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Steve Rogers was irrefutably furious with Howard Stark, to the point where he might just break the man’s nose the next time he set foot in New York, which Bucky and Peggy seemed to think was infinitely soon. He’d nearly gotten the entirety of the SSR’s science department killed with his need to bring life to several of his more morbid designs.
Steve and Bucky had gritted their teeth and patiently waited in the café across the street from the SSR’s headquarters. They’d seen Jarvis enter of his own accord with a leather bound briefcase in hand and resisted the urge to bolt over and pull him back before he signed his own damned arrest warrant.
Peggy had managed to slip them a clipped version of the report for the mission in Russia and a photo of Dugan, the Commandos, and the new recruits: Happy Sam Sawyer and Pinky Pinkerton, along with Peggy, several other SSR Agents and Dr. Ivchenko. Most of the picture’s participants hadn’t even realized it’d been taken upon their return to the U.S. Army post for their extraction. Happy Sam had managed to get a copy of the photograph and send it with the next helicopter to add to the official report.
Happy Sam Sawyer, Pinky Pinkerton, and Junior Juniper had joined the Howling Commandos at the tail end of the war and helped with the cleanup of the remaining Hydra bases after Schmidt’s demise. Steve had only worked with them for one mission and Bucky barely knew them except through Dugan’s correspondence and whatever news he brought back on leave. However, the two of them were willing to trust the other Commandos judgment and accept these men as part of their contingent, Steve had even written to them on occasion.
Junior Juniper’s death had been dull cut, but a blow nonetheless and they knew Dugan must’ve had more than a few sleepless nights over it. Likewise they knew Peggy must feel the same sense of remorse and responsibility for what’d happened. Steve and Bucky found that avenging the young recruit’s death was tempting now that Ivchenko’s retrieval was revealed to be a setup and Junior’s demise apparently in vain.
“It was such a goddamned waste, Buck! He was a good kid.”
“I know, Stevie. We’ll write Dugan after this, try and soothe his conscience, after we take this guy down.”
Bucky found himself increasingly grateful that they had the photograph in hand and that Peggy had taken the time to swipe the camera film and have a separate copy of it developed for their use.
It was nearly fifteen minutes later when a man resembling Ivchenko exited the SSR’s Headquarters through the main entrance.
“Buck” Steve said, nudging Bucky’s arm. “It’s him.”
“He’s got a case with him” Bucky said, eyes immediately focusing on the abnormally large cache the man had gripped in his left hand.
Steve’s eyes narrowed.
“He’s making his move” he said, hastily slapping some cash from his wallet onto the table and hastily moving out the door with Bucky close behind.
They barely make it in time to wrestle with Ivchenko who attempts to talk Steve down while subtly rubbing at gold band on his finger.
"You don’t want to do this, you don’t want more lives to be lost…like this man here-" Ivchenko drones.
Bucky clutches the man’s finger and subsequently breaks it with his prosthetic, causing Ivchenko to loosen his hold on the case long enough for Steve to yank it away.
There’s a woman in a vehicle pulled up to the lip of the curb waiting and Ivchenko pushes an oncoming pedestrian toward them, before jumping into the passenger’s seat while they’re momentarily distracted, speeding off into traffic and out of Steve and Bucky’s reach.
Bucky takes in a breath and checks Steve’s eyes, relieved to find them clear and determined. He’s reasonably sure Ivchenko’s parlor trick didn’t have much of an effect on him after such limited exposure.
“It’s like he was trying to divide us, Bucky, by threatening-” Steve started, but Bucky cut him off with a shake of his head.
Steve eyed him searchingly.
“I think he was playing on our past experiences from the war, Steve, there’re so many guys coming back with memories they can’t escape” Bucky elaborated. “They tried doing that to me in Russia before you came. Using my own memories and guilt to make me more vulnerable so I’d be more effected by the torture and more likely to do exactly what they wanted.”
“He breaks people” Steve surmised “and uses their fears to control them.”
“Or sends them somewhere they can’t feel the pain anymore” Bucky added. Then he looked down at the case in his hands. “We need to return these before the SSR comes out to retrieve them from us personally.”
Steve gave a cursory glance around the immediate area and then nodded, following as Bucky moved to enter the building.
The moment they stepped inside the headquarters was rocked by a tremor following the sound of a considerable explosion. Bucky cursed inwardly and hoped that Peggy and Jarvis had been able to take cover.
The resulting confrontation with SSR Agents ended almost immediately when the guard detail recognized Steve as Captain America. “We need to return these” Steve insisted gesturing to the case in Bucky’s hand, “before someone else finds another use for them.”
“Agent Carter’s expecting us” Bucky added.
A few moments later the two of them found themselves being escorted upstairs and inevitably greeted to the aftermath of the explosion on the office Peggy worked in. She and her co-workers were mourning the loss of Chief Dooley, their immediate supervisor and current head of the New York branch of the SSR, as a result of one of Howard’s inventions. Dr. Ivchenko had managed to use the invention’s instability to wear down and attempt to kill the Chief, who, in an effort to minimize the damage and spare his team’s lives, had broken one of the windows and run directly out of it just before the vest he’d been locked into destabilized. The resulting explosion taking his life and shattering the exterior windows in the immediate area.
Steve and Bucky were introduced to Peggy’s co-workers in passing as both attempted to help with the clearing of the resultant rubble. The revelation that one of Stark’s inventions had been used to kill one of the SSR’s top men had left a simmer of anger and remorse tumbling through Steve. He and Bucky were subjected to a debriefing by Agent Jack Thompson and asked to relay the events that lead to their retrieval of the case and the device annotated as invention # 17.
Steve’s internal anger only grew when they received a subsequent call from Howard that night at their apartment, where he explained that the nerve contagion held with invention # 17’s gas tank was highly dangerous and that in a closed environment it could cause the shutdown of the human mind in such a way that it lead to the infected individuals being compelled to brutalized and kill one another.
The thought of such a contagion possibly being used by Leviathan agents, possibly on military outposts or the population at large, only served to raise the bile in Steve’s throat. This lead to a very heated conversation with Howard and one of the sternest lectures Bucky had ever heard him give another person. Bucky’s own response had been one of subdued horror, leading to a burning desire to break Stark’s jaw with the full force of a well-practiced right hook.
When Steve had finally hung up the phone, he and Bucky took a taxi back to headquarters to immediately inform the science division about what was actually being held in invention # 17’s dual tanks.
It was placed within a well armored safe and a horrified Agent Thompson was able to, within a few weeks’ time, after Ivchenko and Dottie had been effectively permanently compromised, arrange for the disposal of the majority of Stark’s inventions into one of Hawaii’s active and currently isolated volcanoes. Personally overseeing the job himself along with Agent Sousa and Peggy.
After Chief Dooley’s death, none of them were willing to risk the military or the CIA getting their hands on the destabilized devices and experimenting with them.