Date: March 20th, 2005
Time: 1403
Location: Shores of Themyscira

---

The waves of the ocean gently pulled themselves from the beach, giving off a soothing and relaxing aura, but the activity that was being hosted upon the shores was anything but calm. A small unit of the mythical Amazons were doing combat training, paired off into battle partners, learning how to swing a blade with the unstable and shifting sands beneath their feet. Yelling and cheering was a common sound outside of the small song birds that welcomed the early morning sun, giving off a militaristic and yet sister-bonding aura. However it was sharply interrupted by the screaming of metal above, causing all the Amazons to hold their swords and gaze to the skies above.

If anyone could see through the fire and smoke, they would make out a small pod-like ship that was wobbling as it descended towards the water at frightful speeds - how this monstrosity of technology was able to find it's way to the hidden city of the Amazons was beyond anyone's comprehension at the time, only able to watch at the ship crashed into the waters, sending small waves to ripple from the point of impact. After a few moments, the sword sisters gathered at the shore in patient wonder and yet still cautious of impending battle as the ship's fires were put down by the crashing of the ocean. Not one dared to swim out to check for survivors, for any moment they could be attacked and ambushed by an act of compassion.

After some minutes, a figure eventually pulled itself from the wreckage, hauling in it's hand a mace. Though it shocked the Amazons to see that it was a woman! And one that had wings no less, causing them to quickly whisper among themselves, curious if this was some sort of divine creature, though it hadn't ever been one they had heard of. Hawgirl dragged herself to the beach, her mind still in a fog from the crash - even with the new Nth metal infusion and her regeneration abilities, it was taking a while for her body to become accustom to the foreign agent. That and her blood was still pumping from her escape, even though it had been a while since then - she couldn't remember, time had seemed to meld together as she passed by stars and went through the wormhole.

Gripping her mace tightly in an act of self-defense, still hoping she wasn't being chased, her eyes shot up as she heard someone's voice. She couldn't make out the details of who was talking to her or what they were saying, but they looked like... they had armor? And they were branding weapons? Had they found her? In her sudden panic, with mixtures of injuries and the strange metal in her blood, she grabbed her mace in both hands and and swung, striking the blade from the Amazon's grip.

She was not going back!

New York
March, 20th, 2005
11PM

The three junkies that had 'run' into Ted earlier took a while in rousing themselves, taking time to nurse their wounded pride. Not too long though, as men like those don't have what you call an 'abundance' of pride. That's why they found it so easy to steal an old woman's purse later that day, threatening her at knife point until she handed over. She wasn't hurt, but she might have been, and even if she was it wouldn't have troubled their consciences much, just another thing they didn't have an abundance of.

They took the bag straight to their closest dealer, one who operated out of a dive bar just outside of Queens, a real rough neck joint called “Diamond Dave's” where the beer was nine parts water, the women were all short a few teeth, and the guys were just as likely to stab you as shake your hand. More likely, really, if you wore a shiny wristwatch. Still, Dave's had some standards, and even they drew the line at letting in strung out junkies, on the grounds that they were sick of the meth-heads getting high then OD'ing in the johns. So the trio was stopped by a burly bouncer at the doors, and no amount of pleading, wheedling, or begging would convince the gorilla to let them past. He did relent at fetching their dealer though, but only after they'd paid him twenty bucks.

The dealer, a short, scrawny fella named Louis "The Weed" Campagna met them in the alley behind Dave's, the kinda place lifted straight outta a cheap grindhouse slasher movie, fifty feet long, nearby flickering street lamps barely providing enough illumination to see by, a discarded baby stroller dumped under a mountain of trash, puddles of murky, grim-dark water pooling, carrying God knows what diseases. It was so scuzzy and uninviting that it almost looked like it was purposefully designed that way, that there was no way mere chance could have made such an unappealing area.

And so that grimy alleyway served as the backdrop to the drug deal. Little did the principal parties know though, that it was also serving as a certain vigilante's hunting ground, where he thought he might be able to angle himself a real bottom feeder who might be 'persuaded' to give him some information on Victor Moretti's operations.

And so the junkies had their second run in of the day with Ted Grant.

Only this time he was dressed as Wildcat.

And this time he wasn't pulling his punches.



Wildcat coalesced from the shadows like a wraith, one moment nothing more than the hint of a shadow, the next full, and substantial, and terrifyingly real. One meth-head, the one that had first pulled the knife on Ted that one morning that seemed like a lifetime ago now, caught a glimpse of him as he emerged from the smudgy darkness, but before the junkie could cry, scream, call a warning or even shit his pants, Wildcat was on him, all rage, and power, and grim iron purpose.

It was something he'd learnt early in life, that the best way to start a fight was to start it sudden and to start it hard, to knock the other guy out before he even knew he was in a fight.

Maybe not all that sporting, but damn if it wasn't effective.

The first junkie caught a big haymaker to the jaw, so much force and momentum behind it that it woulda stood an even to high chance of knocking a bronco out cold. Some strung-out coke-zombie didn't stand a chance, and hit the ground without much say in the argument.

The next meth-head, a short, surprisingly stout man with a badly considered blonde soul patch, took his beating better, weathering a combination of two straight rights then a left cross before being thrown from his feet, landing as graceless as a sack of doorknobs upon the unrelenting alley stones, followed by a pretty audible crack that Ted was willing to bet was the scumbag's tail bone.

Put a smile on his face.

By this time the last junky, the youngest looking of the group who bore a bizarre resemblance to Steve Buscemi, and Campagna, were starting to react to Wildcat's sudden onslaught. Buscemi-lookalike had decided the better part of valour was discretion, quite wisely turning tail and hoofing it to the relative safety of the street, while Campagna was reaching into his nylon weave jacket, no doubt about to pull a weapon. Wildcat let him have all the time he needed, let the dealer retrieve his weapon, let him think it was gonna even the odds.

He could be real cruel like that sometimes, a cat playing with it's food.

The Weed was just extending his pistol, a winsy colt semi, in Wildcat's direction, finger on the trigger and the beginnings of a triumphant grin worming it's way onto his pinched face when the vigilante made his move. Fluid as flowing water he slid to the side of Campagna's arm, too fast for the dealer to see, never mind react to. Big, calloused, weathered knuckles folded over the colt, forcing the slide back, Wildcat's other hand cupping the dealer's elbow, then with a swift jerk he hyper-extended the joint. Campagna squawked like a plucked chicken, excruciating pain travelling all down his arm, forcing his hand open and making him drop his pistol. The dealer fell to his knee's, more through shock at the pain than the pain itself, but it still gave Wildcat the time he needed to catch the Buscemi lookalike, before putting him on his ass just as hard as he'd done the others.

Campagna was starting to recover himself somewhat as Wildcat returned, stalking like a predator that had just cornered it's prey and knew it had nowhere else to run. The Weed was looking like he was thinking about making a play for the gun, but if that was his plan then he'd left it too late. Way too late.

The big vigilante hoisted the dealer up by his hair, yanking him up like a caveman raider that had just found a new bride. Campagna might have thought the same, squealing like a virgin bride on her wedding night. The Weed's eyes darted between Wildcat's and the pistol, still lying close enough to grab, if he had the stones for it.

"Uh-uh boy," Growled the vigilante, "Nobody ever tell you that it's bad form to take a gun to a fistfight?"

Campagna never did get the chance to reply before being knocked unconscious by virtue of a heavy left.



"Wake up!"

Campagna didn't seem all that obliging, so Wildcat gave him a little tap, just a little something to get the cognitive processes up and running. It worked a charm, the dealer jerking towards consciousness.

In another life, Ted mused, I was probably a doctor.

The Weed ran unfocused eyes about his new environment, half-befuddled mind trying to make sense of his plight. Pointless though, as even if those eyes didn't carry such heavy daze then the room was to gloomy for him to ever pierce it's shadowed depths, and even if he did somehow manage to figure out the riddle of his new holding place, well he'd never recognize it. Few men would. He was tied to a chair in the back of Grant's Gym, in the old storage space where Ted kept the spare weights, burst punching bags, and washing machines. Hardly the Justice Society Headquarters, but it was dark, scary, and soundproofed. It would do in a pinch.

Even so, just in case Ted decided to give Campagna something else to think about, smoothly crossing into the dealer's line of vision. The sharp, frightened intake of air let the vigilante know that he'd been spotted, and for a moment he just posed. Useful for intimidation purposes, a half glimpsed figure that no doubt means nothing but ill. Right that moment Campagna would be taking in the midnight black costume, the tattered leather jacket that had seen more battles than the American military, the fistwraps that had faded from a pristine white into a murky red, the mask that would just hint at some monstrous visage, some ferocious beast that meant a person more malice than winter. Yeah, if Campagna wasn't shitting himself then Ted Grant was a ballerina.

"You don't kill people!" Choked the weed in a broken voice, clutching at the words like they were some kinda lifeline, that he'd just found his way out. Oh, but Ted was gonna enjoy this.

With a bone grating chuckle the old man laughed, a sound as harsh as headstones. Smoothly he stepped in close to where Campagna was seated. The dealer threw himself back in his chair, trying to put as much space between himself and his captor, but the old vigilante just leaned in closer, big paw curling round the back of his 'guests' head, forcing him to meet his gaze.

"Oh boy, I musta hit you harder than I thought. You're confusing me with that other black clad, pointy eared, vigilante type. See this ain't Gotham and I ain't Batman. I will kill ya." Campagna whimpered before breaking into a sob, meaning the bluff was working. It was almost to easy. Wildcat let his captive's head droop, taking a step back while rolling his shoulders.

". . . If it suits my purposes. See kid, I ain't unreasonable. I'm more than willing to meet a guy halfway, if he's willing to meet me. If he's willing to cut a deal." He didn't even need to turn around to see if Campagna had bitten. The scumbag seen his lifeline, and he leapt for it.

"I'll deal, I'll deal!"

"Clever boy." Smirked the vigilante. He sauntered over to an old fashioned tape recorder, set up on a table and just out of the Weed's eyeline. With a flick of a switch he set it rolling.

"Now I'm gonna ask some questions. You tell me the answers. You hesitate, then I'm gonna hit you. Whether you're avoiding the question, acting the fool, or playing for time, I don't care, I will hit you."

"You lie, and trust me when I say I'll know, I'll kill you. Simple as that. You follow."

Campagna nodded furiously. Wildcat growled, slapped the the bound man round the head, not hard but not exactly a love tap either. Campagna yelped out a yes. Satisfied he now understood the rules, the vigilante continued.

"Good. Now, first things first. Do you know of Victor Moretti?"

"I work for Victor!" Cried the Weed triumphantly, happy to be of use. Happy to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Sure, he'd have to betray some pretty dangerous men, but right at that minute Wildcat was there.

And they weren't.

And Wildcat was worse.

Center City, WA
5:24 PM

"Twenty-two. Bust."

The dealer slid the chips across the green felt of the blackjack table with one long and lanky arm. The man at the table let out a sigh as he watched a few hundred dollars in chips disappear down a slot to the dealer's right. Two chairs away, Tracy Lawless stood firm on eighteen and waited for the dealer to flip his card over. It was already showing a queen of diamonds, so it came as no surprise when the dealer revealed an ace of spades.

"Twenty-one. House wins."

Tracy's chips disappeared down the chute. For Tracy, that made a even grand he lost at the tables since he'd hit the floor earlier this morning. That was okay. After all, he was playing with house money. He took the chips he had left in his hand and stood, throwing a small token of appreciation to the dealer as tip, and walked the casino floor. Despite being there for over nine hours, Tracy still recognized plenty of faces from this morning. He would stake the chips he had left that plenty of people had been here for nearly twenty-four hours.

They all had the same look, as if they were slightly unhinged. Their eyes were too wide, they radiated something Tracy knew was dangerous: Hope. Hope had no place in a joint like this. This was where hope came to die, but still suckers lined up around the block to let the house take their money. That was because they all believed in that dream that this country sold wholesale. They all played games rigged in the house's favor, but as long as that small glint of hope remained they would keep coming to the tables until they had nothing left take. In many ways, this dingy little casino with its clouds of cigarette smoke and people looking to score easy money was America in a nutshell. The games in these walls were just as rigged as the big game outside, but as long as people ate it up the house would always take and it would always win.

Tracy walked the floor, glancing up to the long glass pane above the casino. Joe Milligan's god's eye view of the casino he lorded over like a king with horrible taste. Out the corner of his eye he saw the man he first noticed two hours ago. He was a red head with a thick ginger beard and a navy blue suit and white shirt, no tie. He was groomed but Tracy saw the tattoos from a mile away. They were on his knuckles, a single letter on each, that spelled out LOVE on his right hand, HATE on his left. He was one of the men in the security footage Milligan showed him. While the security footage helped, Tracy made him as a caser right off the bat. He wasn't too obvious with the way he watched everything going on around the casino floor, but he wasn't subtle enough to elude Tracy.

He slid up to the roulette table where the man was putting a bet on 28 Black. Tracy laid down a bet on 17 Red just before the little ball went into the spinning roulette. He stared at the table and only discretely glanced at the man out the corner of his eye. His hair was recently cut, the tanlines around the back of his neck made it obvious. They both lost money when the ball clattered into 22 Black. Tracy stayed and played a few more spins while his target took his money to the blackjack table.

After a few more hours of playing, the man left. He spent all his chips, nothing to cash out at the teller's cage. Tracy waited a few minutes before leaving behind him. He was leaving the casino parking lot in a red sedan as Tracy stepped out into the evening. He got his Charger and caught up with the sedan on the parkway, speeding east away from the coast and towards the interior of the state. Tracy kept a long leash on the car, especially as traffic began to thin and Center City disappeared into the distance. The car took an off ramp at a town called Nelson, some thirty miles outside of the city. Tracy followed and kept going as the sedan pulled into a dilapidated gas station.

He doubled back and parked the Charger down the block, the lights off, and watched the sedan idling at the gas station. A few minutes later, a roar filled the air and six motorcycles raced down the street and pulled into the gas station. Six burly bikers dismounted their bikes and walked over to the sedan as the caser got out. He talked with the six bikers about something. In the dim light, Tracy caught a glimpse of the leather cut one of the bikers wore. It read Horde MC.

"Shit," Tracy said to himself.

