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A familiar face in the S.H.I.E.L.D. files had made Tony stop.
White, Kisara
DOB: 23-04-1980
Tony read the rest of her file. An electrokinetic who’d been turned over to S.H.I.E.L.D. for a few grand when she was twelve, in 1992. And then trained to be an assassin until she disappeared on a mission in Japan in 1996. Neither Fury nor Carter had any idea what had happened to her, because the Japanese systems suddenly became unassailable to them.
They presumed she’d been captured. It had been a high-risk mission, what she’d been sent to do. They thought she’d been stopped and killed. They thought that all of her gear had been confiscated. They solidly believed that this gear was used to take a reading on S.H.I.E.L.D. and create defences that could keep them out.
But Tony knew better.
Tony knew exactly where she was.
And she was not dead.
But there was enough on her file to turn Tony’s stomach. And it prompted him to begin really looking through those databanks. And it looked like Kisara was not an isolated event. In fact, it looked like Carter had once tried to rope Tony himself in. His father’s ultimatum had Tony sitting back in his chair, fighting back tears.
It was the first time he’d gotten any indicator that his father had loved him.
But that still wasn’t enough to tell you to get the hell outta dodge, dad?
But, suddenly, KaibaCorp’s much-needed offer of assistance with the data dump made a hell of a lot more sense. Seto Kaiba wasn’t exactly known for having a charitable nature. But what he was known for? An extreme level of protectiveness over his family. You messed with those people…and he would obliterate you.
Tony made a decision. ‘JARIVS, do a background check on the Avengers. A proper one and not just that crap S.H.I.E.L.D. gave us. I wanna see who we’re really trusting the world to.’
‘Of course, sir.’
In the meantime, Tony organised a meeting with Seto Kaiba. A large part of him was curious, yes. How the hell had Kisara White, sent to kill Seto Kaiba and abduct Mokuba Kaiba for indoctrination into S.H.I.E.L.D., ended up Kisara Kaiba? Obviously, she’d turned on her American allies for him. But why?
It was also because Tony was going to milk S.H.I.E.L.D.’s use of child soldiers for all it was worth. They could claim to be good guys until they were blue in the face, but everything in their files screamed the opposite. And the background checks on the Avengers weren’t looking good either.
By the time Tony was boarding the plane for Japan, he’d said to JARVIS. ‘Drop the Avengers, especially Rogers, Romanoff, and Barton. They’re a liability.’
And it was just two days before their senate hearing.
The next day, Tony was in Seto Kaiba’s office. He handed over the file. Kaiba wordlessly took it and opened it up. His expression hardened as he went through his wife’s S.H.I.E.L.D. file. Finally, he laid the file down and looked up. Tony sat there and waited for Kaiba’s response. The man wordlessly considered him for a long moment.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘It was in among the data dump,’ Tony said. ‘I take it my conclusions were correct, then?’
‘Hmph.’ Kaiba crossed his arms. ‘And what did you intend to do with this?’
‘Well, I can’t deny I’m curious to know how the woman who was meant to kill you ended up marrying you instead,’ Tony said. ‘But she wasn’t isolated in being roped into S.H.I.E.L.D. at such a young age.’
Kaiba’s lips quirked upwards in a smirk. ‘I see. You want to destroy S.H.I.E.L.D. from top to bottom by jumping on the fact that they employed the use of child soldiers.’
‘Pretty much.’ Tony nodded to the file. ‘I just need permission to use her for a start. Or…I need the names of others like her.’
Kaiba considered him for a long moment, and then he picked up the phone on his desk.
***
In America, Greg and Patricia White were arrested for human trafficking.
22 years after they sold their daughter.
The entity known as S.H.I.E.L.D. was also charged for the same crime for the purchase of the aforementioned daughter.
Kisara Kaiba had provided the names of other children just like herself, leading to multiple investigations. She was, however, one of the few either still alive or who had broken her conditioning enough to want to testify in court. Kisara Kaiba had absolutely no love for S.H.I.E.L.D. or any of its associated agents.
‘When I was sent on that mission,’ she told the court, ‘I was entered in as a computer programmer. I very quickly saw other people trying to screw around with Seto Kaiba and using his little brother to do so. I saw the consequences of that. It honestly made me happy. You see, Mokuba was the exact same age as I was when I was sold to them. I knew what they did to me, what they did to all of us, was wrong, and it was illegal, but I also knew they operated outside of the law and killed any agents who went “rogue”, so to speak.’
That was also how they discovered how she went to going in as an assassin and kidnapper to becoming Seto Kaiba’s wife.
‘I deliberated and made my excuses to S.H.I.E.L.D. before I was contacted by the Big Five – five executives who’d been fired from KaibaCorp months earlier for trying to do exactly what S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted to do to the Kaibas. I may have capitalised on their use of Cyberspace and betrayed them. I also dropped my S.H.I.E.LD. ID-pass on the mechanical island they were using right before it exploded, leaving S.H.I.E.LD. with the impression that I had been there when it exploded. Afterwards, I told them the truth.’
‘We must assume,’ the Kaibas’ lawyer said, ‘that this was also the time you were given refuge by the Japanese government in exchange for secrets about S.H.I.E.L.D.’s methods?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Mr. Kaiba decided to keep you employed in his company?’
‘Under the very close watch of his security,’ Kisara said. ‘True, I had saved him and his brother. And I was good at the job I’d been slid into the company to do. But I had been originally sent to kill him and to kidnap his brother. I earned his trust at a later point.’
Yes, Tony could perfectly understand that. She’d been intimidated into silence and compliance. Then, suddenly, she had an out. She’d jumped at it with both hands. 12 was kind of a stupid age to try indoctrinating kids anyway. By that age, they knew the difference between right and wrong. They knew killing was bad, and they had enough awareness to realise that being sold by your parents wasn’t something that should happen.
But it turned out that Kisara was an anomaly.
She was someone who’d kept her conscience and her morals even as she was forcibly folded into a conscienceless agency. She had described watching some many others desensitise themselves to murder. She had watched so many others force themselves to forget that they had no power in this situation; that they shouldn’t be doing this; that they shouldn’t want this.
Kisara Kaiba was the key witness.