Chapter Text
Nick Fury sat back in his chair and regarded the scowling man in front of him calmly.
The man crossed his arms across his very broad chest. “I don't know what you called me here for, but I thought I’d made myself clear."
The director sighed. “You knew we were aware of your whereabouts. We were never really going to let you go.”
“I want no part in your program. Not yet. I-” the other man hesitated. “I need more time.”
“Time for what?”
Steve Rogers ran a hand roughly through his cropped blond hair. “I don’t know. Time to get settled. To adjust. Twenty-first century life hasn’t exactly been a walk in the park to get the hang of, and joining the Avengers right away didn't really help matters.”
“You've had two years, how much more time do you need?” Fury leaned forward and placed both hands on his desk, fingers interlocked. He studied the Captain with a narrowed eye, but Steve had grown used to Fury’s scrutiny.
“Yeah, and in those two years how many times have you dragged me back into another plan, assigned me another mission-”
“Those were of the utmost importance,” Fury dismissed. “Life and death situations.”
“Let me guess. This is another one of those.”
Fury looked at Steve for a long moment with an intense look in his eye, the one that meant he was contemplating something very carefully and if he was interrupted, the world as we know it might just implode.
“No,” he said finally. “Not exactly. Or, not yet anyway.”
He typed something into his computer.
“We’ve got some recent information about some illegal activity taking place near SHIELD’s offshore base in Puerto Rico. We’re not sure, but the way it looks… it’s got HYDRA written all over it.”
Fury turned the monitor to face Steve, who squinted at a grainy video recording of a ship’s deck. It was lined with rows of armed men, and in the center there seemed to be a confrontation taking place, a tall, dark-haired man shouting at two other men in what Steve vaguely recognized as Russian.
Steve pulled his chair forward. “What am I looking at?”
Fury pointed at the brunette. “That is Viktor Kasyanov, leader of a team of smugglers… and former member of HYDRA.”
“Former?”
Fury shrugged. “Or current. We don’t know. Our information on HYDRA is a bit outdated seeing as we haven’t had many run-ins with them since before your little extended nap.”
“What are they smuggling?” Steve said after a moment.
Fury pressed a few keys and another video popped up, this one of trucks on a pier unloading large wooden crates onto what looked like the same ship from before. Faded lettering on the side read The Soldier, and Steve would have laughed if the ship hadn’t sparked something inside him, a forgotten memory. Steve frowned and tried to retrieve it, but it slipped from his grasp and buried itself deep in the recesses of his mind.
“Radioactive material,” Fury said, tapping the crates with a knuckle. “Tons of it.”
Steve let out a long breath and leaned back in his chair until it squeaked in protest.
“What are they doing smuggling that stuff near SHIELD’s base,” Steve mumbled, almost to himself.
“That, Captain Rogers, is what we need you for.” Fury stood and walked around his desk. “We managed to smuggle something of our own out of that ship a month ago, when it made its first venture into our waters. We kept it in a high-protection chamber underneath the building, and we’ve been trying to figure out what it is all this time.”
Steve stood and followed Fury to the door.
“And what is it?” he asked as they boarded the elevator, curious despite himself.
Fury looked at Steve out of the corner of his eye, his jaw hard.
“Well Captain, I think you should see for yourself.”
~*~
The “high-protection chamber” – Steve rolled his eyes when he saw it, because really, it was just a glorified basement – turned out to be further below the building than he’d ever been. Fury had had to grant Steve temporary special access to even go below the ground floor: they were headed three floors below that.
The room itself was dark and musky, the only source of light a flickering bulb which Fury managed to turn on after momentarily grappling around on the wall for the switch.
“We’ve had some budget cuts,” Fury grumbled in explanation, leading Steve to the far right wall. There was a freezer there, humming in an odd imitation of life within the dead stillness of the chamber.
“They call him,” Fury said, opening the door with some effort, “the Winter Soldier.”
Steve’s heart stopped. He stared in shock at the impossible figure before him, suspended in a glass vessel of greenish-fluid, hair long and wild around a face that had once been more familiar to Steve than his own.
“Bucky?”