The Horde was among the baddest biker gangs in America, especially out west. They cooked and sold crystal to rednecks, sold guns to Mexican cartels, massacred rival gangs, and terrorized the communities were their chapters formed. And now, it appeared to Tracy, casino robbery was about to be added to that list.

Washington D.C.
March 26th, 2005
13:59pm

Barnes, Stevenson, and Fontaine had left for Washington the morning after their inquisition at Smiley's hands. Bucky had spent most of the flight reassuring them they wouldn’t spend the rest of their careers in an even deeper hole than Jakarta. Try though he might to assure them that SHIELD wouldn’t punish them for not rooting out Jackson they seemed unconvinced. He couldn’t blame them. In their position he would have been too. All Bucky could stress was the importance of keeping Jackson’s betrayal secret. If they wanted a future within SHIELD that was absolutely imperative. If they wanted a future anywhere that was absolutely imperative. That part of the message seemed to sink in. He hoped for their sakes it had done lest he be called into Smiley’s office one day and handed a folder with their names in it. It certainly wasn’t Smiley’s style but Bucky wouldn’t put it past Nick Fury.

Barnes exchanged an awkward goodbye with them though tried as earnestly as he could to express his desire to work with both of them again. After Smiley had finished debriefing Fury, Barnes had stopped by Fury's office for a time. They spoke briefly and Fury made his disappointment at having lost Tiger Shark clear but otherwise congratulated him on a job well done. His first proper outing as Captain America had been a success as far as SHIELD were concerned. So why was Bucky still so downbeat? Was it the boy on the ship? He couldn’t quite work it out but felt some personal time was in order. He felt like he’d been living in the uniform for the past week.

It had taken some convincing but Maria Hill agreed to allow Barnes out of the Triskelion for the afternoon. Bucky had wanted to go to a bar somewhere to get a drink but Maria “suggested” he visit the Captain America Exhibit at the National Museum of American History instead. It was better than prowling the hauls of the Triskelion or sitting alone in his quarters. He had exactly six hours to himself in which he could do that. Hill had offered to send some SHIELD “escorts” with him but Bucky refused her on the spot and told her SHIELD would have to find another Captain America unless they let him go on his own. After several expletives Agent Hill finally agreed.

Feeling the wind on his face on the bike ride there had been freeing. The actual exhibition had been anything but. Bucky stared into a cabinet in which the "actual" shield of Captain America sat. He knew from first experience that it was anything but the real deal and wondered how anyone believed it. There beside the shield was a mannequin dressed in Bucky's old uniform. He tried his best not to make eye contact with it and instead focused on the shield behind the pane of glass. From beside him the sound of a voice made him jump slightly.

It was a grey-haired lady that looked as old as time. She smiled at him and gestured towards the cabinet. “I met him once.”

Her words listed past Bucky's ears without registering as he stared at her wrinkled skin. She was so frail that she looked like she could barely support her own weight. Yet there she stood on her own, a lilac cardigan draped over her shoulders, staring into the cabinet beside Bucky all the same. Bucky looked at her face, her thinning hair, and wondered whether he'd look that old now were it not for the icy waters of Atlantic.

Suddenly he remembered the old woman had spoken but not what she had said. “I beg your pardon?”

“Captain America’s sidekick,” the old woman grinned. “I met him.”

Bucky strained to find some face amidst the wrinkles that he recognised. After several seconds of trying he found himself disappointment. More likely than not the woman was misremembering things or it was a family story that the details of had been embellished with time. Barnes thought back to the young SHIELD agent on the flight to Germany that claimed his grandfather had fought with Steve. It wasn't uncommon for men to fabricate stories like that. The people waiting at home expected glory or gore when more often than not war was soul-destroying tedium. Perhaps this was another instance of that.

“I was a child at the time and far too young to understand what was going on. My father was a civil servant in the Vichy regime working as a double agent for the French resistance. One night some men came to our home speaking a language I could not then understand. Tallest amongst them was a man in a blue uniform carrying a shield that I had heard the other children talk about. Captain America. They say he was five times as strong as a normal man and ten times as fast. It wasn’t him that fascinated me but his young friend, Bucky.”


“Through the eyes of a child I thought he was huge,” the old woman muttered as she pressed her hand against the cabinet. “Now I understand that he was no more than a boy then. I remember thinking how brave he must have been. There amongst all the bullets, all the explosions, all the… killing. He must have been forced to do things that no boy should ever have to do. When I grew older and my family moved to America I read about him. I saw the footage they showed American children of him fighting alongside Captain America. He was always smiling. It was wrong. The young man I met was sad.”

The woman's words cut Bucky deeper than any knife might have. Perhaps she had seen him. Perhaps not. It made no difference. In a few seconds the woman had shown she'd understood him and the pain he'd felt all those years ago better than anyone since Bucky had woken up. He had bore the responsibility that came with being Captain America's sidekick willingly, he'd done things Steve couldn't bring himself to do, and somewhere along the line he'd lost a part of himself in doing it. If he could go back and change a thing he wouldn't have but there were times he dreamt of having had a normal childhood. If only all the boys back in America that envied him knew how badly he used to envy them at times.

"I never forgot his eyes," the old woman said as she glanced towards Bucky. "There was so much sadness in them.”

Suddenly eyes that had been bleary and lifeless came alive as if she recognised something in those eyes that she had recognised once before. She reached a thin, wrinkly hand towards Barnes and placed it against his cheek. Unsure of himself he stood still and allowed the woman's hand to rest against his cheek for a moment before staggering backwards a few paces. The old woman's hand remained in the air and stretched out towards Bucky as he shook his head slightly and began to walk backwards away from the woman.

Tears began to well in the woman's eyes and Bucky wanted to step towards her and tell her she was right, he wanted to hold her and tell her that he was alright, but he knew he'd never be able to do that. Instead he tried to swallow away the large knot in his throat, turned his back on the old woman, and made his way towards the exit. As he reached the parking lot and bestrode his bike he stopped for a moment and dipped his head in mourning. Not for Steve or the boy he'd killed in Jakarta but for himself.

Bucky Barnes was dead.

The campus was lightly littered with yawning students, despite being in the heart of London, the campus was still relatively quiet, no doubt there'd be a sudden surge of students at around quarter to 9, rushing to get to morning lectures in the nick of time. The few students who did wander about like hungover lost souls stared and whispered at the strangely dressed, tall woman walking confusedly around the campus.

"Hey Barbie! You're a bit early for Halloween!" one smart-alec yelled, laughing and chugging on his Starbucks. Thor completely ignored it, she didn't even register that the comment was aimed towards her, she had no idea who Barbie was and what a "Halloween" was. Even if she'd noticed that he was talking to her, she was likely to have ignored it just as much because she had a mission, and Barbies and Halloweens were irrelevant to her cause right now.

A groundskeeper, rake in hand, eyed her up and down and she came to a stop in front of him. "I seek a man by the name of Eric Selvig, can you bring me to him?" she asked.
The groundskeeper gave her a wary look and shrugged.
"Selvig always did keep strange company, I'll bring you up to his office." he replied, leaving the rake against a wall and taking her inside one of the impressively large buildings. If Thor's mind wasn't otherwise occupied with countless questions she'd have regarded the university building with awe and curiosity.

"Just that door up there on the left." the groundskeeper said, pointing at a thick oak door.
"You have my thanks good sir." she replied, parting ways with the groundskeeper and knocking on Selvig's door.
"It's open." came his reply.
"Eric Selvig, I would have words with thee." she closed the door behind her.
"And who might you be?" Selvig replied cautiously, though he saw the hammer strapped to her hip and recognised it instantly. He was filled with a number of questions himself. Whoever this woman was, she had Thor's hammer, something which not just anyone could pick up on a whim.
"I am Thor, and you are an ally of Odinson are you not?"
Selvig gave a hearty laugh and gestured for Thor to take a seat opposite his desk.
"You aren't Thor madam, he's an old friend of mine and he certainly didn't look like that" he pointed at her, "Last I saw him"
"Verily, I am Thor, she who commands lightning, weilder of Mjolnir, the Goddess of Thunder."
Selvig quelled his laughing and decided to roll with this for now, till he could get to the bottom of it at least.
"Alright, alright, Thor ... Lets say I believe you ... Why do you have Mjolnir? Where is ... Odinson?"
She steepled her fingers together. "I was hopeful that you woulds't be able tell me where Odinson is."

This disappointed her. Selvig was an ally of Odinson's, and Mjolnir had been abandoned on earth, so surely he was here somewhere and he would have reunited with his allies if that were the case, yet Selvig had no answers for her.
"I'm sorry ... I haven't seen him or heard from him since the Convergence, I cannot tell you where he is. You are clearly of Asgard yourself ... why are you here?"

"Asgard has fallen. I believed Odinson would come with haste to this realm ... his love for Midgard is unlike anyone else of Asgard's. With Asgard lost, I seek to defend Midgard in his stead, just as he did."
Selvig nodded slowly, sadly. Part of him was reeling, numb, how could Asgard be lost? Destroyed? Had Odinson ... the Thor that Selvig had known, been lost in the battle? Was that even possible.
"You seek Odinson, so that you can protect Midgard together?" Selvig confirmed.
She nodded. "I believe if anyone could survive Ragnarok, Odinson would, and it is in this realm he woulds't seek sanctuary. I can only hope that the Son of Laufey hath not."
"But Loki died during the Convergence ... it's impossible."
"He was very much alive during the war." she said icily.
"Are you sure he died on Asgard? It wouldn't be the first time he's escaped his fate."
"From what mine eyes bore witness on Asgard ... not a soul couldst escape the helfires intact ... Odinson though ..." she trailed off.
"You think he'd survive?"
"Verily. He is truly remarkable, not even Ragnarok could best his might." she looked out the window, the campus below was growing busier. Suddenly a large black military helicarrier landed on the campus and heavily armoured mercs hopped out, weapons primed, students ran screaming. Selvig got up and looked out the window.
"Looks like you have a welcoming party."
"Art these your allies Selvig?" she asked, turning to walk towards the door.
"I don't know them ... be careful ... Thor" he said, suspicious of this mysterious woman. Whomever she was, she wasn't Thor Odinson, he was certain. She wasn't an enemy yet, but his guard was up.

Thor stepped out onto the campus, Selvig ran to catch up with her but stayed in the door way out of the way as the armoured men inched forward. She held Mjolnir in her hand, primed and ready to swing.
"Lay down thine weapons and I'll let thou live another day." she said.
The mercs stayed still, one raised his fingers to his helmet, awaiting orders. Slowly they lowered their weapons.
"We want to talk. Would you come talk with us?" he finally asked.
"Who commands thee? I would have words with him." came her reply.
"We'll take you to him."
"So be it. I will accompany thou." she turned to Selvig and gave him a parting gesture, "Farewell, Eric Selvig."

She disappeared into the helicarrier which took off from the campus and disappeared across the horizon.

---

---

9:00 AM, March 20th, 2015
Location undisclosed
Deep in an underground bunker,
Padded Cell

Hey! Hey, get up! There's someone here to see us, and it's not Johnson spitting on the bulletproof glass

"Wait, Johnson's late?! Aww, I really thought I had something going with him. A few more loogies and curse words and I was gonna ask him to go steady!"

That's cute. What were we gonna make our prom dress out of? Bedsheets and some extra cell padding?"

...N-no?

We know there's no ACTUAL prom in the Top Secret ARGUS super-prison, right?

"BUT I WANTED TO BE THE PROM QUEEN AND THE THEME WAS GOING TO BE ARKHAM ASYLUM!"

"Ha! At least then you'd be where you really belong. Now get up Wilson, you have marching orders."

One of these days, Wade would actually learn not to scream portions of his inner dialogues out loud.

Maybe.

As the massive sheet of hardened glass that separated him from the rest of the facility slid away, Deadpool fell in line in front of his latest escort more out of a desire to escape boredom than anything else. At first he thought it was strange that his only supervision would be one man considering when they initially locked him up he'd been brought in surrounded by multiple squads with tasers and full combat armor. Well, he was confused until he remembered just who that one man was.

"Hey! I know you! You're Little Ricky Flagg! From that one time with SHIELD in Morocco. I saw you take down ten guys with your bare hands! Impressive as hell! I heard rumors your Dad used to run the Task Force back in the 70s during the last HYDRA thing! How ya been, guy?"

Captain Rick Flag Jr. one of the most decorated and deadly agents of ARGUS, visibly winced at the nickname and looked more than embarrassed not to mention shocked that one of his prisoners was being so friendly.

"I'm...good? and...It was more like eight guys, honestly. And...that means a lot, coming from the guy who broke through the barricades alone with nothing but a food truck. Got us out of a tight spot."

" 'WHO WANTS SHWARMA!?' heh, man those were the days."

The two of them walked in silence after that, and though they might have shared a moment and a past, the captain never took his eyes off of his prisoner or kept his hand far from his gun. Finally as they stepped into a lift that secured behind them, Rick Flagg spoke up again.

"So what the hell happened, Wilson? You were one of the best of us, you did the impossible and made it look fun and easy, pulled more ops and asses out of the fire in three years than most Agents manage in a whole career. You were a hero. So what gives? The cancer's on record sure but here you are six years later still alive, but on the wrong side...I don't get it."

Maybe he's right...We could've gone back to SHIELD, worked something out, something better...

Shut up.

"No. You don't get it. And I'm not on the wrong side. The only side I'm on is mine."

It's not too late...We can still do the right thing.

shut. up.

"Heh, if that were true why'd you take Waller's deal, volunteer to fight HYDRA? Whatever enemy she was going to hand you over to can't have been that bad, and I know you can't actually die. Why not just ride it out, escape, keep living just for yourself? Your files say you've done it before. I think maybe you wanted to make a difference, I think maybe-"

We can be a hero again!
"you wanna be a hero again."

"SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP!"



As the elevator doors slid open, Deadpool walked on alone down a narrow hallway with only one door at its' end. Rick Flagg stood behind, not quite stunned enough by the outburst to forget to train his weapon on the mercenary's back, but made cautious enough by it to give him some space. It wasn't as if there was any other place to go now.

The only door led to Amanda Waller's office.

