long trashed the cake altogether.
“Where is he then?” was the direction of conversation Tony settled on, avoiding the topic of Fury’s betrayal.
“Gone.”
“You mean he’s not in HQ?”
“No, I mean he’s off-grid.” Stiles popped the top of the cup off to chug the rest of his smoothie down, setting it aside once he did. “He wasn’t in the office, but I know he’s gone dark.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Tony frowned, not seeing the logic of why Fury decided to run.
“Because it’s what I would do.”
“Hmm.” Tony gave him an incomprehensible look before turning away to Bucky, gesturing at the man with his eyes. “How’d that led to this?”
To his defence, all Bucky did was stare at him unflinchingly. The genius returned the cold stare with a deadpan of his own.
Feeling the last of his brain cells struggling to function, Stiles ignored the quip to focus on more important matters, digging into the pocket of his pants. “Fury left me something, hidden in my office.”
He tossed the USB at Stark’s direction without even looking, grabbing the gun from his back pocket and zipping up his hoodie once his hands were free. “Private reserves, I think.” Stiles explained before Tony could ask, “I couldn’t decrypt everything there, only names and access records.”
Pulling on his hoodie, he made a small nod to the supersoldier currently watching him with a blank look. Without breaking eye contact, Stiles hopped onto the workbench before scooting to his preferred position, “Do your tech magic and sort that out for me will you?”
“Well, since you asked so nicely.” Tony watched him, squinting at the man patting and moulding his duffel bag, “What are you doing?”
“I’ve been running on 4 hours of rest for the past 3 days, and my wanting to punch you in your stupid goatee is getting stronger by the second which means my impulse control and subsequent cognitive ability is decreasing terribly fast.” Stiles laid down across the length of the workbench, head pillowed by his bag and crossed his arms, gun in his right hand. “So for everyone’s safety and my sanity, I’ve decided to sleep.”
Even with his eyes closed, he somehow knew Stark was rolling his. It occurred to him that he may have spent too much time with the billionaire to know his quirks now, but that didn’t seem too bad of a thing to know.
“Wake me up in 5 hours.”
***
Clint Barton checked all his communication lines thrice, refreshing his connection and stabilising antennas. He had kept it open for the last 72 hours; radios, public chat domains, online newsletters, dating sites, his online messaging softwares and all of his registered and unregistered numbers. In the off-chance that Stiles would contact him secretly, he didn’t want to miss it.
He knows that his young protege probably wouldn’t reach out to him for anything, he was too independent, too emotionally distant right now. But he’s still holding on to the hope that the young man he’d come to see as family—a younger brother that he’s never had—would return his sentiment and trust him enough to ask for help.
Clint considered himself loyal, most people would. But not to agencies, not to governments, not to countries—not even to SHIELD. He was loyal to people. He knew very well when not to follow orders, when to doubt his superiors and when to trust his instincts.
He was orphaned young, and been through the system enough times to escape it. He joined the circus, under the apprenticeship of a twisted dangerous man, who taught him enough tricks and skills to become one himself.
People who grew up the way he did, they don’t trust easily. Like him, like Natasha.
Like Stiles.
Director Fury being missing was like a testament to his stance.
To Steve, it was another wrench in his progress, another crime in Stiles’ repertoire. To Natasha, it was a mystery, a dangerous clue to unravelling the whole thing. But to Clint, it was a sign.
A sign that he was right.
Stiles would never hurt Fury, even under extreme duress. That man practically raised him, gave him purpose—which everyone in their world knows was worth more than anything.
It proved someone else did this, someone powerful enough to throw Fury off his throne. Dangerous enough to either capture the man or cause him to run and hide.
But it also proved another thing that he prayed wasn’t true: Director Fury was directly involved in whatever the hell this was. And that he’d known from the beginning, knew what was happening right from the start.
Which meant he deliberately started a witch hunt for Stiles Stilinski on purpose.
Clint didn’t want to admit it, but it’s starting to seem like Fury threw Stiles under the bus and drove right over him. The wheels of betrayal turning in his mind: what, how, and why?
