Chapter Text
It was at two a.m. when Howard’s communicator pinged with an incoming call. He had made it years ago for Peggy so the two could talk with absolute certainty their calls couldn’t be intercepted. Howard had eventually made a similar, more compact version for SHIELD agents to use.
The only reason he was able to pick it up was because he was up late working on a project at the time — not an uncommon occurrence.
Peggy’s voice came through the second he brought the phone to his ear, her tone taking on a forced calm. “I need to talk to you. In person. I have reason to believe that SHIELD’s data has been stolen by someone, possibly multiple people, working as a double agent.”
And to think Peggy was always the one reprimanding Howard for staying up so late. He shook the thought away, taking in Peggy’s words.
SHIELD was always careful when recruiting new agents. Even before they began filing the paperwork for approval, they had to run hundreds of background checks. Hell, SHIELD had an entire sector of agents that were dedicated to making sure new recruits were both suitable and ready for the job, as well as whether they could be trusted to keep SHIELD’s secrets. If even one person was able to bypass so many security measures, they were dangerous.
“Okay,” Howard agreed easily, forsaking his usual quips. “When and where?”
“Your personal lab in California. You can expect me to arrive within two days.”
The call ended. Howard huffed. Not even a goodbye, huh? Peggy must’ve been more worried than she let on.
For the next thirty minutes, Howard continued tinkering with his current project, a source of energy that could resist EMPs while still efficiently powering an entire building. At the moment, it could barely power a lightbulb.
Howard checked his watch. Two forty-five. If he didn’t go upstairs soon, Maria would give him an earful about staying up late… again.
He turned towards the door to leave, but stopped when he spotted the man just a few feet in front of him.
“Holy shit!” Howard yelped.
In the corner of the room, next to the door, was James Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, raising an eyebrow of… judgement? Amusement? at his reaction. It was a relief to see the man without a mask or face paint. Howard could now clearly see Bucky’s expression, no longer cold and hollow. Though it wasn’t as expressive as he used to be, it was still better than nothing. His leather gloves and jacket covered his left arm, making Bucky look like any other person Howard would walk by out on the streets.
Howard pulled himself back to the situation at hand. “Bucky! How the hell did you get in here?” Without alerting his security systems or even making a sound?
“Your security is shit. I disabled them in less than a minute,” Bucky responded.
Howard stared at him incredulously. “I’m using the same stuff SHIELD uses for all their bases! They’re designed to keep trained professionals out.”
Bucky continued staring at him. “You need better security,” he said flatly. “More useful than flying cars.”
“Wh—” Howard protested, but Bucky cut in.
“That’s not important at the moment. What you just discussed with Carter is putting a lot of people in danger, including you. I already sent two Avengers to get Carter’s family and I’m going to be escorting you and your family to a safe house with Lawson.”
“Wendy?” Howard’s mind spun. “I thought she was in Nevada.”
Bucky sighed and grabbed his arm, dragging him to the front door. “Like I said, you’re in danger right now. We’ll tell you later.”
Howard stared in a mix of shock and confusion as he stepped out the doorway, having spotted Maria and Tony already in a car — an inconspicuous black Ford — on the street. Wendy leaned against the driver’s door, wearing civilian clothes rather than the strange suit she had donned during the alien invasion.
He talked to Bucky for two minutes, at most. When did they get his family out of the house?
“Come on Stark, we don’t have all day!” Wendy called out to him.
Howard shook himself, quickening his pace to get to the car. He joined Maria and Tony in the backseat as Wendy took her place on the driver’s seat and started the car. Bucky appeared to their right on a motorcycle with a concerning lack of a helmet.
“So,” Howard began as the car took off, Bucky trailing behind them, “Avengers?”
“That’s the name for the team,” Wendy replied cheerily. “I got permission to use it from my colleagues.”
Tony perked up from his seat. “Team? What team? Is this the top secret SHIELD stuff dad won’t tell me about?”
“Yes, it is,” Howard replied, “which is why you shouldn’t be listening to this,” he said sternly.
“I’m in the same car as you, old man. Whaddya expect?”
“Tony, please show some respect to your father,” Maria sighed.
“It honestly doesn’t matter what you guys hear at this point, considering you’re all going to be targeted anyways,” Wendy said.
Howard frowned. “Who’s after us? And why?”
“We’ll explain who later; it saves time to just tell everyone at the same time. As to why, Carter found something she wasn’t supposed to, then continued to tell you about it, which added you to their list.”