It was definitely not what Deadpool was expecting when he pictured The Wall's office. There was a big mahogany desk, a plushy looking couch off to one side, a roaring fireplace in the background that was obviously holographic but seemed to give off a feeling of warmth anyways and books! Shelves of books in this day and age! It felt...bizarre. Bizarre and cozy. The very contrast to the bleak utility of the rest of prison made the room uncomfortable, and paradoxically Wade found himself longing for the spartan utility of his cell.

Hell, Amanda Waller herself was seated in what looked like an upholstered freakin' armchair behind that fancy desk! Without waiting to be prompted Deadpool sat down, fidgeting a little and feeling like a kid from some 1950s sitcom called into his Dad's study for the inevitable belting after the lecture that never got shown on TV.

"Wilson. It's good to see that you didn't try to start a gunfight in the hallway on the way here."

"I can play nice if I feel like it, I'm not all deposing third world regimes and robbing taco trucks for kicks, y'know."

"That's actually what I brought you in here to talk about. You were a dedicated soldier once Wilson, and a brilliant operative. Myself, Dugan and even your brother thought you had it in you to be one of the all-time greats in this business before your cancer and those atrocities at CADMUS. But I'm not going to sugarcoat it, you burned all of your bridges with your behavior over the past six years and the U.S. government would like to bury you in a twenty-foot-deep hole ground up inside an adamantium matchbox then cover the whole thing in cement and leave you there until hell froze over. Or just hand you to the Chinese and see how inventive they can get..."

Well, here it comes. We've enjoyed having a body while it lasted right?

You mean I'm gonna have to spend half of eternity inside a tiny box with no one but you for company?

"But the U.S. government doesn't get to make that choice. I do. And I think that you can still be of use to your country. I've read the reports, but unlike the idiots at the Capitol I know how to read between the lines. You fell out with the Foot at the same time that they started recruiting from teenage street gangs in Japan and abroad. In the infamous Zesti Soda incidents every target you killed was involved in the sort of war crimes that makes Genghis Khan look like a creampuff, and there were no children listed as casualties in that hospital fire you caused, impressive considering it specialized in pediatrics. Your preferred form of payment was one that cost Zesti more money to uphold than any lump sum of cash and you wiped out the worst scum they employed when you didn't get it. And that orphan fighting ring..."

Here we go.

Here we go.

"Well, some might decry your methods as barbaric, even monstrous. But any bastards who force homeless kids to fight for their amusement deserve every bit of torture you gave them. My point is Wilson, I think you have potential and that you're better than you pretend to be, better than your file makes you seem. So...

Waller reached under her desk and pulled out a pair of Japanese swords. Deadpool recognized them instantly of course considering he'd been wearing them when ARGUS took him in. His hands twitched toward them involuntarily.

"...I have a proposition for you."

This was it! The cozy, comfortable setting, all of the compliments, returning his swords...

Deadpool knew there was only one thing all this could possibly mean.

"MRS.ROBINSON, YOU'RE TRYING TO SEDUCE ME!"

*Facepalm*

"what?!"

"...Well aren't you?"

"I...wh...no, I am not trying to seduce you! I'm formally offering you a place on Task Force X!"

How are we even the same person-

"Oh. Well in that case my answer's no now. After all the crap the spy business put me through you guys should be giving me a medal and a retirement package, not a microchip in my head. Give me one good reason I should join the Squad"

"I c'n think of one."

That voice...changed things.

Of all the offices in all the prisons in all the world, she had to walk into this one. Vanessa Carlysle. She had smile that said 'heavenly', a walk that whispered 'damnation' and legs up to...well, wherever you wanted her legs to be up to. It was one of perks of being one of the world's greatest shapeshifters, but the dame had my heart in her fist in any shape she pleased and she damn well knew it. It had been years since we met in Boston that rainy night, back when I was still on the wagon and still on the force. She'd been forced into working for a global thieving ring with ties to terrorists, just like a sexy, sexy Oliver Twist.

I was supposed to be her SHIELD liason in witness protection, but in the end we both did a whole lot more than just liase. The two of us were just kids, young, stupid and in love. I wanted to get her out of this crazy game called life, settle down, raise some awesome shapeshifting kids. But then the cancer hit me like a ton of bricks on a freight train driven by a bull. It took my heart, my lungs, my prostate and even my girl. She didn't need a dying man and she knew it, I was no good for her so I did the only thing I could. I walked out: Out of her apartment, out of her life and out of her heart, and sucker that I am for a pretty face, I promised I'd never look back. But now here's that same pretty face staring into mine, and my immortal heart skips a beat, the Merc With a Mouth struck silent...

Only then did Wade realize he'd once again been speaking his entire monologue.

"I missed you too, Wade. Life...hasn't been easy for either of us, since you left."

Realizing that she really was there and what it must mean, Deadpool turned on Amanda Waller and was inches away from snatching his swords from her and gutting her then and there. For her part, Waller seemed completely undisturbed.

"YOU BITCH, KEEP THE VANESSA THE HELL OUT OF THIS OR I'LL-"

Then Vanessa's hand was on his shoulder, pressing him back into the chair.

...How long had it been since someone had touched him without trying to hurt him?

"Wade, 's'alright. I'm here because I wanna to be. I've done a lot of bad since you knew me and I honestly wanna pay my debt to society. You understand, right? You'll help me do that?"

The rage drained from Deadpool's body and left him confused and empty for a moment. So, Waller wanted to play dirty, pull his first love into things and she was just going along with it? Well, he'd work with her then, at least until he could figure out what mind control was being used on Vanessa and get her free of it. Then they would see just how dirty he could play.

"...Sure babe, sure."

Waller looked decidedly smug.

"Well, now that that's settled let's introduce you to the rest of the team."

---

Deadpool walked with Waller on one side Vanessa on the other and Flagg in the back ready to put the shocks to him if he tried anything, especially now that he was armed. The trip down to the Task Force X 'Cafeteria' was Deadpool's first since he'd been arrested by ARGUS. It was basically supposed to be like a school lunchroom, but full of sociopaths, bullies and outcast freaks forced to be on their best behavior.

So exactly like a school lunchroom.

"HEY GUYS, GUESS WHAT? NOW IT'S A 'POOL PARTY!"

Deadpool would've followed up his entrance with even more purposefully annoying quips, but there was suddenly a fork and a knife in his left and right eyes respectively.

"WILSON YOU SCUMBAG! I TOLD YOU IF I EVER SAW YOU AGAIN I WAS GOING TO USE YOU FOR TARGET PRACTICE!"

"Oh hey! Deadshot's here!"

A second later a hand like a vise seized his skull and pinned him to the wall

"Naw, lemme do it! I wan' squish the bo's head like a grape for what he did in Qurac!"

"Qurac...and that dumb accent...so that'd be Warhawk..."

"With the level of pressure you can exert it should only take about two seconds. Four for his head to re-form so I can cut it off..."

"And Clock King makes three! We might actually die this time!"

"Well, at least now we know why they call it the Suicide Squad!"

Brooklyn, New York
May 24th, 1976

The crimson Cadillac Coupe DeVille glided at a slow and steady pace down Coney Island Avenue towards the beach. The neighborhood the car drove through was known as Brighton Beach. This part of Brooklyn was created as a beach resort one hundred years earlier, but was soon restructured into a residential community in the 1920's. Since the 30's, Jewish immigrants drifted to this patch of New York upon their arrival to the United States. Many of the residents bore marks on their body, scars and reminders of their time in concentration camps.

Since 1970, the demographic of the neighborhood had begun to shift again. Although plenty of Jews still found their place in Brighton Beach, more and more of them were coming from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. The shops in the area were accommodating, the writing in the store windows in Cyrillic script as well as English. Like Little Italy and Chinatown in Manhattan, the growing influx of immigrants gave rise to the nickname of Little Odessa.

The Coupe DeVille sped past kosher butcher shops, makeshift synagogues, and jewelry and appliance stores that lined both sides of the avenue. Red, white, and blue streamers were hung from light posts and storefronts in celebration of the America's upcoming bicentennial anniversary.
The car contained three men. They were stern-faced and silent, the only sound coming from the car was the steady drone of the engine. Today marked their fifth day in America. They had flown in from West Berlin, their passports marking them as residents of various cities in West Germany. In actuality, the names and locations on the passport were a grand fiction. The names and identities were just one of many the men used for their work.

The man driving was the oldest by at least twenty years. His steel-colored hair had been grown out from its usual military crew cut. He wore a thick mustache matching the color of his hair. A pair ray-bans on his face and the current American fashion, a burnt orange turtleneck with a checkered sports jacket and a golden medallion, made him look the part of an average America. In truth, he felt ridiculous and foolish in this get-up. It was too flashy and ostentatious, like something a clown would wear.

The two other men dressed in similar clothing of various colors, each article of clothing chosen to help them blend in with the current styles and trends of the country. They all smoked cigarettes, their brand not the common Marlboro or Pall Malls. These were Turkish brands purchased from a special store many miles away from Brooklyn. The foul-smelling smoke of the cigarettes spread through the car and out the cracked windows.

The car turned right onto Brighton Beach Avenue and sped along with the traffic. The Cadillac turned off the Avenue and swooped into a parking spot outside a four-story apartment building. The driver kept the car running as he looked at the two men in the back of the car. His hard eyes sized them up. He removed his sunglasses, excitement glittered in his eyes as he gave his men one last look.

"Bewegen," he said in the harsh German tongue. Move.

Quickly, the two men exited from the running car. They hurried up the concrete steps into the apartment building's foyer. The man in the car checked his wristwatch. It was 2:14 in the afternoon.

The next five minutes were the most crucial of their operation. The three of them had practiced, trained, and prepared for months. They had committed the map of the area to memory, knew the schedules of the NYPD patrolman who passed by the apartment once every fifteen minutes, knew who would be in the apartment building at this time of day and when others would be back. The man in the car would run interference if any of the apartment's residents attempted to go in, waving them away with a forged NYPD detective badge and speaking in perfect American English that there was a gas leak in the apartment and it was not safe to go inside.

Short of an epic fuck up by the two men inside, this operation would go off without a hitch. A successful operation today would be their sixth such outcome in the past two years. The three were the best of the best their service had to offer. Clever and ruthless, they were the proverbial sword for the party. While other directorates and sections did more acceptable work to protect the GDR, they were the unseen knife that those in control slipped between the ribs of the state's enemies. They were the necessary evil the politicians that ran the world did not want to face.

The two men inside came off the stairs on the third-floor landing, their cigarettes gone from their mouths. The older of the two was a squat, chubby man with a wrinkled face and watery eyes. Sweat clung to his brow. His black hair had traces of gray in it. The grayness, mixed with the wrinkles, made him look ten years older than his current age of thirty-three. The man beside him was taller by at least four inches, coming in around six-foot-three. His dark blonde hair was close to his scalp in a buzzcut. His cobalt blue eyes stared straight ahead calmly, never once betraying the nervousness he felt.

The fat man looked up at his younger comrade and nodded. The man tall returned his nod. Today was the young man's first time doing work of this sort. He had been part of the unit for six months now, acting as runner and lookout for the others. But now, it was time for him to truly become one of them.

As they approached the apartment marked 3H, the two men reached into their sports coats and produced weapons from hidden shoulder holsters. They each had a Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter. Screwed on the end of the barrels were two suppressors. The older man nodded as they stopped outside the apartment. With no further words, the tall man thrust a shoe forward at the door. His foot crashed at the base of the doorknob, splintering the door jamb and snapping the lock in two. He led the way into the apartment, rushing in with the short man close behind him.

They came through the door and into the dirty, dimly lit apartment that reeked of the same sour cigarettes they used. Standing in front of a television set, wearing only an undershirt and a dirty pair of underwear, was a thin bald man with a ginger mustache. He held his left hand up while his right hand stayed by his waist where he cupped a velvet bag. He looked at the two men in front of him with no fear or defiance in his face.

"Stasi," he said in a thick German accent. It was a declaration and not a question.

"Ja," said the fat man. "Schild und Schwert der Partei."

"Verpiss dich, du kommunistischen bastarde," the bald man sneered.

Without hesitation, the tall man opened fire with his Browning. The gun kicked three times, three soft pops accompanying the bullets. The bald man fell to the floor, the three shots striking his head and chest. The tall man ventured forward to the body and looked down. The dying man stared up at him, his eyes opaque and his dingy shirt stained with dark red blood. What caught his eye was the bag beside the dead man. The little pouch dropped beside the body in the ruckus, its contents spilled out onto the floor.

"Fritz," the tall man said urgently, picking up a shiny stone and holding it up in the light. "Ich habe etwas gefunden. Diamanten."

--

Now
Triskelion
Washington D.C.
13:51 Local Time

Phillip Coulson could hear his pulse in his ears as he rode the elevator to the twelfth floor. He was in the middle of researching information about Albania when a stern-faced security agent summoned him from the archives. Smiley wants to see you, he said without any preamble, and led him to the elevator. He stood behind Coulson in the elevator, hands clasped together in front of him and watching Coulson with that sort of bored intent only a long-term SHIELD security man could manage.

The archives were his home now. After that mess with the drone in Yemen, he'd been taken off the drone center and dumped into the basement where he did legwork for the analysts desks on the sixth floor. He'd been waiting for the shoe to fall ever since that day, waiting on someone to round him up and hand him his walking papers or worse. Today looked like it was coming to pass. Why else would be going to see the Accountant? That was the nickname the SHIELD wags had given the newest member in the command chain. It derived from his short, dumpy appearance and large glasses as well as the large ledger he seemed to carry wherever he went. Already the rumors about the man were flying thick. According to one, he broke down a suspicious agent simply by staring at them for twelve straight hours and not uttering a word, another was that he got the job because Nick Fury was his spy and he was running SHIELD with the director as a puppet, another had it that Smiley was telepathic. That rumor was not as far-fetched in today's world as it may have been ten years ago.

The elevator dinged and Coulson stepped out onto the landing with his babysitter right behind him. The twelfth floor was counterintelligence's domain. Coulson had never been here, but he felt uncomfortable the second he stepped off the elevator. Compared to other parts of the building, this floor was offputting. It was the tiny corridors, Coulson theorized. Whereas most of the building had lots of open space and lighting, the hallways here were smaller and dimly lit. It felt like to Coulson that he was traveling back in time to the old SHIELD headquarters near the reflecting pool. He was guided down twisting hallways to a large, soundproof door at the end of a hallway. A simple G. Smiley was the only thing on the plate beside the door.