Refreshing all his connection lines for the fourth time in the last hour, Clint let his brain work silently. Natasha and Steve would soon head out to search for their missing Director, first checking all of his safehouses on Natasha’s insistence that he might’ve escaped on his own (considering Fury’s survivability rate) whilst the tech crew worked on unscrambling their video feeds.
At this point, everyone knew Clint was running solo separate from the task force, so he didn’t worry too much about his attendance. Also, Natasha was more than willing to cover and help Clint on the sidelines, feeding him information and clues that she’d also found on her own.
The only question left was what he was going to do.
Terrible as all this was, a new line of investigation opened up.
He’d been investigating Stiles all this time, and found nothing—makes perfect sense, since the man had been notoriously careful, and with the genius Agent Lydia Martin at his side, all intel regarding his team was ironclad.
Director Fury, on the other hand, well.
After the near fall of SHIELD, there was a small time frame wherein assets and intel were easier to access due to the vacuum the data dump Natasha and Steve authorised caused. Though he didn’t have the full picture of how it was controlled, he knew that there was a full revision of security in their database.
A full-scale clean up like that meant one thing. Like reorganising your closet, you must first take everything out and do inventory before putting it all back.
And that left a vortex of data, of sorts. Including Fury’s.
If Fury was intent on turning his back on Stiles, on pinning crimes on his pseudo-son’s back, then he must have a motive.
And if Fury had no problem lying to him about it, then that just made Clint’s conscience all the more clear to start burying his nose into his personal secrets.
People keep forgetting the twisted dangerous man Clint was before SHIELD took him in. The sly kid who survived on his own in a world desperately stacked against him.
It’s about time they remembered. Hawkeye was his codename, and it wasn’t simply for his competent marksmanship. Because when it comes to seeing the bigger picture, he was damn better than anyone.
Even Fury.
***
Stiles woke to knocking next to his face. He jerked his body upwards and was met with bulging steel plates and a red star painted starkly against the silver.
“It’s been 5 hours.”
His eyes strayed up towards the gruff voice, before putting his body into motion to get off his makeshift bed. Stiles nodded a small appreciative gesture to the soldier before he walked off to the circular command-centre where Stark was waving his hands in the air, organising what seemed to be text files in his holographic display.
Soft footfalls followed him but stopped right at the entrance of the circle, the slight rustling of fabric told him that Barnes had parked himself on the edge of the workbench.
Always wary, constantly on guard.
Stiles sat himself down on a stray chair, grabbing an idle StarkPad.
Tony greeted him with a slow blink, “Still got any threats to my goatee?”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going away with sleep.” He snarked back without heat, hands scrolling through Tony’s progress on decrypting the files. “How’s it going?”
“Well, JARVIS is doing his best on Howard’s blueprints but I can’t make heads or tails of it yet,” the genius’ tone sounded like it pained him to say that, small crinkle between his browns telling on his emotions, “and Fury’s USB is just a paranoid man’s utopia, but nothing that my baby can’t break, right J?”
“Ofcourse, Sir.” The smooth ever-present British voice answered him, “I’m well-versed with how to handle the creations of paranoid men.”
Tony rolled his eyes, not denying the accusation, “Look up filial piety, J, you need it.”
Sergeant Barnes watched the interaction with slight interest, but otherwise kept his silence. Stiles spared him a glance before speaking up again, “Can you focus on decrypting a specific file? It was the last one accessed by Fury, on the day he dropped me into this hellhole.”
“Which one?”
The soldier finally set his eyes on Stiles, and he looked up just in time to catch it.
“Do you happen to know anything about the Commissioner?” Stiles kept his eyes on Barnes, though his question was directed to Tony.
“The Commissioner.” Tony rolled the name around his tongue, shaking his head slowly. “No, never heard of him.”
“That’s because he’s a ghost.” The young agent set the StarkPad down in favour of working the circular table interface in the middle of their command centre, bringing up the file. “Or she, or they—we don’t actually know, but for now all sightings of the Commissioner have described a guy.”
Stark immediately joined him in the middle, rerouting the processing power to decrypting the file in question, still intently listening to Stiles’ briefing.