Howard and Tony spewed various questions at her, with answers that gave varying amounts of information. Wendy got tight-lipped about anything involving whoever was after them and what happened to Bucky, since “it’s his choice whether you know about it or not”.
The group reached their destination around sunrise. The car slowed, veering off the main road and stopped directly outside a dense forest. A minute later, a blonde woman stepped out of the trees, waving at them. She wore a brown leather jacket on top of a red t-shirt with the Air Force logo on it.
“Hey Wendy! Damn, you guys got here way faster than I thought. I owe Foster ten bucks now.” The woman had a bright smile reminiscent of Wendy’s. “T’Chaka just opened the force field, you can get in now.”
Wendy nodded. “Thanks, Carol.”
She drove the car straight into the trees. Howard tensed, bracing for impact, but none came. Instead, the illusion of a forest dissolved as they passed through the force field (Howard had to ask T’Chaka about that), giving way to a single house standing in the center of a wide, grassy field. The vehicle made its way to the house, Wendy parking it next to three other cars. Bucky was already on the front porch with Carol and opening the door.
Bucky opened his mouth to speak to her, but was interrupted by a cat bounding out the house and jumping at him. Bucky immediately caught her, though he looked mildly irritated by the interruption.
Carol crossed her arms at the sight of them. “Really, Goose? You like Bucky more than me?”
Bucky rolled his eyes at her, moving the cat to a more comfortable position in his arms. “Let’s get everyone inside.” He looked over at the group walking towards them. “Carter’s family is already here, right?”
Carol nodded before turning to wave at their group. “Come on in.”
The safe house’s furniture was sparse, as if attempting to take up the least amount of space possible. A single couch was seated in front of a coffee table, holding multiple stacks of files and floppy disks with a computer precariously perched at one edge. More boxes were stored underneath it. T’Chaka was conversing with Peggy and Foster as her family sat on the couch. A few of them turned to look at Howard’s group as they entered.
“Quick question, why is there a cat here?” Howard asked. This was very important. He had to know before they got down to business.
“That’s Goose. And she’s not a cat, she’s a flerken,” Carol said.
Goose glanced over at Carol from her perch on Bucky’s shoulders as her name was spoken, before returning to her duty of playing with Bucky’s hair.
“Wendy picked her up a while back,” Carol continued. “The little guy actually saved my life, you know. She ate an alien trying to kill me after I went unconscious from shooting the Tesseract.”
That just gave him more questions than answers. A cat — flerken, whatever that was — eating an alien? And since when was there an incident involving the Tesseract?
“Moving on, now that everyone’s here, we might as well start talking,” Wendy said, looking at Bucky.
Howard stopped himself from muttering a ‘finally’, and judging from Peggy’s expression, she felt the same.
Bucky deposited Goose into Carol’s arms and without turning to look at them, said, “Hydra’s in SHIELD. Everyone in this room has come across something Hydra doesn’t want you to. Everyone here would probably have been killed if we didn’t bring you to this safehouse in time.”
After five minutes of everyone in the room talking (yelling) over each other, they quieted down enough to ask coherent questions, which either Carol, T’Chaka, Bucky, or Wendy would answer.
According to the four’s explanations, Hydra was never fully taken down and had been hiding in SHIELD ever since its creation. The organization stayed undiscovered for years, taking control of nearly every country and gaining power in all of their government systems. The organization could take down an entire country, yet they’ve stayed hidden, playing the long game in order to take over the world. Their strength and reach heavily depended on secrecy, spending most of their resources on staying undiscovered.m in the shadows.
Carol Danvers got superpowers from shooting the Tesseract after an alien tried to steal it, losing her memories in the process.
Goose was an alien that apparently had an extra dimension in her stomach. She ate multiple Hydra agents when Foster and T’Chaka went to pick up the Carter family.
(“It was traumatizing,” Peggy’s daughter said. “The cat spewed out tentacles.”)
Wendy Lawson got her hands on highly classified files by hacking SHIELD, apparently through pure accident.
Bill Foster stopped a group of Hydra agents from stealing the few remaining Pym particles in SHIELD’s custody, hidden in a lab whose location shouldn't have been known by anyone other than one or two scientists from SHIELD’s science division.
Hydra stole some of Wakanda’s vibranium, which led to T’Chaka spending a month tracking it down and returning it to his country. His wife began developing technology that could track down vibranium as a result.
Bucky didn’t answer any questions about himself.