"Deputy Director Smiley," Coulson's babysitter said into a buzzer beside the door. "Coulson is here."

"Send him in," a voice in an English accent replied. "That'll be all, James, thank you."

The door buzzed unlocked and Coulson stepped inside. Smiley's office still looked as if no one occupied it. Nothing on the walls except a world map, nothing on the man's desk beside a neatly ordered inbox/outbox. Not even a computer. The man himself rose from his desk and held out a pudgy hand for Coulson to shake. His hands were soft, Coulson noticed as they shook, but his grip was firm.

"Phillip, take a seat please," Smiley said graciously. "Do you go by Phillip? What shall I call you?"

"Phil, sir."

The two sat and Smiley let out a reassuring grin. It was small, but it put Coulson at ease almost at once. Even though in the back of his mind he knew the rug could be pulled out from under him at any second, he had a feeling that he would be alright.

"I prefer George myself. Could never stand it when someone called me Georgie or Georgie Boy. Now, Phil, I wanted to bring you in here today to speak about something."

Smiley leaned back in his chair and stared at Coulson through half-open eyelids. Coulson got the feeling that this was his serious face, the one that supposedly made that agent crack. He figured if he had to stare at that for twelve straight hours, he may just crack as well.

"You applied for field work straight out of training, but was instead sent to technical services, working as a janitor out of Bulgaria and tapping embassy phones and computers. Do you know why?"

Coulson shrugged. "At the time they said they needed janitors more than they needed fieldmen. I believe I scored high in surveillance training."

"Oh you did. You scored quite well all across the board. Too well to be just a simple janitor. What did you make of your... custodial service?"

"It was a mixed bag,sir. I loved the tech I got to play with, but it was tedious when it came to the sitting. Though I've learned now that actual spy work is mostly sitting and waiting."

Smiley drummed his fingers on the table and nodded. He stayed silent for several moments, leaving Coulson to wonder what was going on in the man's head.

"If I could sum up my evaluation of SHIELD personnel thus far, two words come to mind: Wasted potential. So far I have encountered a few very talented agents either in backwater posts or in a section they are ill-suited for. You may be adept at technical surveillance, Phil, but I see your talents more suited to my line of work. Janitors are a dime a dozen, but a good network man is damn near impossible to come by. I want you to come over to my shop, Phil. Work under me and cultivate intelligence and counterintelligence networks."

Although he didn't show it on the outside, Coulson let out a huge sigh of relief from inside. There would be no walking papers, nor a black bag over his head.

"I need someone to carry out the operational side of things," Smiley said, a hand disappearing into his desk. "I cannot gallivant across the globe on a whim. I did that a few days ago and it nearly killed me. Plus, I'm needed here in Washington. I'll be spending most of the week on Capitol Hill and something has come up in Eastern Europe."

Smiley pulled a collection of photographs and handed them to Coulson. He looked at grainy, black and white footage of two men huddled together in a doorway. One was large with a crew cut that looked gray, but the color palate made it hard to tell for sure. The other man was tiny with a bald head and a pair of glasses hooked at the end of his nose.

Smiley adjusted his glasses and spoke as Coulson flipped through the photos. "A surveillance unit caught this in the Czech Republic thirty-six hours ago. The tall man is Wilhelm Wolf, formerly of the Stasi. He was part of a three-man hitsquad in the 70's and 80's that were responsible for at least two dozen murders of GDR enemies. He moved up in ranks and was Stasi security chief just before the Berlin Wall came down. Wolf disappeared shortly after East Germany fell. He's wanted for a laundry list of crimes, including the 1976 murder of a German defector to SHIELD."

Coulson waved the photo of the little guy, an eyebrow arched.

"That is Zastrow. As far as names, that's all we know about him. It's more than likely a work name. He was a major in the KGB and was a protegee of a Russian spymaster I went up against name of--" Smiley paused. Coulson looked up as the older man let the name come out in something approaching a hiss. "-- Karla. Zastrow ran several deep penetration networks into the West during the Cold War. Like Wolf, he fell off the grid as Mother Russia imploded in on herself. Both SHIELD and my old outfit appealed to the Russians for information on him, but they wre mum on that one. There have been sightings here and there of both of men since their disappearances, but the two of them meeting together raises eyebrows. There was no known Cold War connection between the two of them, both served in separate countries doing very different work. It is doubtful they crossed paths, so why are they meeting now?"

"HYDRA," Coulson said softly. "Intelligence reports have indicated they're using criminals and renegade intelligence operatives to fill out their networks. Have you read the report, sir?"

"I wrote it," Smiley said cheerfully. "SHIELD has a station in Prague and there's an active network still running through the Czech Republic, one of the few holdovers from the Cold War. Phil, I want you to go to Prague and serve as my eyes and ears, use the Prague station staff and the network and whatever means you can to find Wolf and Zastrow and see what kind of game they're playing."

Coulson felt a bolt of excitement and nervousness go through him. Finally, honest to god field work. But he was rusty in tradecraft, he wasn't sure if he could play it the way Smiley wanted it. Plus there was the lingering question that bothered Coulson since Smiley mentioned bringing him into the fold.

"Why me, sir?" Coulson asked. "I heard rumblings that you used Captain America for a mission, why not use him again?"

"Because Captain America is bright and capable," Smiley said without hesitation. "But I need a different sort of mind for this one. A mind that is capable of pragmatic choice. For all his experience in covert affairs, our shield wielding friend is still used to fighting a war under the rules of engagement. I sense you have no such illusions. If you disagree with my assessment or find the task too overwhelming, you can walk out the door and that will be the end of it. Spend the rest of your SHIELD career in the archives, reading up on what they eat in Morocco. But, follow me down the rabbit hole and you'll enter another world altogether. My world. It is a world fraught with peril and deception, but I feel you will be adept in navigating through it. What do you say?"

Coulson thought about Smiley's words. He was promising nothing but work, a chance to do something and help someone and make a difference. It wasn't sitting in a musty room or sitting in a van listening to a fat man eating borscht. It would be dangerous and hard, it was Smiley's only real promise, but it came with Smiley's endorsement of his ability. In Coulson's mind, the rewards far outweighed the risk.

"Let's get started."

New York
March, 21ST, 2005
4AM

The landing floor creaked like an old time galleon, while the front door squealed open like a stuck pig. Ted couldn't remember them ever making a noise like that before, but then he'd never had to sneak into his own house before. Last time he'd been an urban vigilante he'd been an extremely eligible bachelor, now he was an old man who shared his home with a teenager. Back in the good ol' days he could come and go as he pleased, whatever time of night, and only have to worry about passers-by on the street noticing how much time Wildcat spent in and round Ted Grant's place. Now he had to worry about waking Tommy and giving the game away, every whisper of noise as conspicuous as rolling thunder.

All those worries combined still couldn't wipe the smile off his face though, not after the night's good work. Not after he'd discovered that he still had it. That Wildcat was still the biggest badass going. (Suck on that Batman, ya young pretender).

By a real stroke of luck it had transpired that Campagna actually worked for Moretti, and had started singing like an eager-to-please canary, feeding Ted all the information he could have possibly needed, and more. Ted almost felt bad for dropping the Weed and the junkie trio off with the cops after how helpful they were. . . Almost.

The former champion padded through to his bedroom, unwinding his fistwraps and peeling off his sweat-soiled costume. Damn, but he felt good. Like top-of-the-world good. Like how he imagined Superman-felt good. And all he had to do was put the mask back on. He shoulda have done it years ago.

The landing floor creaked like an old time galleon, while the front door squealed open like a stuck pig. Ted ears pricked, whole body tense. What the hell could that be, at this hour? Surely Moretti couldn't have found him, not so quickly. His neck broke out in a cold sweat. What would they do to Tommy?

He heard stealthy footsteps making their way through the apartment. One set of footsteps. That wasn't right, Moretti wouldn't be stupid enough to send one man, because unless the guy could tangle with Iron-Man then he wasn't gonna be nearly enough. Ted crept behind his bedroom door, ready to leap out and throttle the intruder, soon as he sounded close enough to grab.

Closer and closer the steps got.

Ted's fists started to itch.

Closer still.

The intruder yawned.

With a thunderous sigh Ted pushed opened his door and stepped into the hall.

"You just get in Tommy?"

"Nah, just got up to get some water." Tommy lied. Even if he hadn't been caught in the act it would have been easy to call his bluff. His shoulder length dark hair was clumped in greasy rat-tails, bags as big as suitcases had formed under his red veined eyes, and he was still dressed in shirt and jeans. The stench of smoke and alcohol hung heavy in the air around the boy, a potent reminder of Ted's own misspent youth. Worse still was the fact that Tommy was too young to be either drinking or smoking, especially on a school night. This was the sort of thing a father had to stamp out quick and hard, before it became a habit. . .

Only problem there was that Ted didn't really feel like a father. He hadn't been there for Tommy, hadn't even known about him until a year ago, his mother had seen to that. She had kept the secret of Tommy's birth, and she was probably right to. Ted hadn't been father material, a hard drinking, modern day gladiator who picked men apart with his fists for money. He'd been on a path of self-destruction, good for a one night stand, but not for raising a family. Only reason he and Tommy ever met was because the mother had passed, and that small fact didn't make Ted a father. It just made him a man trying, and most likely failing, to make up for lost time with a boy who shared his blood.

Still, he felt he should try to steer the boy onto the straight and narrow.

"Tommy, tell me the truth now. Did you just get in?" Ted did his best approximation of a stern but fair father face. Truth was he wasn't quite sure how it was supposed to look. When he was training a fighter he just growled or screamed at em. He didn't think that would pass as good fathering. Tommy still didn't look all that receptive, his stance locking up defensively as he screwed up his nose, annoyed at being called out.

"No, I told you, I. . . " The boy tailed off as his nostrils flared, and he sniffed at the air. His face softened a fraction. "Wait, did you just get in?" He asked. Ted stiffened.

"What, no! Don't change. . . "

"You smell like sweat. . . And is that blood? What the hell have you been doing?" Damn that boy had a good nose. Must get it from the mothers side.

"Nothing, I was sleeping!" Protested Ted, taking a step back towards his room.

"Really, because I swear I can smell. . . "

"Forget it. Just go to bed Tommy. You've got school in the morning."

"Fair enough. 'Night Ted."

"Night."

Ted pulled the bedroom door closed behind him, marveling at how quickly that had gone south.

Who woulda figured fatherhood for being so difficult.

Washington D.C.
March 26th, 2005
17:12pm

Horns blared as Bucky’s bike came to a halt. Downtown Washington was gridlocked with traffic. On the horizon Bucky could see a row of patrol cars and a cordon around which a crowd of people were assembled. He took a glance at the brown leather-strapped watch around his wrist and sighed before pulling parking up and dismounting. He made his way towards the crowd and listened in for a while as they peppered the officers with questions. Each one was either batted away or ignored outright. Eventually Bucky turned to the elderly black man in the flat cap beside him and gestured towards the police cordon.

“What’s going on here?”

“One of those costumed freaks is holed up in a restaurant with a bunch of folks down there,” the man muttered with a shake of his head. “The police have cordoned off the entire block from the looks of things. What can you do, eh? As if traffic in this town isn’t bad enough already.”

Barnes grimaced. He’d promised Hill before he left that he wouldn’t do anything to bring attention to himself but the police looked far from capable of handling this situation. His thoughts drifted back to the woman at the museum and the “sadness” she had seen in his eyes. This was Bucky’s life now, the duty and the shield, and there was nothing else. What good was he if he walked away from situations like these? What would Steve have thought of him if he had done? He gritted his teeth as he thought about the torrent of abuse Maria Hill would hurl in his direction afterwards and headed back to his bike to get his uniform.

It was bitter cold as he slipped down an alleyway to pull on his uniform but once it was on Bucky could barely feel the cold at all. He took a couple of breaths to calm himself as he prepared to walk out in public in his uniform for the first time and then strode out. At first there was nothing. People walked past him with bemused looks until he drew close to the crowd near the police cordon. The old man Bucky had spoken to looked round first and took a brief glance at him before turning back to the cordon. He froze in place as what he’d seen began to sink in and he slowly looked back. His eyes widened as if he’d seen a ghost and he reached for those nearest him. One by one they turned and the crowd began murmuring.

Bucky stepped towards them and the crowd parted to let him walk through. The bemused Bucky had been met with at first had turned into stunned silence. He lifted up the police tape and slid underneath and began to approach the restaurant when a voice called out from behind him.

“Hey!” A police officer stood with his hand pressed against his radio as he readied to call for backup. “You can’t go in there.”

Suddenly his eyes widened as Bucky turned to face him and the sun deflected off of the red, white, and blue of Bucky’s uniform. The police officer’s hand slid from his radio and he gulped loudly and nodded in Bucky’s direction. With a small smile, Barnes turned back towards the restaurant and walked towards it without breaking stride. A bell clanged behind him as he stepped inside and he spotted a young beaten woman in the corner tied up with rope. She squealed with fear as Bucky locked eyes with her and he gestured to her to calm down.

Barnes took a glance around the corner into the restaurant and mumbled an expletive under his breath at the bodies dotted around the room. Many sat at tables with their ribcages torn open, a gaping hole where their hearts had once been, with lifeless eyes rolled back into their heads. Others lay on the ground with large portions of their skin missing. The floor was caked in blood and utensils were scattered across the floor atop broken glass. At some of the tables the living sat acting out some bloodless pantomime. They pretended to drink from empty glasses, scraped their knives and forks against empty plates, and mopped at their mouths with napkins.

Bucky glanced around the room for the “costumed freak” the man had spoken about earlier and found nothing of note. Finally in the corner of his eye he sensed movement as an elderly man stood up from one of the tables. His hair was a blonde faded by age and his face was wrinkled and aged. He wore a long-sleeved baby blue shirt and dark blue trousers. With a walking stick in hand he hobbled towards Bucky and shot him a fragile smile that wavered as if maintaining it took all of the man’s effort.


Finally the man moved to speak. “What do we have here? Please take a seat. I do so love having company for dinner.”