“He’s like the wizard behind the curtain, something of an urban legend, a boogeyman you commission to achieve impossible tasks. Dating straight back to the 1940s, he was first linked to the Red Skull.”
Tony’s eyes were still locked on the Russian ex-assassin, currently the subject of a Steve Rogers patented manhunt—well, to be accurate, both of his guests were under Steve Rogers’ capture list, but the less he knows the better.
Stiles tracked the man’s eyesight and confirmed his suspicion, “This guy’s someone who can lead us to him.”
Bucky finally broke his silence, “Negative.”
“Excuse me?” Stiles blinked.
“Never said that.”
“You said you’d help.”
“I said I’d try.” Bucky stood his ground. “I don’t actually have any contacts, my skill set was never about making friends or keeping records.”
Tony, getting caught in the middle, tried to act as a mediator. And people told him he wasn’t a team player, eat that Romanov. ‘Don’t play well with others’ can suck it.
“Right, settle down Metallica, you too jailbait.”
Surprisingly the two listened well enough to his direction, Tony noted, ignoring the weird feeling it left in his gut. He furthered their agenda, mind half-dedicated to helping JARVIS decrypt the file as his hands flew on the keyboard.
“You think this Commissioner is involved.” Piecing the logic behind Stiles’ words, Tony looked at him openly, “Any leads to find a ghost?”
Unexpectedly, Stilinski fell silent at his questioning. The mechanic lingered on him for a second longer before moving on to his eerily silent guest, “How bout you, Comrade, any clues?”
Bucky didn’t even bother responding to the nickname, keeping his eyes locked on the transparent monitor. He nodded to another file, at the list.
“HYDRA.” He voiced out, grim as ever, “The Commissioner never works alone.”
Tony blinked, turning to Stiles, knowing the man would get his underlying message, “Is there a chance it’s HYDRA?”
“No? Honestly, I don’t know, we’re still running fall-out from that whole debacle.” Stiles ran a hand through the mess of his sleep-mussed hair as he began to recount the events to the room.
Project Insight was a shitshow of massive epic proportions. Captain Steve Rogers and Natasha had the insane idea of trying to flush out HYDRA from SHIELD by going public and dumping their entire data files to the internet—which was thankfully thwarted by multiple agents, including himself.
Stiles and his DELTA STRIKE team were right there in the midst of chaos—well, sort of. His team was mid-route to an op in Belarus, when Lydia pinged the distress calls in the Triskelion from her tablet. It was only later that they found out that the op they’d been dispatched to was a HYDRA trap, courtesy of one Agent Brock Rumlow (a right grade A bastard), in an attempt to send them far off the scene and hopefully eliminate them.
Derek instantly turned the Quinjet around and they’d quite literally dropped right into the chaos, no parachutes or flying gear, crashing through at least two planes of glass. Stiles met up with Agent Maria Hill in the security room, which was when he got clued into the monumentally shit situation they’d been caught in.
“HYDRA in SHIELD.” Tony recounted to the room, hands massaging his brows, “And they get all pissy when I say I don’t trust them.”
Bucky, or the Winter Soldier, though unwillingly implicit in the acts of HYDRA’s attempt at their renaissance, had limited understanding of what actually happened. He only had minimal contact with other HYDRA members save for his handler, and he was only ever given targets, no context.
“Utter dog crap it was, but surprisingly not too shocking.” Stiles countered, having always thought that the creation of SHIELD was shifty in and of itself. “I mean, they recruited and included previously HYDRA-affiliated scientists and agents into their ranks, and now Fury’s jaw is dropping all over the place—no shit.”
Logistically, he gets it. HYDRA had been thwarted in the wake of Red Skull’s death, and their brilliant minded-scientists and nifty agile-agents had nowhere to go. So, they must’ve thought that rather than letting them scatter and join other agencies, or let their skills rot in prison, they’d much rather have them working under their thumbs and reap the benefits.
That it bit them in the ass was just a naturally drawn conclusion.
“Wait, but didn’t SHIELD dump the files on HYDRA anyways?”
