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Ringing woke him and he tried to answer his cell twice before he realized it was the room phone. "Brock," he mumbled. He hoped there wasn't a last minute mission. He was still trying to catch up on sleep from the last one.
"What's a Brock? I don't have time for code words, Fury, we need to talk about satellites!"
"What?" Code words? And… "Satellites?"
"Yes, satellites!" Whoever was calling him was either angry, scared or both. "Man made objects in low earth orbit, good for communications and spying, you may have heard of them? These could have communications in, weapons out. Hardwired to tidally lock, of course, so the weapons wouldn't aim in."
"What?" He didn't particularly want to wake up, but it was happening against his will. "Tidally…? I think you dialed wrong, this is Rumlow."
"What's a Rumlow? Never mind, that sounds like the start of a bad Jamaican joke, did I dial wrong, I never forget numbers, but I could have been, not shaking, that's wrong I have steady hands, I-"
"Who is this?"
"Iron Man. Stark, that is. Tony Stark."
Well. That was… something. Brock wasn't sure what at (he checked his other phone) three AM, but it sure was something. An Avenger misdialed him. Maybe drunk dialed, it was hard to say.
"Well, this isn't Fury, I doubt even he'd be at his desk right now." He could hang up with that but then he'd be wondering, "And what do you mean by weapons out?"
"He ought to be, fucker thinks he can come into my home any time he wants a meeting, he should at least pick up when I'm trying to save the goddamned world! Space, the weapons would be aimed out into space, that's where the aliens will be coming from, their use once there's a beachhead wouldn't justify the danger of abuse, that's not, that's not okay to risk."
He didn't think Pierce would agree, or Fury for that matter, but Stark had rules about weapons these days. More importantly, word around SHIELD was that the invasion was well quashed. "The aliens came through a portal. And I thought you guys killed them all?"
Stark gave a laugh that was probably supposed to be mocking, but held a note of hysteria. "Yeah, that's what everyone who didn't actually see it seems to think! And they needed to steal our magic space cube to make a big enough portal, so it's not standard for them - they'll be coming the long way next time. Believe me, Agent… Brock? Or is it Agent Low Rum? Agent-"
"Commander Rumlow, Strike Team Alpha."
"Well, Agent Commander Rumlow, speaking as the only guy who saw the queue on the other side of our amazingly convenient bottleneck, we didn't kill even a fraction of them." That was not a good thought and from the quickened breathing on the other end of the line it wasn't doing Stark much good either. "Those Leviathans that squeezed through were minnows swarming around ships that made up an armada just waiting their turn, and even if the nuke hit one of the flagships, that would just make the rest pissed off once they regrouped! They will come again, they will come in strength and no one wants to do anything about it!"
That was concerning, but so was the edge of hysteria creeping into Stark's voice. And it was late.
"I think maybe you could do more on some sleep. You're pretty worked up right now."
"I'm not worked up, I'm legitimately concerned!"
"You're also mis-dialing Fury after midnight and verging on a panic atta-"
"You don't understand!" Stark's voice was more anguished than angry. "No one does! Fury's dismissing everything I saw, Rhodey wants me to get over it just like Afghanistan, Pepper thinks I need a therapist, but I'm not crazy, it's REAL! I saw what's out there, I know how laughably outmatched we are! Don't any of you get it? Threat is imminent and I have to do everything I can to protect people."
Brock was certain that there might be someone worse than him that the poor guy could have misdialed at SHIELD to help him through a breakdown, but he couldn't imagine who. (That was a lie, Romanov would have gaslit him out of habit.) He flailed mentally for a moment, and a slight hitch of breath made him blurt out the first thing to come to mind, because a top index threat crying to him was just not something he could deal with on this much sleep.
"I mean, it doesn't have to be one or the other."
There was a moment of complete silence, not quite long enough to have him check his connection.
"What?"
Well, possibly annoyed flatness was better than crying. "They're not, you know, mutually exclusive or whatever, are they? A real threat and you being, well, not crazy, but traumatised and needing to get some help?"
"I… what?"
He wondered how badly people had been reacting to Stark to have him this confused at the concept. His friends, yeah, they might be so focused on getting him help that they ignored the intel, but Fury? Still it was distracting the guy from spiralling more, so Brock just went with honesty.
"Okay, look, one time when I was at another base, I was doing an internal investigation of some contraband issues, someone stealing drugs from the infirmary, but it wasn't obvious where they were going. So we were following the evidence chain, while trying to keep it quiet so as not to spook whoever was doing it, right?" He got a vague grunt of assent. "But me and two of my guys went to check a possible witness and found him dead, then got ambushed there by obvious professionals. My guys were killed, and it went pretty damn badly for me too."
"Fuck." It was said with obvious empathy, which Brock appreciated. Sure, Jameson and Willis hadn't been Hydra, but they had been good agents, and he had mastered compartmentalization early in his career. That job hadn't had any secondary objectives, so they really were his guys for the time being.
"Yeah, exactly. We obviously had a mole in the investigation, and I wasn't okay with that. But my point is, it also made me pretty paranoid."