Between the man’s teeth was human flesh but that was by no means the most shocking part. He’d been slow to notice it at first but now the man stood directly in front of him he realised he’d seen those eyes somewhere before. That voice too. Both had aged some, the voice more raspy and the eyes heavier, but there was no mistaking it. Stood before him was a man that was supposed to be dead. A man that Bucky Barnes had once considered a brother, a mentor, and a friend.

It was Steve Rogers.

Washington D.C.
March 26th, 2005
17:27pm

It was wrong. He was wrong. That thing was not Steve Rogers. Bucky knew that and yet he felt compelled to sit down. Without a word of protest he followed after Steve and sat down when he gestured to him to do so. On the table was a slab of meat that resembled a half-eaten heart and given the chunks of flesh between Steve’s teeth it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out who’d been eating it. The elderly man picked up his utensils with surgical care and began to cut a small piece of the heart free. Once he had managed to do so he offered the piece to Bucky and smiled at him weakly. Barnes shook his head and Steve shrugged his shoulders and slid his teeth along his fork until the meat was in his mouth. He chewed on it greedily for a few moments, moaning euphorically every other second, and then looked up at Bucky as if he’d forgotten he was there.

"That uniform does not belong to you," Steve smiled mischievously at Bucky from across the table. "Did your mother never teach you that it was unkind to take things that don't belong to you?"

It was Steve's voice but the speaking pattern was nothing like Bucky had remembered. With each second in his presence it became clearer to him that the thing opposite him was not his friend. Those eyes though, the way they shone in the light and looked as if they saw straight into your soul, Bucky found it damn near impossible to believe it wasn't him. He steeled himself and tried to force some inquisitorial statement from his lips but something about the way the man looked at him forced him to confess his deepest, darkest thoughts.

When Bucky spoke it was more blubber than the bluster he had in mind. "My mother died when I was a child."

“Of course she did. That would explain why your manners are so lacking,” Steve mumbled from behind the napkin he wiped his mouth with. His eyes darted towards Bucky’s arms that were resting atop the edge of the table. “Elbows.”

Barnes pulled his elbows away from it and placed them in his lab obediently. “Sorry about that.”

“You are forgiven,” Steve said with a polite smie. “It’s not often that I have dinner guests. Not willing ones at least. I am afraid it’s been some time since I last entertained so I do hope you’ll be as forthcoming with your forgiveness if the locale leaves something to be desired. I did not have much time to prepare. Much the opposite in fact. You see, I could feel it, I could feel the madness. It had been too long since I last fed and it had begun to fetter my brain until I could think of nothing other than doing harm to my fellow man. That simply wouldn't do, would it?”

Bucky's hands twitched a little as the man spoke. He tried his best to calm them but his body seemed to be fighting against whatever hold the thing posing as Steve had over him. Every time he opened his mouth to speak it seemed to erode his control over Bucky and now Bucky's body seemed to have taken up the battle where his mind had faltered. Barnes spotted those piercing blue eyes lock on his hands and he held them against one another tightly to quell the twitching so as not to arouse his suspicion any further.

"Yes," Bucky smiled politely as the old man looked back at him, visibly unconvinced. "I understand."

Steve shook his head gently. "You are a resilient one, Captain, it is not often that I encounter men like you. Even now you try to suppress it but you must not. You see, were I not to feed, were I to suppress my urges, I would succumb to the madness and become something truly monstrous. What would you become if you failed to suppress your most base impulses, I wonder? Should we investigate what it is you fear?"

In the blink of an eye "Steve Rogers" became something else. Something Bucky at once recognised intuitively and felt completely detached from. It was him. There was something different about him though, a dullness to his eyes that made him deeply uncomfortable. His hair was long and shaggy and a black domino mask rested atop his face. His doppelgänger reached for a glass of wine in front of him and drank from it with a contented sigh before looking up at Bucky.

To his surprise a thick Russian accent left his mouth. "You are full of surprises."

Bucky searched his memory in an attempt to recall some clue as to why the doppelgänger might have taken that form but found it blank. He had nothing. Whatever this thing was, whatever it was trying to do, it had seemingly fired a blank. Seeing Steve sat before him had unsettled him so much he had succumbed to the hold of the being in front of him. This bizarro impression of him had broken it. The shaggy hair and domino mask slithered away and the man's true face was finally revealed.


He was horrific. Impossibly skinny with blemished, jaundiced skin and a half dozen ginger rags atop his greasy scalp. His teeth were jagged, yellowed points that looked as if they were barely cling to his rotten gums. Bucky noticed a flash of recognition across the man's eyes as if he noticed that Bucky had broken from his hold. He lunged towards Barnes with his fork and attempted to stick him in the neck. Bucky parried it away and twisted one of the man's arms until it snapped in two like a twig. He howled in pain and suddenly the man's hostages burst into life, as if freed of his hold too, and began to flee to the exits.

There was a crackle of energy as Bucky's arc shield burst into life. He took a glance towards the diners that sat dead, their skin flayed and their rib cages burst open, as he approached the hideous man with a grimace. Bucky rained punch after punch down on the man until the yellow pins in his mouth were cracked and broken. The man hacked up blood in Bucky's face and used his last free arm to scratch at the exposed mouth of his cowl. Bucky broke that arm as easily as the first before beating the man in the face with his shield until he slipped out of consciousness.

He stood, breathing heavily, and glanced down at the beaten mess that had taken once take his and Steve's forms. He lifted him from the ground and threw him through the window of the restaurant onto the street outside. Bucky stepped out of the broken window after him and glanced towards the end of the block towards the police cordon. The crowd had swelled, there were more patrol cars than there'd been when he'd gone in, and everywhere Bucky looked a phone was brandished in his direction.

Bucky Barnes might have been dead as far as the world was concerned but they would all know that Captain America was alive after tonight.

Washington D.C.
08:11 Local Time

Smiley stood at the curb outside his hotel and waited his ride. He wore a brown mackintosh to ward off the chilly morning. Within a month Washington would be more than warm to Smiley's English sensibilities, but for now he was at home in the nippy morning of the early spring. Underneath the raincoat was the finest suit Smiley owned, which wasn't saying a whole lot. He'd went home after another twelve hour day at the Triskelion, reviewing files and plotting the next move for the offensive. He'd asked Fury to set up some sort of makeshift living quarters for him on site, just a simple cot and tea kettle would suffice, but Fury nixed it on the grounds he needed something resembling a social life. Smiley, never a social butterfly, had gotten several requests to attend dinners and parties of Washington's movers and shakers. He denied them as a matter of course. Back when he did things like that, it was Ann who took the lead and Smiley took part to keep her happy. With nobody to keep happy, he saw no reason to waste time on vapid conversation and underdone chicken.

A black sedan pulled up to the curb, the passenger window rolling down with an electronic hum. Michael Stevenson sat behind the wheel and nodded at Smiley as the older man got into the car.

"Hullo, Michael."

"Mr. Smiley," he said in his quiet way. "Big day today."

Stevenson started the car down the street and navigated them through the fairly busy Washington traffic. Smiley looked in the rearview mirror and saw a navy blue sedan pull into the street a few seconds behind them. The windows were tinted, but Smiley knew the car belonged to the Russian embassy. What the Russians didn't know was that they had their own watchers. Smiley's small team of janitors and pavement artist tailed the tailers and inserted a bug in the car while they were busy chasing Smiley through the park. He pulled a receiver out of his jacket and flipped it on.

"Он ездит, как сука," a voice said in Russian.

"Michael you speak Russian. Translate for me."

"He's talking about my driving," said Stevenson. "Not favorably."

"Я не понимаю, почему мы должны следовать за ним. Он старик, который идет на работу и с работы."

"Now one of them is complaining about you," Stevenson said as he guided them onto the freeway. "They say all you do is go to work and the hotel. There's nothing worth following."

"Good," replied Smiley. "Let them grow bored. Bordeness breeds sloppiness."

"Why are the Russians so hellbent on you, sir?"

Smiley gazed out the window. They were heading towards downtown DC. The Washington Monument loomed ever larger. Smiley never visited Washington, even when he was head of the Circus. Ann always talked of going, she was almost certain Bill Haydon would bring her with him one weekend he was visiting the Cousins. It never materialized, and now Bill was dead some twenty years past.

"I helped destroy their intelligence agency," said Smiley. "They took offense to that, but I was just returning the favor for what they did to mine."

Stevenson said no more. They listened to the two Russians, Stevenson providing a running commentary. They complained about the traffic, one of the women they were sleeping with here in Washington. Smiley noted which one complained and made a mental note to have the janitors follow him for the next week to find the woman and set up an operation.

"Nervous, sir?" Stevenson asked.

"Not in the slightest, Michael," Smiley replied. "I've been through inquests before."

Stevenson grunted. Smiley could tell the young man had enough nerves for both of them. It was curious how quickly the man took a shine to Smiley. He'd appropriated the agent after returning for Jakarta. While he was stateside, awaiting reassignment he could work as valet and stringer to Smiley. In that short time, Stevenson grew very attached to him. Maybe it was because of the grueling interrogation Smiley put him through, he needed to prove without a doubt he was a committed patriot. Maybe it was sheer sycophantry, a desire to please Smiley so he could get a plumb posting. Smiley sensed something different at the heart of the matter. He collected proteges the way one might collect stamps. The aura he emitted attracted many a young and impressionable mind to come and learn at his side. Smiley sensed they could sense his desire for their devotion.

Like many childless men, Smiley had many surrogate sons. There had been Guilliam and Fawn at the Circus in the 80's, and now Stevenson and potentially Coulson. He told Brent Jackson he was not the parental type, but he was most certainly the father type. And he played it well.

After more traffic and a struggle to find parking, Stevenson escorted Smiley up the steps of the capitol building and down its polished marble floors. The architecture greatly impressed Smiley. Westminster was grand in its own way, but the House of Commons and 10 Downing Street seemed a lot smaller when compared to the House of Representatives chamber and the White House. After a security check, Smiley and Stevenson were given visitor passes and a young man who was a senator's aide escorted them through the capitol halls. They went down and down into the building's bowels until they arrived to polished wooden doors.

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Stevenson will have to wait outside," the aide said with a frown. "Mr. Smiley only from this point."

Smiley took off his mackintosh and handed it to Stevenson, who looked crestfallen at having to wait outside.

"I'll be back," Smiley said with a reassuring pat on Stevenson's back.

He waited until the big man was seated on a bench near the meeting room before following the aide inside. The room looked like a conventional chamber congress used except for the cube. A giant glass cube sat in the middle of the room, a large crescent-shaped table with six chairs inside of it and facing a smaller desk and a single chair. Four men and two women were sitting at the crescent table inside the cube. As the aide led him towards it, a guard did another pat down and checked for any recording devices. After his nod of approval, a soundproof door was opened to allow Smiley into the cube. He walked in, the vacuum-sealed door closing behind with a pop of suction.

"Mr. Smiley," the chairman in the center of the desk said with a soft smile. Underneath him read the words Sen. W. Brown, South Carolina. "Welcome to this special session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Please, have a seat."

Smiley unbuttoned his suit coat and took his seat at the small desk intended for him. He made sure his posture was perfect as he faced the six senators who held the future of his spying career in is hands. He wanted to be upright and stiff as a board as he faced whatever this firing squad had ready for him.

Wakanda
March 21st

S’yan knew it was time. He had been trained in the Old Ways, he would feel sobered by the frequent whisperings of the common people as he walked by, the hushed accounts of his magic in healing. S’yan would be the one called when people were in their darkest hour, their desperate need. However the revered man knelt beside his brothers’ bedside humbled. Unable to be the source of hope that he had grown accustomed to being for people, unable to save the one person who had always protected him. He remembered words of his brother; ‘Strength comes when you are aware of your limitations’.

The king was dying. It was painful to look upon his brother, the signal of strength and power to many in this world, and yet here he was, his final days beset with pain and grief.

Days before, the Kings son had revealed to his father he was to leave Wakanda, rejecting his responsibility as heir. Detailing that he could be of greater service to a greater nation rather than wasting his talents in an isolated world his father had built. S’yan had watched as T’Challa left, his final words visibly cutting into T’Chaka’s chest. In the kings weakened state, it was too much to bear; knowing his country was now at risk to rebellion was secondary to losing his only son.

There wouldn’t be much time; S’yan left the royal grounds to find perhaps the only comfort he could provide for the aged king.

-

Cursing herself at the heaviness of her breathing, Shuri dropped from the rocks she’d been training on for the past three hours. She knew she could do better, she’d be repeating her practice well into the night if she hoped to impress herself. Her mother used to call out to her when she trained in the compound, imploring her to rest, every time eliciting the same reply.

“I will stop my practice only when I am called to serve”

Shuri would tell herself that memories of her life as a princess were wasted. She was born to be the Black Panther, and she would prove her worth to take that mantle. If it took every laboured breath until her last day, she will show her mark, she wanted only to become a legend amongst her people, revered, celebrated, honoured. Her father would only then be proud, by becoming everything she was certain her brother could not.
It must have been coming up on eight, maybe nine months since she had seen her father. The King had dismissed her, assuming her state of rage was yet another tantrum fixed with her competitive nature. The Queen had always reprimanded Shuri for her hotheadedness, a trait that commonly surfaced on a daily basis. Had her mother known, had her father even taken the time to listen to her, perhaps the fate of their monarchy wouldn’t be in ruin.

Shuri’s uncle would frequently send word for her and even visit her in her desolate dwellings to plead her to return to her rightful home. He’d sent a messenger detailing how her brother had left Wakanda, rejecting the responsibilities he’d been conditioned for all of his life. It was a message Shuri had been waiting to receive since the day she’d left.

-

It had been a day where the air felt heavy as you breathed it in. Stifling heat had slowed Shuri’s combat training and halted the master’s efforts. As expected this caused Shuri’s temper to surface once more. Thundering through the halls, by no design she had found her way into her brother’s room, clawing his books from shelves and toppling his writing desk in her blind fury. Shuri could feel her breath seething through gritted teeth, she was sure her brother would be at a court meeting, being venerated in front of the crowds. Whereas Shuri had never once been praised for her dedication to furthering her abilities. Thoughts which only darkened her mood. Papers cascaded over the floors as she turned to leave, had the foreign money not fluttered into view perhaps she would have paced through the halls until she found some calm, resolving to train alone for the evening. Had she not crouched to inspect the money, maybe she wouldn’t have seen the plane tickets dated to leave within the year.
Betrayed, confused, but ultimately vindicated for resenting her brother for so long, she knew she had to show the King. T’Challa was due to take up the responsibilities of the Black Panther at the years end. Surely her father would be grateful, thank her even, finally he’d start to believe she was worthy to wear the black suit, become a symbol of loyalty for her family, her country. She must see her father immediately.