“Hydra needs to stay hidden to have so much power. They’re paranoid and kill everyone that comes within a one mile radius of something that has even the possibility of exposing them. You’re lucky you got here without any casualties,” Bucky stated. “After the invasion of last year, they’ve become even more careful than before, which makes it harder to find anything that could expose them. Right now, we don’t have enough power or information to do anything about Hydra.” He motioned to the items on and under the coffee table. “This is everything we’ve gathered. You can look through it if you want.”
Then he left the room without another word.
“That’s the most I’ve ever heard him talk,” Carol commented.
Peggy was already at the table, starting up the computer and opening files. Howard smiled in amusement. Always neck deep in work, that woman. Even after forty years of working with her, Howard could never convince her to take a break.
Howard’s gaze strayed towards the doorway Bucky left through. It had been two years since he last saw Bucky; two years of wondering what happened to Bucky to make him the Winter Soldier and where the man went after the “invasion” of New York.
Howard’s chance at finally getting answers was just a few paces away, and he was not going to let it pass him by.
Bucky and Howard sat in two wooden chairs on the back porch of the safehouse, with Howard on the right chair further from the door and Bucky on the left. Bucky stared at something in the distance, pointedly avoiding looking at Howard. He couldn’t get a read on Bucky’s expression.
“So, Snowflake, you said you’d tell me what happened,” Howard prompted after a moment of waiting.
Bucky rolled his eyes, but he finally turned to face Howard. “I know about Hydra because they’re the ones who made me the Winter Soldier,” Bucky began. “They replaced my arm and used me to do their dirty work. I was sent to assassinate anyone they deemed a threat and cryogenically frozen between missions.”
“Well, I guess that means I’m not going to get your skincare routine, huh?” Howard tried — and probably failed — to lighten the mood.
Bucky snorted, but still didn’t smile. Howard wondered when was the last time he did so and immediately cut off the line of thought. He was too sober to think about that.
“What do you remember?” Howard asked.
“Not enough,” Bucky replied bitterly. “A few flashes here and there. Mostly Hydra.”
“So… you didn’t just lose your memories before Hydra picked you up,” Howard concluded.
“No,” Bucky confirmed.
“How?”
Bucky glared at the patio’s wood flooring, reminiscent of the way the sergeant would look down when reporting casualties back during the war after missions.
Howard raised his hands placatingly. “Look, if you don’t want to—”
“Five hundred volts of electricity through the skull, targeting the hippocampus and various other parts of the brain related to memory and thought processes,” Bucky said, eyes laser focused on a stray pebble on the floor between the two of them. “One memory-wiping machine stationed in every base with a cryogenic stasis chamber, activated before and after each mission. The only human subject recorded to survive its use while maintaining full functioning capacity is the Winter Soldier.”
Images popped up unwelcomingly in Howard’s mind, of Bucky frozen in ice under some Hydra base underground, of his memories being ripped from him before he had the chance to even grasp them, of the blood of innocents on Bucky’s hands as he walked away with the cold, empty eyes of the Winter Soldier.
“I’m sorry.”
Bucky looked up, startled and maybe a bit baffled. “What?”
Howard wasn’t good at apologizing, wasn’t used to doing so at all. Something he had in common with Tony. He was trying to get better at it to become a better role model, a better dad for Tony, after listening to Peter’s stories about his time with his biological father, Ego. A few hit a little too close to home.
Howard took a breath. “I’m sorry. When you fell off the train, we didn’t look for you. We were so caught up in the war, we didn’t spare any time or resources to even recover your body. After we thought we got rid of Hydra, I was so focused on my projects I never really looked into SHIELD once we established it. If I did, maybe I would’ve discovered Hydra. I could’ve saved you earlier.”
Bucky shook his head. “You’re talking about Hydra. You’d never find me. Wouldn’t have even gotten close to the truth before you’d get yourself killed — probably by me.”
“Still, I feel like I could’ve done something.”
“You did. You saved my life, Stark. If you didn’t talk to me on that comm, I’d be back with Hydra right now. And the world would’ve ended, or something like that, because I would’ve killed that kid.”
Howard grimaced at the thought. Yeah, it was a good thing he stopped Bucky from killing Peter.
Bucky turned to the door a moment before somebody knocked and opened it.
Carol waved. “Lunchtime.”
Howard stood, ignoring the pain in his knees telling him he did so too fast. “Great.” He patted Bucky on the shoulder as he moved towards the house. “Nice talking to you, Skywalker.”
“Skywalker?” Bucky muttered.
Jesus, Howard really needed to make a list of pop culture for Bucky to catch up on.