Stiles paused at Tony’s interruption, “Yeah.”
“But you said you thwarted that?” Tony adjusted something on his StarkPad before looking back at him.
Stiles sighed, “Well, if it were my choice, no data would’ve been dumped at all. Involving the public always makes things worse. But I guess with the death threats and the intensity of the situation, not to mention the civil war of SHIELD agents and the return of our American sweetheart’s long lost bestie over here—doing a full data dump to flush HYDRA into the light seemed like the most efficient and damaging option, mutually assured destruction and what not.”
He registered Bucky wincing at the implication, knowing his memory of Steve was still spotty at best, but continued on regardless.
“Since Fury and Natasha were already wreaking havoc in the World Security Council meeting, and used the data dump as leverage against Pierce, I knew I couldn’t reach them in time to stop them.” Even recalling the whole mess was enough to give him a headache the size of Texas budding behind his eyeballs. “So, I ran interference with Hill and my team’s tech expert. The planned data dump was all the data, incriminating both SHIELD and HYDRA in the downfall, since there wasn’t any time to filter and sort through it. My team and I managed to program something like a digital sieve at the branch of output from all SHIELD servers, so that we don’t pull the plug and spill all our secrets.
“Ofcourse, with limited time, we couldn’t delete all SHIELD involvement in HYDRA activities or that blurry line of HYDRA acting as SHIELD in some operations, so some things still slip through. My team and I were actually on clean-up duty missions for that, before we got pulled into this.”
Something was sparking at the back of his memory, Fury had assigned his team to take point on damage control since it was his and Lydia’s plan. He’d learned that hell hath no fury like a Lydia Martin scorned, spitting harsh insults of the idiocy that is deliberate secret-spilling from an organization that runs on secrets.
It had been a busy year, indeed, and a mentally exhausting one. They’d been following up on operations that were listed under exposed HYDRA agents in SHIELD, tracking paper trails, seized evidence and assets. It was quite overwhelming how much work they had to do that they thought they’d already done before.
Redundancy, at its best. Exciting, truly. Peak of working in intelligence.
“The Winter Soldier.” Bucky’s voice cut through his mind, the question unasked.
Stiles looked him in the eyes, hands folded on the table. “Yeah, those files got released, but since your identity report and debrief was filed by Captain Rogers, we’d managed to catch that in the sieve.”
“HYDRA’s still running.” Bucky flexed his metal arm, his shoulder joint flaring up in a dull pain. “They’ve been hunting me down, to decommission the Winter Soldier. They know I’m starting to remember my past when I saved Steve.”
Realistically, Stiles knew HYDRA would never be thwarted—cut one head, another two grows and all that bullshit. But hearing it out loud, confirming it, was something else entirely.
“Well, we already know SHIELD is involved in this whole mess.” Tony started, mind running on theories, “But what are the chances, right now, HYDRA is still in SHIELD?”
There was a tense sort of silence that bit at Stiles’ nerves, he tried to control it by pressing down a nerve at the junction of his thumb—a habit. Something about the statement invoked a deep fear in him, unresolved trauma and stress battling in his head.
“That’s near impossible,” was the response he decided with.
Bucky challenged him, which was fair with his intimate knowledge of HYDRA’s survival instincts, “How would you know?”
“Because it worked—the plan fucking worked.” Stiles insisted, because it had to. For all the trouble they went through trying to fix it, it had to.
Ever so helpful Tony decided to pipe in with his paranoia, “If you hadn't tweaked it, then it definitely would’ve.”
“Something you wanna say, Stark?” Stiles dared the billionaire.
Bucky glanced between the two, the building tension triggering his reflexes as his hand slowly inched towards the nearest weapon—a screwdriver.
“Stilinski, your sieve program might have saved SHIELD from collapsing, but with your parameters for the distinction between HYDRA matters and SHIELD’s—you could’ve missed a few.” Tony sighed, knowing he wasn’t helping defuse the situation, but he’s always been a man of logic. “That’s the risk. I get why Fury and Nat wanted to dump all of it, even at the risk of their own destruction, because it’s a full flush. A clean slate, complete transparency.”