Shuri was thankful for the noise that broke the bitter memories away from her mind. Pulling herself up and over the rocks once more she could just about make out her uncle’s vehicle trailing clouds of coppered dust behind.

The viscous potion slid down Hellboy’s throat, warming every fiber of his being like the best whiskey you’d ever sip on. It tasted of warm, fresh milk tinted with the slightest bit of ash, and finished off with a bit of lilac. It was meant to completely calm the drinker, and quickly send them into the Dreamscape. He hated taking potions if he was being honest. He felt they often dulled his ability to hit things really, really hard. They had a place in his line of work, like tonight, but still. Red had always preferred the straightforward method, and probably always would.

He handed the vial over to Nancy, who downed her portion of the liquid, and instantly fell asleep. These kinds of things worked fasted on humans than the did on the hulking demon, in the same way some scrawny freshman would get drunk quicker than alcoholic. Still, before long Hellboy felt his eyelids droop, and he passed into the dream realm.

It was a weird sensation to consciously pass into the realm of dreams. Most people would never experience it, as they could not control their access to this other plane of existence. Hellboy probably should have warned Nancy about the sensation. It was like stepping through a thick, choking fog, nearly like a solid membrane. Someone like Hellboy, who had done this before, could feel the slight weightless feeling in the dreamscape that others couldn’t comprehend. It was like you lost a few pounds in a manner of seconds.

When he emerged through the swirling, struggling membrane, he found himself once again in the midst of Springwood. Little had seemed to change in the transition. Some of the colors were deeper and more vibrant, while the shadows were slightly darker. It was like a photo that was slightly out of focus.

Hellboy looked around the street in a search for Nancy, but quickly realized she was nowhere to be seen. In the mere seconds between the two of them falling asleep, Krueger had either chased Nancy away from where Red would be entering the dream world or he had split them up upon their entrance. The latter of which would have been the scarier proposition, as it meant Krueger had a ton of power.

A scream drew his attention down the street towards where Nancy’s house would have been in the real world. Hellboy took off towards the sound as fast as he could.



Nancy Thompson knew this wasn’t real. She knew it was all just a dream. But after the events of the last week, she also knew dreams could kill, which is why she let out a bloodcurdling scream as Freddy Krueger transformed from a man into a giant, grotesque spider in front of her face. His mouth turned into a disgusting smile of pincers, and his terrible, yellow eyes multiplied and spread over his face. Hairs grew from the burnt, desiccated skin, creating a matted, sticky mess. His spindly, reaching legs were each tipped with a blade like the glove he wore on his hand.

“Oh come on, Nance!” the spider Freddy hissed at her. “More arms means more fun! Come give Freddy a hug!”

“Get away from me you sick freak!” she yelled at him and took off down the street.

“Not so fast, little girl!” the spider clambers over her and comes to a sliding stop, sparks erupting from the knives on the bottom of his legs, cutting her off from her escape route. Behind her, the street was cut off by a wall that came out of nowhere. The only thing left on the street was a telephone pole next to her. “Oh, you seem to have hit a wall.”

Nancy slid over towards the telephone lines, snarling at Krueger as she did. If she was going to go out, she was going to go out defiant. “You want me, freak? Come and get me!”

“Freak?” Freddy raised one of his bladed appendages and smiled, somehow, with his awful spider-mouth. “Now that wounds me, Nancy. Let me return the favor!”

He raised a leg and swiped at the young girl, who ducked at the right time. He had played right into her hand. She wanted him to take a swing. She didn’t know if she’d be able to duck out of the way, but she knew either way that Krueger would clip the telephone pole as well. He cleaved through it with ease, and the pole came crashing down. It slammed into the giant arachnid, sparks flying from the electricity. Krueger growled in pain and backed away from the teenager.

“Nice move, dumbass,” Nancy sneered at the murderer. “That’s for Glenn.”

“Ahhh, sweet Glenn,” Krueger growled. “Shame you didn’t give him a taste before he died in a horrible and painful way. At least he could have died after getting a little bit.”

Before Nancy could respond, a shot rang out, and the joint of Krueger’s back left leg exploded in a cascade of green goo. He cried out in pain as his body contorted back into his human form. He crawled towards one of his fingers, which now wiggled bleeding across the pavement like some grotesque worm. Freddy picked it up and shoved it back onto his hand, and turned to find Hellboy pointing his modified revolver “The Samaritan” at the spectral serial killer, “Hey, pizza face. I know I’m a bit older than what you usually go after, but hell, let’s try it out, just this once.”

“I’m not sure you want that, demon,” Freddy smirked broadly. “You might not like what you see.”

Hellboy wasn’t impressed, “I wake up to this face in the mirror every morning, pal. Granted, it’s better than yours, but I’m used to ugly visions.”

“Yea, well-AUGH!” Freddy flinched as Nancy stabbed him with a jagged shard of the telephone pole left over. Freddy spun around and slapped Nancy who went flying into the brick wall behind her. She hit hard, before disappearing from the dreamscape. Liz must have saw she was in trouble and woke her up.

“Well, well,” Hellboy rolled the wrist of his giant right hand and flexed its fingers, “looks like it’s just you and me now, princess.”

“Fine by me,” Krueger chuckled as everything around Hellboy turned to blackness. “They told me about you, Hellboy. That you’d probably come at some point.”

“Yea, well, I hope they told you how I’d kick your ass.”

“They said you would try,” Krueger mocked from the darkness. “But I know what you fear, Hellboy. You fear that your destiny will lead to this.”

The darkness exploded into a burst of fiery light, forcing Red to shield his eyes. When they adjusted, he found himself in the ruins of a city. Buildings crumbled around Hellboy and clouds of dust rolled through the street he was standing on. He spun around to find bodies lining the streets. Some had been crushed by the falling debris, their blood and viscera painting the sidewalk red. Others were impaled on spikes, moaning weakly as the life dripped out of them drop by drop.

“Why...Red...why?” one of them called. He turned to find Liz, the spike sticking out of her chest, blood seeping from her eyes. “Why did you do this?”

“You betrayed us all,” Abe, whose body below his pelvis was crushed by a skyscraper, pointed at Hellboy.

“No, no,” he shook his head. “I wouldn’t...I couldn’t.”

Another building fell behind Abe, revealing a throne of human skulls spiraling into the sky. On top sat Hellboy. His horns were grown in their full glory, and on top his head sat a crown of flickering flames. From his mouth and eyes poured orange smoke, and purple storm clouds swirled in the sky above him. It was grand and terrifying. The two Hellboys locked eyes, and the exalted one smiled and bellows, “Behold Anung Un Rama and despair, for he has brought about the end.”

“You have failed, my son,” a familiar voice said from behind him. He spun to see Professor Broom, decayed as if risen from the dead. He pointed at Hellboy, the little flesh remaining on the bone hanging off like scraps of ribbon, “You have betrayed everything I taught you.”

“Father, no,” he said dejectedly. He had to snap out of this. Krueger was getting to him, and that would give the bastard even more power. He snarled and threw a punch with his right hand at the specter of Broom, which connected solidly. As the corpse flew back, it transformed back into Freddy Krueger. “Big mistake, pal. You try to use my father against me, and I hurt you even more than I was gonna before.”

Freddy laughed as the world around them changed to an old, steamy boiler room.

“Fine, Hellboy. You want to tussle? Well, welcome to my nightmare.”

Sinestro touched down in front of Blastaar’s monolithic stronghold with the four missing Green Lanterns capsuled in a bubble construct. He muttered inaudibly under his breath as his gaze fell on Amanita’s lifeless body. Of all the Green Lanterns, Sinestro felt Amanita’s passing most of all. Before the ring had sought him out Sinestro had been a decorated anthropologist. Amanita had belonged to a species older than the Guardians themselves. With his passing a millennia of history went with him. The things Amanita had seen and the experiences he’d had were all evaporated into the ether as if they’d never happened. The doors to Blastaar’s stronghold drew open as Sinestro approached them and a group of Blastaar’s armed guards met Sinestro. From the look on their faces and the way they gripped their weapons tightly they were not pleased to see him.

Sinestro was led to Blastaar’s chamber and the hulking Baluurian smiled broadly at him as he entered with the missing Green Lanterns in tow. Blastaar’s men had offered to take them to the medical bay upon Sinestro’s arrival but he wanted Blastaar’s word first. The Baluurian seemed many things: domineering, spiteful, and intimidating to say the least. Yet he seemed a man of his word. That counted for something. Sinestro wasn’t going to part with the missing Lantern until he’d had Blastaar’s assurances. Until he’d heard the words leave his mouth.

As Sinestro came into sight, visibly worse for wear, Blastaar smiled at him wrly. “You have returned.”

“I have,” Sinesto said with a cordial smile. “Your information was correct, Commander, those vermin on Arthoros were responsible for the abduction of the Lanterns. Thank you.”

Blastaar looked at the Green Lanterns in Sinestro’s bubble. His eyes fell on their withered forms of the living Lanterns and the lifeless Amanita. “Yet still you ask more of me.”

“Only to grant us safe haven for a time,” Sinestro nodded. “The Lantern I was with earlier went in search of a missing power ring. I ask that we be allowed to remain here until she returns with it.”

Blastaar laughed. It was as bone chilling as it had been the first time Sinestro had heard it. The Baluurian’s body shook for several seconds until finally he composed himself again. “What has become of the great Green Lantern Corps when it sends a woman to do its dirty work and the men stay at home?”

Sinestro was not a man without prejudices. He abhorred weakness. The servants he’d passed on his way to Blastaar’s chambers had made him sick to his stomach, as had the cowardly insectoids that lived in fear beneath the earth on Arthoros, but Carol’s gender wasn’t even a consideration in his mind. It was not the reproductive organs one possessed that made a person weak, nor their species, but their willingness to overcome fear. In that respect Sinestro considered himself Danvers’ better but in that alone. Her being a woman had not occurred to him.

His practiced politeness slid away for a moment and he sneered at the Baluurian. “Green Lantern Danvers is more than capable.”

The door to Blastaar’s chamber opened and through it stepped one of the shaggy creatures that answered to him. It slunk towards him and placed its hand on his shoulder, leaning in towards him and whispering into his ear, before leaving the chambers as quickly as he’d entered them. Blastaar’s spiteful smile all but disappeared as whatever news his subject had imparted began to register in his mind.

“I would not be so certain.”

Sinestro’s eyes narrowed a little. “What does that mean?”

With the flick of a button on a dashboard a projection appeared between Blastaar and Sinestro. It took some time for Sinestro to make out what was happening but finally he discerned in the chaos a horde of insectoids. The very same insectoids he’d encountered on Arthoros.

“It means that the vermin you speak of have followed you here from Arthoros, Lantern, and they have brought their leader with them. Lantern Danvers is dead. You have brought war to Baluur.”

Sinestro spotted their leader amongst the masses of insectoids. He was thin and metallic, green and purple to look at, but most peculiarly was the green energy that appeared to be seeping out of him. It almost looked like the energy that Sinestro and Carol wielded. Slowly it clicked into place and Sinestro realised that the ring Carol had gone back for was now in the creature’s possession. He knew not how it was wielding it or what had happened to Carol but he intended to find out. He would have his revenge.

Sinestro clenched his his fist and looked towards Blastaar determinedly. “If it is war, let it be war then.”

“We are not prepared.”

“You do not need preparation,” Sinestro said with a wrathful smile. “You have Sinestro on your side.”

With that he blew a hole through the wall of Blastaar’s chambers using his power ring and left Blastaar, the Lanterns, and Blastaar’s servants behind. On the horizon he could see Baluur’s red sky turning black as the wave of insectoids swarmed towards Blastaar’s stronghold. Amidst the blackness he spotted one shining green light. It shone like an emerald star amidst the night’s sky. He shot out into the air and flew towards it. He would meet the wave head on, he would extinguish the star, and he would turn Baluur’s sky red once more.

For Amanita.

Washington D.C.
March 27th, 2005
08:41am

Adorning the walls of Maria Hill's office were pictures of her in army fatigues in far flung corners of the world. In each she was surrounded by smiling friends, often with arms interlocked, or sat in a beach chair somewhere with a beer can in her hand. Bucky could count on one hand the times he'd seen her smile since they had met. The pictures were a humbling reminder of the double lives most SHIELD agents led. Hill looked like a completely different person in those pictures and it was likely she was one when not prowling the halls of the Triskelion. The absence of family pictures was notable but Bucky put that down to times having changed more than anything else. A seated Hill stared at a tablet on the desk in front of her whilst Bucky watched on.

"Thanks to your little performance last night I’ve been up all night trying to track and remotely delete any footage of your little run in with Cornelius Stirk. I apologise in advance if I come across as seeming a little irritable but I assure you that Director Fury was doubly so when he found out. You’re lucky it’s me you’re talking to or not him."

"Cornelius Stirk? That was that thing’s name?"

Maria nodded curtly and slid her hand along her tablet. A run sheet of Stirk's popped up on the screen. "He’s a small-time criminal out of Gotham with telepathic powers of some sort. We’re not sure what brought him to Washington but we certainly could have dealt with him without announcing to the world that Captain America was back."

Bucky shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. "They were going to find out sooner or later."

Maria Hill let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose. She made no attempt to hide her exasperation. The bags beneath her eyes were heavy with tiredness and Bucky's indifference seemed to grate on her. There were more factors at play here than Barnes had accounted for and his desire to play the hero last night had cost her far more than a night's sleep. There had been a plan in place for Captain America's eventual reveal that had been thrown into disarray by what had happened in Washington last night.

"Of course, but HYDRA and the Red Skull didn’t announce their return by pounding on some anonymous SHIELD agent in the middle of the street, James. They made sure they had an audience. We had hoped for something slightly more worthy of the return of Captain America than grainy footage of you beating on Cornelius Stirk being beamed round the world."

