Chapter Text
“
Bring her out.”
The order echoed over the walkie-talkies and short-wave radios spread across a fleet of boats, surveillance helicopters, and a large-scale ice excavation team. This portion of the arctic circle was usually deserted except for the lone north sea fisherman, hoping to get lucky. However, the past two weeks the entire area had been a hive of activity. There were no less than eight ships patrolling the stretch of sea as a group of scientists, geologists, and archaeologists worked to excavate a giant aircraft from the icy grip of the frozen tundra.
Slowly, a large portion of the snow-pack that covered the hull of the vehicle was pried up and then airlifted a safe distance away. There was another small, controlled explosion, and a flurry of snow drifted upwards as another shelf was secured with cables and flown off.
When a large portion of the coast disengaged from the glacial borders of Greenland, SHIELD picked up a frequency reading that had been dormant for years. It took less than two weeks to assemble a field crew and put enough boots on the ground to pull out the wreckage of the Valkyrie.
Nick Fury was on-sight almost immediately. He repelled down into the snow-filled HYDRA plane, looking around. There had been no record of an aircraft this size making the flight towards America, and he suspected that there was a weapon on board that would have made secrecy more important than record keeping. He walked towards the front of the plane, moving slowly, looking for a manifest or even a map. As he reached the front of the cockpit, he paused, looked over the figure encased in ice, and then glanced back at the agent who had followed him down into the plane.
“Well fuck me,” he sighed, turning back and stomping past the agent. “Can’t ever be easy.”
What followed afterwards is hard to explain.
The man in the Valkyrie was alive. Born in 1919, frozen over in 1945, Steve Rogers was cut away from the cockpit of the plane and transported to New York. Whatever weapon he had been transporting wasn’t with him when he had been put into an accidental cryogenic sleep.
Nick Fury knew what Howard Stark had found in the ocean when he went trawling for Steve Rogers. It didn’t occur to him that he should keep the two away from each other. The Tesseract had laid dormant for years, locked safely in a SHIELD vault, protected by the best tech Fury could get his hands on.
What Fury didn’t know would haunt him for years.
When Steve Rogers woke up it wasn’t from an easy sleep. He started, jolted upright immediately, and scrambled backwards on the bed, wide-eyed and sweating. The young woman across from him smiled beatifically, unfazed by a traumatized GI in a recovery room.
It’s not an easy thing to come back to life.
Rogers had driven the Valkyrie into the water with every intent of never breathing again after he’d breached the Arctic Ocean. He’d made his peace, said his goodbyes, lost everyone, let them go.