Stiles scoffed, “A clean slate for what? Reinstating SHIELD would’ve been impossible.”
“Building SHIELD again from the ground up would be damn difficult, after a bad report card, but at least it would be HYDRA-free.” Tony set down his StarkPad, putting his full attention to the man who was on the edge of fiery retribution, “Even you said you were on clean-up because of this very reason.”
Stiles took a silent breath, composing his anger—unresolved and unruly, feeling like he was transported into that room with Hill and Lydia at his side, all those months ago.
“There were millions of sensitive information in SHIELD’s data servers—things that put innocents at risk, not limited to the release of the witness protection program files, list of superpowered and enhanced individuals both confirmed and suspected, agents in hiding or undercover. Hell, Clint’s own secret family would’ve been burned by the fall out.” Stiles’s tone was set in a silent fury, for good reason.
Reasons that he’d thought everyone would understand, but apparently not, considering the decision they made.
He’d been angry, furious actually, that save for the righteous and one-path-minded Captain America, Director Fury and Agent Romanov would agree to such a ludicrous solution. There were thousands of undercover ops that were running at the time of the data dump, among which were his friends, his colleagues. They would’ve been burnt, months and years of work down the drain, and their lives would’ve been up for grabs.
In the wake of it, the SHIELD data that didn’t get filtered through the sieve was then encrypted at lightning speed by Lydia and her nimble-fingered friends, but even then the repercussions were terrible.
Hundreds of operatives were flushed, information still slipped, and lives were lost. Families were put on hit lists, entire organizations fell, and governments shook unsteady. Because even if they’d done their best to protect the fallout, there were equally as many, if not more, people working against them for their own agenda.
“If all of that got out, that’s bloodshed I won’t stand for.” Stiles gripped the interface table with such strength, even Barnes was unsettled by it. “So unless you can be in thousands of places at once, protecting every single innocent life that unfiltered information blast put in danger, shut the fuck up about it.”
Tony raised his hands, mimicking waving a white flag to surrender. “Yeah, that would be too much collateral damage, there’s no question about that. But, you can’t tell me that the possibility of hidden HYDRA sleepers in SHIELD digging deeper after the data dump doesn’t exist.”
Stiles stood up from his chair abruptly, the force of his action so strong, his chair knocked into the workbench behind him. He left the room without another word, knowing full well that the possibility does exist, but too furious to admit it.
Tony silently typed a request to JARVIS, telling him to ping any relevant potential HYDRA sleepers in SHIELD’s current list of agents, before pinning the only other person in the room with an accusatory glare.
Bucky returned the glare with a blank expression, arms straight down, one gripping the workbench he was half sat on and the other brandishing a screwdriver.
The mechanic pointed a lone finger at him, “You were the one who brought up HYDRA and lit his angry fuse, you do know that right?”
The silence that replied him was almost laughingly predictable.
“Thanks for the support,” The spiteful sarcasm in his words biting, but failing to incite a reaction from the stoic soldier. Tony leaned back into his chair with a bone weary sigh, “Really helped.”
***
Halfway across the world, in a musty room with barely any source of light, a phone lit up on a lone desk. It flashed only for a minute, but the contents were crystal clear: a notice of Fury’s disappearance and an issue of arrest for Agent Stilinski for the crime. The last incoming message was a SHIELD profile portrait of him, bright eyed and smirking.
“It’s time.” One of the two occupants of the room piped up, taking the phone into their hands with a careful manner.
There was a rustling across the other side of the room, a figure sitting up from a small single bed, heavy duty boots making impact on the floor.
The phone-holder turned the gadget in their hands before tossing it in the air, only to catch it before it fell. “There’s no going back after this.”
With a cold calmness, the figure on the bed stalked towards the other person, leaning down to place a device on the table in front of them, “Start Phase 2.” Their voice was unwavering, steely, almost, even to the latter.
Little did anyone else know, in this dark room in the middle of nowhere, the dice was cast to the game that was going to change everything. And so the dominos fell.
“It’s time we get serious.”