"I was just trying to do the right thing," Bucky muttered as Stirk's illusion of Steve Rogers flashed through his mind for the umpteenth time. Every time he'd closed his eyes since leaving the restaurant he'd seen it. "You didn’t see what he’d done to those people. If you had you’d understand."


"This is bigger than you, James, this is bigger than all of us. It might sound crass to say it but it's bigger than a handful of people in a restaurant too. We could have had a SHIELD unit there within five minutes if you’d told us rather than steaming in half-cocked. We need you to be smarter than that. We had you put that uniform on to give the world hope, not to deal with street level threats like Stirk."

"I did what was right," Bucky said sternly. "I won’t apologise for that."

Hill placed her head in her hands and sighed again. "Fine. Well, we managed to have most of the footage taken down but given the nature of the internet we’re always going to be one step behind. Facebook and the like are the least of our problems. We can lean on them."

"What’s the issue then?"

With a stroke of her finger Maria Hill brought up an audio file on her tablet. "Listen to this."

"Maria, it's Lois Lane from the Daily Planet. I thought given our history I ought to call you as a courtesy. The Planet have received some footage from the incident in Washington last night. We know Captain America is back, Maria, and no matter how many times SHIELD tries to shut this thing down, we're going to follow it up until someone eventually rolls over and cops to it. You know as well as I do that it's only a matter of time. You have my number if you decide to get out ahead of this one."

Bucky stared at Maria expressionlessly. "What are you telling me? That you can lean on these… websites but not on a single reporter?"

The beginnings of a smile appeared on Maria Hill's face.

"Lois Lane is not just some reporter, Barnes, she’s a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist with international reach. We can dismiss the videos as a hoax, some social media ploy, but Lane is not so easily dismissed. She’s a terrier. Once she has something in her sights she doesn’t let it go. Think Ben Ulrich in a pencil skirt."

"None of this means anything to me," Barnes said with a bemused look. "What are you saying? What’s our play here?"

What had been the beginnings of a smile spread into a broad, bashful one and Bucky couldn't help but smile back at Maria. Suddenly it dawned on him how unusual it was to see her smile and he reasoned that there must have been a reason for it. His own smile began to fade as he realised that Agent Hill had something planned for him that he wasn't going to like. When her bashful smile finally broke and she opened her mouth to speak his fears were confirmed.

"You’re going to sit down with Lois Lane tonight for a televised interview that will be seen the world over."

March 21st
Wakanda

S’yan knew this wasn’t going to be an easy conversation. The headstrong girl hadn’t acknowledged any attempt he’d made to console her ego and get her to return to the compounds. As much as it wounded him to have to deliver the news, he’d hoped Shuri would at least soften enough to return to her father’s bedside. He knew she possessed an eager will and beneath that was genuine heart; surely her pride would not stand in the way of her showing that.

There was no doubt that Shuri had great skills that would fulfil the duties of becoming the Black Panther, but that position being open to her was always dependant on whether she could tame the tempestuous nature of her heart. A skill possessed that would be valued now more than ever. S’yan had seen the ritual when his brother had taken his vow, anyone unworthy would not survive the process. The doubts he had raised with King T’Chaka concerning T’Challa’s dedication had been dismissed at the moment of the words leaving his lips.

S’yan was an unshakable man, yet he was stood before his kin beginning to stumble through his words, perhaps if finally realising what he had been quietly denying. This kingdom was in very real danger.

-

The news of her brothers’ departure had been nothing other than more fuel to the fire of her daily exercise regime. However, upon hearing the condition of her father, it had felt as if grief had caught in the back of the throat. White noise blared through Shuri’s ears, it was as if she’d stood up too quickly, her head began to spin and her racing thoughts began to blur.

S’yan could not understand, had she heard him, was she even listening? All this girl had sought after was her father’s attention. T’Chaka had taken great care over her as he had all of the people of Wakanda. Why could the child show no remorse of her attitude and fulfil her familial obligations?

The deafening silence broke.

“Has he asked for me?”

“Child, he is in no state to...”

“Did he ask for me? When T’challa left, did he ask for me, did he say my name aloud after all this time?”

“Your place is at the palace both the king and you know this. We need T'Challa back, this needs to be fixed betweeen them.”

“If the king did not ask for me by name... after he realised I was the only one willing to be his heir, after all this, he couldn’t bear to ask for me? Why would I go to comfort an old man who forgets one from his own blood? Less, why should I grieve over the old king’s state if after T’Challa, he could not even spare a thought for the one child who wanted to serve. Grief is a distraction; I’ve come to learn family is an anchor keeping me from my cause.”

S’yan roared at the girl’s impudence.

“Foolish child, being ungrateful to your father is an unforgivable sin, but disrespecting your king, you know the law of Wakanda you’d be held accountable for your insolence. Of what right do you have to call yourself of noble blood if you reject your familial ties?”

“Familial ties are only imposed by those who feel they are owed for the existence of another or perhaps for those afraid of finding themselves alone. Do not try to paint your clouded beliefs in front of my eyes; I’m the only one who has expressed absolute clarity.”

The great healer had heard enough. Spitting on the ground, he turned to leave.

“Correct. You have been clear enough child. Your headstrong ways are what have always held you back, do you think if your father had bent his knee to your rages, your demands for audience, that he could be respected, less, that he could have then gone on to teach you the patience needed to rule? Child you mistake your fathers dismissal for lack of care. The place for you to rule was always there, beside your brother. Your pride, your brash nature, only pushed that place further away. Shame to you. I fear I have wasted time I could have spent with our king in his desperate hours."

Shuri’s glowering gaze was unmoving.

“If you believe your one true destiny is to become the Black Panther, you’ll need to realise, all you have cultivated is a spoilt, angry soul in your isolation. Not one that is deserving of such an honour.”

S’yan had noticed those words hit home in his niece as he watched her swallow her rebuttal. But he had no more time to coddle one who lacked the ability to rise above her egocentric ideals.

Shuri could feel heat rising in her chest, an acidic taste in the back of her throat, but she remained still. She would not move, nor would she give her uncle the satisfaction of seeing her paroxysm, if only further proving his accusations of her. She remained with arms straight to her side and waited until the trails of dust from her uncle’s jeep were settling along the horizon.

It took some time before Shuri broke gaze from the trail, feeling a wetness dripping down her clenched fists, a quick glance revealed that her nails had pierced through her callous palms. The silence dawned on her, how alone she was. But Shuri had to train, perhaps now more than ever Wakanda needed a loyal warrior to lead them. Her blood stuck to the red dusty rocks as she climbed once more.

The Hub City docks smelled like old fish and oil, the pungent smell stung Steph’s nose as she moved quietly through the old shipping containers that lined the decaying docks. Rust was spreading like a fungus along the metal containers, branching out like a rash along the skin of a diseased person.The docks were often synonymous with the health of a manufacturing city, and Hub’s showed just how bad things had gotten here. Still, their largely abandoned nature and plentiful warehouses had given the homeless of the city a place to call their own, so they were at least providing some good. She had seen many pop up settlements using the containers and crumbling infrastructure for homes. Her heart bled for them, but at least they were surviving.

None had seen her, of course. Steph had often prided herself on her ability to stay unseen. She had graduated top of her class in stealth tactics during her time at the SHIELD academy, and they were, in her opinion, her most useful skills. Sure, her strength, speed, and agility were great when she got into real trouble. Carter, however, preferred not to get to that point. If she could get in and out of a situation without alerting the entire enemy force, she’d save a lot of time and energy.

The setting began to change the closer she got to the Roxxon dock. Bright lights illuminated the immaculate space, and a large, modern transport ship sat moored at the docks. The place was crawling with armed guards and people. It was clear something important was going down, and Question’s instincts were right.

“That crazy son of a bitch is going to help me so much,” she chuckled under her breath as she surveyed a way to infiltrate the area. The front of the dock was blocked off by a large security gate. She spotted at least three men on top of it brandishing automatic weapons, meaning that was out of the question. Luckily all the lights on the dock were pointed inward, leaving a water approach a viable option.

She stepped over to the edge of the water and wrinkled her nose as she looked at it. The brown water looked like it had a thick layer of oily residue on the top of the calm liquid. She sighed and pulled a small breather mask from a pouch on her belt, “Well, no one said this would be easy, Carter.”

The cold water stung as she dipped herself in. Her body, adaptive as it was, quickly normalized in the chilly lake, and the breather did its job, allowing her to make her way towards the dock completely submerged. She could see the dim illumination from the spotlights above as she made her way there, the only thing she could use to find her target.

Once Nomad was in proper range, she emerged from the water and pulled herself up to the edge of the dock. Before she popped up, she allowed the excess water to drip from her body, ensuring she’d make as little noise as possible when on the platform. She slinked up, and crouched behind a pile of crates and surveyed the situation. The guards were all focusing on the crate currently being loaded onto the freighter off a truck.. She didn’t need her binoculars to see the “Hub City Motors” logo plastered on the side of it. She knew that company, and its plant, had been shut down for decades. Carter made a mental note of it before deciding to get on that ship and find out where it was going.

Nomad slipped back into the water and made her way to the ship’s anchor. She shimmied up the chain connecting it to the ship. At the top, she peered over and saw only two guards patrolling the top of the deck. As the one closest to her passed by, she slipped behind him and unholstered her tranquilizer gun. In a flurry, she put her hand over his mouth and pulled him behind one of the containers, and pressed the gun to his head. He didn’t know it wouldn’t kill him, but she did, “How many guards on this deck?”

“Just two of us,” he responded nervously. “I swear. Everyone else from the ship were commanded to stay below deck while they load whatever the hell we’re picking up. Captain is in the bridge.”

“Thanks,” she smiled and put a dart into the man’s neck. She slid to the edge of the container, and peered around the corner. A few dozen yards away she spotted the other topside guard. She lined up a shot with the gun and fired another dart. After a second of nervous silence, she saw the guard fall to the ground asleep. “Still got it, Stephie.”

Keeping to the back side of the ship away from the dock, Nomad made her way towards the bridge. There, she found the captain looking over his maps and instruments. Steph slammed the lights off. He was distracted for the moment she needed. Like the guard outside, she pressed the gun to his head, “Scream and you’re dead.”

“What do you want?” the captain asked, the slight wobble giving away the fear that gripped him.

“Your destination and cargo,” Steph peered at the cargo, which was now loaded. “Make it fast.”

“Northern Africa,” he responded. “Don’t know what the cargo is. The board told us to pick something up, and we did. Simple drop off and pick up. That’s all I know. I’m just trying to do my job.”

“I understand,” Steph sighed and fired another dart.

Steph slipped out of the bridge and moved up to the edge of the boat. She peered over the side to see the guards dispersing and the truck firing up its engine. Knowing she didn’t have much of a choice, she vaulted off the side, landing on the dock with a roll. She slid into the back of the truck where she found another surprised guard. Another tranquilizer took care of him, and turned on the radio Question had given her, “Q, you there?”

“Affirmative,” the vigilante responded in his normal inflection. “What do you need?”

“I’m on my way to the Hub City Motors plant,” she gave him an update. “It looks like AIM is using it as a production facility. I need you to find anywhere Roxxon has interests in Northern Africa. That’s where the cargo is headed.”

“I’ll get to work,” Question confirmed.

“And Q,” Steph said as she plucked the guard’s keycard off his chest, “find me a way to get out of the country and to Africa. I’m finding out what Roxxon is up to, and I’m taking them down.”

“That I actually can do easily. I’ll make a call.”

The truck rumbled on to its destination, and Nomad centered herself in preparation for what would come next.

Prague
Czech Republic
17:22 Local Time

Phil Coulson stepped into his motel room and locked the door behind him. The room looked like every other cheap room, regardless of the time or place. There were cookie cutter watercolors on the walls showing boats and generic landscapes. The wallpaper, once a bright orange, was faded and chipped with yellowing tobacco stains on its surface. A single bed with bleached cotton sheets lay pressed up against one of the walls, a plain nightstand beside it with a telephone sitting on top.

Coulson unslung his bag and laid it on the floor before walking to the phone and pulling out a pen knife. He popped off the earpiece, revealing wires and a speaker underneath. Reaching into his jacket pocket, Coulson pulled out a small metal disc and connected it to the phone's wiring. He placed the earpiece back when he was finished and dialed the number he needed. An automated greeting picked up a few rings later and gave him options 1-4 to press to reach a line. Instead, Coulson punched nine and listened to the ringing until--

"United States Cultural Attache's office," a pleasant female voice said.

"Yes, ma'am. My name is Greg Clarkson and I'm here working for the Washington-Times Herald on a story about Prague's tourist sites. I'd like to arrange an interview with the attache sometime this week."

Coulson heard the sound of shuffling papers and a pause as the receptionist looked through her codebook. His use of a defunct paper's name was the key identifier. It was shorthand the world over that an agent in the field wished to request a meeting with the SHIELD staff at the embassy."

"Mr... Clarkson was it?" She asked after a pause. "I'm looking through the attache's calendar, will the 31st work?"

"Perfect. That'll be at your embassy?"

"Yes, sir. 10 on the dot and no later"

"Got it. Thank you."

He rang off and went into his bag. Coulson pulled out a map book of Prague. Tradecraft dictated that the meeting place would be held at whatever location was located on the thirteenth page of the book, the inverse of the thirty-one the receptionist threw out. St. Vitus Cathedral sat on page thirty-one. He checked his watch and saw he had a little under five hours to throw off any tails he may have and get to the rendezvous. If he was even a minute late the meeting would be cancelled. Leaving his bag behind, Coulson tightened his jacket and left the motel room behind.

--

Washington D.C.
11:35 Local Time

"There is no doubt your record is impressive, Mr. Smiley," said Senator James Albright of Idaho. "You don't get to the top of British intelligence without being good. But large chunks of the file MI6 gave us are blacked out. All we know is that you worked there for twenty plus years, became their head, and retired."

"Can you shed some light on your tenure with MI6?" Senator Ellen Davidson of California asked.

"I am hesitant to do so, Senator," replied Smiley. "As a British national, I may violate several laws by speaking in-depth about my tenure with the Circus. I doubt I can do SHIELD very much good from a London jail cell."

A polite laughter broke out among the senators. Smiley chuckled along with them.

"Why is it called the Circus?" Senator Dan Wilkins of Texas asked after the laughter subsided.