"Thought you weren't paranoid if they really are out to get you?" The tone was purposefully light, and it seemed like Stark was one of those people who gets it together to take care of others. He really was a White Hat.
"Yeah, I used that line a lot over the next couple of months, but once it was over and I gave in to the mandatory psych review… well, there's legitimate paranoia, and then there's getting up in the middle of the night and checking the same places for bugs as I already had twice before I went to sleep." He heard a snort and hammed it up a little. "In a hotel room. That I'd gotten under a fake name. Maybe not the justified caution I was trying to sell."
"Okay… okay, yeah, I can get that. I guess that after my little vacation I didn't like people talking about PTSD because it seemed like they were dismissing the changes I was making, but… ya know, when it takes you months before you can rinse your face off in the sink, there's probably a problem."
Brock made his own empathetic noises - the Hydra briefing had been a lot more educational on what Stark went through during his three month "vacation" than the SHIELD one, and he admired his survival as much as he allowed himself with a probable enemy to the organization. (See? Compartmentalization.)
"Yeah, I mean, I believe your threat assessment on what you saw through that portal." And he would need to talk to Pierce about it. Hydra needed a world to unite, and if Fury was buying into his own smear job on Stark, somebody was gonna have to step up on it. "I trust a genius to calculate numbers and sizes of ships, and you would certainly know the specs of the bomb and how tough their plating was to guess how many it could take out."
There was a slight choking sound and the, "I… thanks, Agent Commander," was suspiciously wet, but he ignored it for now.
"But seeing that, and almost dying at the same time, sounds pretty traumatic, and maybe you're also panicking and working yourself into an early grave trying to deal with it alone and too fast."
"...which is worrying people like Pep and Rhodey, and them focusing on me as the problem makes me feel like no one believes me and I have to solve it all myself, which worries them more, ad infinitum."
"Sounds about right. I don't presume to know what's going on in the Director's head, but he accepts character assessments from the Widow, so I wouldn't let his reactions bother you."
This time he got an all out laugh, which was nice in a way he instantly compartmentalized. "Do I detect a mere hint of professional rivalry, there?" Well, it wasn't like he could give his best evidence for Romanov not being able to profile her way out of a wet paper bag, but he could dis her as a SHIELD operative too.
"Just saying, she was trained as a honeypot and an assassin. She assesses targets for weaknesses that she can use to get closer or blackmail them on, and that's it. She never works with teams here unless she has a separate mission straight from the Director, so why anyone thought she could determine a good fit for the Avengers project is beyond me."
He totally wasn't trying to make Stark feel better about that shitty 'assessment' that just happened to be leaked all over SHIELD when the consultancy started. Brock just liked to rag on Fury's pets.
"Huh, guess she'd be the perfect choice for a little reverse psychology on someone who already turned it down, though. I really need to get back on top of my game. Fury is probably playing me on this too, figuring the more desperate I am, the more tech and funding I'll give to 'convince' him to pay attention to the threat."
"Maybe. Fury has his own borderline paranoia about certain Earth-based threats. He might just think the Avengers are enough and not want to think about it."
The small skeptical noise was followed by an unwilling sounding, "Fair enough," and then a long, weirdly comfortable silence.
"It's still hard not to panic about not being ready."
Well, he couldn't argue with that. Thinking of what rained down on New York showing up in enough force to attack all over the planet at once would be giving him some problems once he slept enough to focus.
"I dunno, I'm about the farthest thing from a shrink to be giving advice… Thinking about reasonable risks was what helped me get my paranoia under control, but my team tells me I'm still a paranoid bastard, so how well it worked...?"
Stark chuckled. "Yeah, I gotta think that's an occupational hazard with your employers." He didn't know the half of it. "In my case I suppose reasonable risks would be trying to figure out how soon they could actually get here, when I start to think it could be at any moment. Lotta factors there we don't know, though."
"Well, from what you said earlier, it takes long enough that they were willing to accept the huge disadvantage of a bottleneck to not make the trip."
He could almost hear Stark blinking. "That… that is the other way of looking at what I said, isn't it? What about that. I guess that's why you're an Agent Commander, huh?"
"That's gonna be a thing, isn't it?" He tried to sound grumpy, but Brock kinda like the idea of having his own 'thing' with Stark. (For strategic reasons related to Stark's importance to both Hydra and SHIELD, of course.) "Yeah, I'm not a geek level brain, but they train us up in strategy and logistics."
"Logistics… Hmm, now there's a thought…"
"Why don't you follow that thought after some sleep?"
"Sleep, yeah, sure." The conversation had obviously lost its allure compared to whatever was going on in Stark's big brain, but it sounded like geek-revelation rather than PTSD spiraling, so he wasn't too worried. "I'll get right on that. Thanks, Agent Commander Rumlow, see ya 'round the Spook Squad."
Brock listened to the dial tone for a moment before he hung the phone up and rolled back over. He definitely needed to report to Pierce on all this and maybe look into the locations of some invasion leftovers himself. Just. Ya know. After some sleep.
It's not like Pierce and Fury weren't both probably tapping his phone anyway. After all, he wasn't paranoid when both of his employers were out to get him.