"Because it used to be located at Cambridge Circus in London before that large monstrosity on the Thames was built. Hard to be a secret service when that thing serves as your headquarters."

"I don't know if you've seen the Triskelion yet, Mr. Smiley, but it's not much better," Senator Davidson said with a grin. "And don't get us started on the flying aircraft carriers."

More laughter from the senators, all of them except one. Senator William Brown of South Carolina, the committee's chairman, stared at Smiley over his reading glasses.

"There is one thing I think you may be able to answer for me, Mr. Smiley," Senator Brown said in his thick drawl. "And if you can it will go a long way to putting my faith and trust into your appointment. I was part of the House of Representatives' version of this committee in the mid-80's. At that time, our intelligence agencies here heard rumbles from across the pond. The Circus was supposedly in turmoil after a Soviet spy was discovered in its midst. The entire agency had to be rebuilt from the top up, is what our spies here were hearing. Looking at your history, you came back from retirement and took over as 'M' shortly after the inside man was supposedly caught and retired shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed. My question is this: Did you have a hand in catching the mole? Is that why you came back from retirement and ran the agency through the end of the Cold War? You can simply answer yes or no. And I will remind you, as well as my colleagues, that these meetings are secret and will not appear in any record other than sealed SHIELD records. Mr. Smiley?"

Smiley sat stone-faced, perfectly still with his hands resting on the table in front of him. This was the moment, he knew it. Years of conversations, interrogations, and debriefs with three or four layers of meaning had honed his instincts. Senator Brown at least wanted Smiley's confirmation to pass, and he knew this was the way. Hampered by legal constraints, this was how Smiley could prove to the other senators that he was more than qualified to be Fury's cupbearer. But the question brought to mind so many bad memories. Little Percy Alleline with his hangdog look after he was sacked, Ann's tears when Smiley delivered the news, Bill Haydon's nasty turn before it was all said and done, even Jim Prideaux's cold eyes sizing him up over a rickety card table, Smiley adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat.

"Yes," he said softly. "To both. I found the mole inside the Circus and vigorously engaged in counter-action that resulted in the defection of a high-ranking KGB officer known as Karla to the West. Are you familiar with the name, Senator Brown?"

"I am," Brown said with glittering eyes. "I seem to recall the intelligence he gave us destroyed several Soviet plots across Western Europe and Latin America."

"Indeed," was all Smiley said.

"We'll take a thirty-minute recess and convene again," Brown said with the rap of his gavel.

March 23^rd, 2005
?, 5:15 AM

---

When John awoke in the early hours of dawn in the field of wild grasses, his breath was ragged and cold sweat had formed on his brow. His clothes were damp and clutched to him like an unrelenting lover - a combination of morning dew and the rains that had came pouring down atop of him with a righteous fury. A less knowledgeable man might of thought that God was angry with him or something. John of course knew that God was too busy dealing with every other problem under the sun than to bother with the affairs of one Constantine. Or that was the deal at least.

In the dream or more accurately the nightmare that he had awoken from, he had been suspended in a dark void stretching infinitely outwards. The chill alone felt like enough to kill a man as if it could seep through the skin and freeze his damn innards. He stayed like that for awhile, until a translucent blue the color of a winter’s ice appeared on the horizon. Unable to move he was fixed into place as the glow began to spread watching it with vague curiosity until it washed upon him. Upon contact the blue was no longer blue, but something akin to clear glass. He found himself like a bird suspended above London but all was not right, thick smoke filled the skies and festered about him like maggots in an open wound, the harsh red glow of raging fires below. The screaming was probably the worst of it, terrible inhuman yells of pain and suffering all rushing for open occupancies inside of his head. Then the scene pulled back as he continued rushing upwards and he saw the rest of Europe was ablaze with the same fire and destruction. Further still he went and the earth itself was ablaze and across the way beyond the edge of the vast sphere, a form sat inhuman in its proportions. One of its large continent sized eyes fell upon John and seemed to ripped his very soul from its foundation and then nothing. It was all gone and he was left back in the void, nothing more and nothing less.

With the grey lights of the early dawn he rose to his feet brushing the strands of grass and flecks of dirt that clung to his jacket. He sagged his shoulder feeling bones pop as they realigned. Another reminder that he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He fished inside of his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled and bent white cylinder held close to the body like some sort of precious gem to protect it from the rain. Popping it between his teeth he looked around momentarily before snapping his fingers, causing a small flame to appear and light the edge. He took a deep breath filling the smoke fill his lungs as he observed the countryside. The rolling countryside stretched out before him, void of life except for the occasional cawing of some bird out to find the morning catch. He pulled his jacket closer to his body to fend against the early spring frost as he made his way away from the scraggly old tree with long winding branches that he had taken shelter under as he moved back towards the road. He then began to head east.

Amsterdam, had nothing left for him. After ransacking its libraries and dark corners for any information pertaining to any resurgence or kindling of mention of the old Völkisch movement. The closest thing he had gotten to information was from a disturbed old man yelling about how HYRDA was just the start of it all and that more was coming. So he had two options left really either continue digging around loose leads and drying to hope something bit or do what he did best and get to the heart of it. He figured that if there would be any semblance of clues left for him, that they would be in the Führer’s deutschland proper. If these occulist were anything like their forebears it wasn't going to be that hard to find them, you just had to keep your ears open in the right channels. So he set out about two days ago with the vague direction of east, knowing sooner or later he would stumble across the border. He could of taken a train, but he hated trains too much noise and too many idiots - besides he didn't have a euro to his name at the moment to even afford such thing. Walking was okay though, it let him think and besides he had legs for a reason didn’t he?

~~

7:16 AM

He had been walking for sometime when he stumbled across the residence of Mary and Patrick Ó Braonáin. They were a middle aged couple who had hitched tail during the Troubles and had never looked back running away from the prospects of getting shot when heading to market or blown up by some bomb on either side. Mary was an English teacher in the local town about five miles down the road and Patrick was a writer and aspiring socialist revolutionary writing pamphlets for the CPN. They lived a humble existence in a small abode with a saint bernard named Sam and a garden out back that Mary attended to in her free time. These generally good people upon seeing John walking down the road is his haggard and worn state, generally could not stand idly by and invited the stranger into their home to at least have something to eat and maybe have a wash.

After feeling the strange sensation of taking an actual shower again and washing the dirt and the grim off of his body, he stepped outwards freshly dressed and Patrick ushered him into the kitchen where Mary had already finished up breakfast. It was a simple thing some potatoes and meat of some sort but to John’s malnourished body running on alcohol and little bits of food that he could acquire it smelled great and tasted better. They eat in silence for a little bit but soon the sounds of moving cutlery and teeth tearing at meat faded away to conversation.

“So Fergus what do you do exactly?” Patrick asked John inquisitively. Of course to them he wasn’t John Constantine but Fergus Thirlwell, a well to do intellectual from Northumberland born in a little village outside of Morpeth. It was a lie but it was a little one that was easy enough to pass off as the truth, he’d met enough folks from up north to at least be able to convincingly mock their mannerisms. Besides it was safer this way. The name John Constantine only brought sorrow to those that knew of it.

“Ah well I’m a historian of sorts, a study old cultures looking for secrets and the likes.” The lies came easily enough to him after a lifetime of doing it. He could talk bullshit to the Queen and probably get her to knight him if he wanted to. The trick wasn’t convincing others that was easy, it was convincing yourself because once your mind was willing to believe whatever you said it was easy for the others to follow.

“Ah, A man of the histories! How interesting! I imagine you're traveling for work then right?” Mary asked her face kind and warm as she did. Inwardly John smiled, they were almost making it too easy for him at this point but that was key playing on others expectations.

“Why yes actually! I’ve been traveling through the Low Countries following the old routes and paths as part of my current infatuation on trade and travel during the Carolingian Empire. So no cars for me only my own two feet and sleeping underneath the stars.” Constantine explained with a smile and a brightness to his eyes, you had to look the part and get them invested.

The conversation continued for some time and with John’s carefully prodding moving away from the life and times of Fergus Thirlwel and his escapades and into things like current events and just day to day occurrences. Once they had gotten into Politics, John almost didn't have to talk at all with Patrick falling into a huge speech that almost felt like he had it prepared in advance on the folly and corruption of big government. And down with the agenda of the rich in their proxy wars and oil schemes. Only to be interrupted by his wife butting in to play the devil’s advocate and voice her own more moderate opinions. Eventually things came to a close and John was ushered to the bathroom to use their spare toothbrush, do his business, and wash his hands while the pair continued to debate amongst themselves. As he finished up washing his hands, John’s ears picked up on something a strange lack of noise. He could no longer here the pair talking, or the dog outside slowly plodding about only the dim sound of the radio in the kitchen. Something was wrong.

He pushed the bathroom door open with a gentle care to go as slow as possible to keep the sound minimal. He moved through the small hallway into the kitchen where the food was still left on the table growing cold, the faucet still running over the sink water slowly dripping into the basin. The radio was playing on the same station that it had before now playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.6. He looked out the window to the outside and saw a few feet away from the house, the shape of Sam laying completely still in the grass. Then a noise coming from the front of the house and a crash. He moved slowly out of the kitchen and into the small living area that connected to the front door, consisting of a couch, a leather armchair and a small television set. As he rounded the corner, he stopped dead in his tracks frozen by the sight in front of him.

On the ground a few feet ahead of him was Mary and Patrick looking much worse for wear. Mary was on her back on the carpeted floor, her face was grey and her mouth agape frozen in a mask of horror looking like all the life had been drained from her body in an instant. Patrick was next to her and wasn’t much better lying face first in the carpet and with his back blown open almost as if a baseball had went through the front of his chest and came out the otherside, staining the carpet around him red with blood. Standing in front of them by the now kicked in door were three men - two of these wore black combat suits that hung to their muscular frames and wore thick black balaclavas over their faces in their hands they carried what appeared to be assault rifles of some sort, they did not concern him. The third man was the one John could not take his eyes off of. He was dressed in a form fitting, black velvet suit making strong angles all the way down, and a pair of meticulously white gloves something beyond spotless almost to the point they were uncomfortable to look at. His skin was unnaturally pale, a harsh alabaster framed by neatly kept black hair with not a single strand undone. Finally John’s eyes fell upon his chest where an amulet lay with the same symbol of Yggdrasil and Níðhöggr upon it. He seemed very out of place with the carnage in front of him. Upon seeing John, the pair locked eyes blue eyes meeting with those a devilishly red in color. The man then give John a predatory grin as he spoke.

“You have thirty seconds John Constantine. I suggest running.” Not one to look a gifted horse in the mouth, John was turning around before the man even finished. He moved through the kitchen, knocking a chair over as he went and shoulder his way through the backdoor. He moved into the fields and not looking behind him moved as quickly as he legs would take him. It was cowardly, but John was more concerned about survival at the moment and he definitely wasn't going to win 3 against one while being unprepared. At exactly the thirty second mark he felt a release of energy and a moment later an arcane force slammed into his back sending him face first into the dirt and into darkness.

Stardate Irrelevant
New York City, New York

An anxious chiptune beat filled the atmosphere of a community garden where a pair of hard-trained boys stood locked in combat. Each had his most powerful and experienced companion by his side, fighting the battle on his behalf while feet away from a fast spinning CD player and the referee who'd brought it. To the untrained observer, they appeared as tasteless low-lives with nothing better to do. But in the right circles, they were gods of the arena. Masters of the Pocket Monsters.

"Use thundershock, now!" Kyle exclaimed before throwing his finger forward like a dart.

"Errr - damn," his friend muttered. "It's super effective!"

"Wartortle fainted. Send in Goldeen?" The boy furthest away from the action asked before scratching the recent development into his notepad. "Don't you know water types are weak to electric types?"

"Stop asking me stupid questions! I'm a water type specialist. Send in Goldeen!"

After a successive and brief exchange, similar to the above, the pizza-faced loser dropped Kyle a ten-spot before heading on his way. A chip on his shoulder and one less badge in his pocket. Kyle had earned a medallion symbolizing victory after a great deal of work.

"Congratulations, you beat Trainer Brad," the referee said with a grin. "That makes you the trainer with the longest victory streak."

"It just means I need to let everyone else catch up for a while, Dan."

Kyle scooped up a trio of red & white balls before tossing them into his messy backpack beside the rulebook for their homegrown LARP adaption of a popular handheld title. At that, he jumped onto his bicycle and pressed off, giving a playful salute to the ref while he cornered onto the sidewalk. Once out of sight, he wiped the sweat of his brow with his sweatshirt's sleeve. Before he could make it any further, he recieved a phone call.

"Kyle, what are you doing?"

"Anxiously awaiting the release of American Idiot. Oh," he feined surprise, "you mean right now?"

".. we need to talk."

"Yes, indeed we do, Ooma."

"Ooma.. ? Izzat some kind of new slang?"

"All it is is saying that you are the object of my affection, from now until-"

"Oh Kyle."

Oh Kyle. He imagined having her purr it over and over. Sometimes he felt alone. In those dark times, he unfailingly would turn to Alex DeWitt, a straight-A student with dreams of attending Harvard or Yale, once crushed by her own failure to be accepted by the private Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. When he didn't have Alex, he felt alone in the world, with only his own charm and good looks to keep himself company.

Hardening his resolve, Kyle forced an investigation of her initial sentiment.

"What is it we need to talk about."

"Wha - Oh, nothing. Yeah, can't even really remember."

"Oh, um, okay then. TTFN, ta ta for now." At that, he hit the sticky red button to end the call before wedging the phone into his front right pocket.

He was sure that one day his love for acronyms would begin to peel away her patience for his self-expressions. But until that day, he intended to continually secure himself in her heart. He'd determined within his own heart that not even death would cause them to part.

While he was on his bike though, he couldn't help but notice a peculiar insect trailing him, streaking beside him and weaving towards him. With response faster than lightning, Rayner crushed his handbrakes and let it pass. Giant, green and shaped like a coin almost, he was amazed by its speed and dexterity, but also worried that it was going to bite the piss out of him.

It's a green bee! No, a hornet. Gah!

He turned away before accelerating his best, feeling the gears of his bike failing to spin as he needed them to. Relentlessly, it followed up. Despite an attempt to swat it, the thing clasped itself around his finger, and he was surprised to discover that it was not an insect or a coin. It was a ring.