chapter forty-four
the painful truth

𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐀𝐘 𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐕𝐄 𝐑𝐎𝐆𝐄𝐑𝐒 was not having a good day would be an understatement. Not only had he fought people who had believed to be allies in an elevator — and probably nearly killed himself in the process — he had no way of contacting Grace. Which meant he didn't know if she was okay, or if she even knew that SHIELD had been compromised.

"Where did Captain America learn how to steal a car?" Natasha asked, breaking Steve out of his daze and he glanced over at her before turning his attention back to the road.

"Nazi Germany," he replied with a sigh and the redhead nodded, impressed. "And we're borrowing," he added. "Take your feet off the dash."

Natasha obliged before turning her attention to the soldier on her left. "Okay, I have a question for you, which you do not have to answer. I feel like if you don't answer it though, you're kind of answering it, you know?"

"What?" Steve asked impatiently.

"Have you and Grace... you know... since you woke up?" she asked and he looked over at her with a weirded-out look. "What? I'm curious and I know I'm not the only one."

"Who on earth also wants to know that?" Steve questioned her with a frown. "And you're right... I'm not answering that."

Natasha shrugged. "Then that answers my question," she said and he rolled his eyes. "You didn't want to tell me. I'm not judging, you know. Everybody loves Grace."

Steve nodded with a small smile. "Yeah."

"Okay, new question," Natasha said he sighed, leaning his head on his hand while holding the steering wheel with the other. "Do you want to marry her one day?"

"Do we have nothing better to do than discuss my love life?" Steve asked, glancing at the red-headed woman next to him.

"Well, considering we still aren't there yet, not really."

Steve pressed his lips together and let out a breath. "Right now, I just want to make sure that she's okay. Especially given that the organization that she helped create has been compromised."

"For as long as I've been at SHIELD, she's always put everybody else before herself," Natasha told him. "Maybe too much to a fault. You should just make sure that she's not bottling up her emotions." Steve looked over at her and she shrugged. "Just a thought."

He turned back to focus on the road. "Yes." Natasha raised her eyebrows and he nodded. "I do want to marry her. Just... when the time is right."

Natasha smiled softly to herself before looking out the passenger's side window. She watched as the day turned into night and Steve stopped in front of the gate.

"This is it," he said, walking onto the abandoned military base.

"The file came from these coordinates."

Steve nodded. "So did I," he muttered, looking around the base as memories of the past swirled around his mind. "This camp is where I was trained. It's where I met Grace. Well, for a second time. Had our first date here."

"Has it changed much?" Natasha asked him.

"A little."

"This is a dead end," Natasha said with a sigh. "Zero heat signatures, zero waves, not even radio. Whoever wrote the file must have used a router to throw people off." She looked up and saw Steve looking at a building in confusion. "What is it?"

"Army regulations forbid storing ammunition within five hundred yards of the barracks," Steve replied, walking toward the building. "This building is in the wrong place."

He broke open the lock with his shield and the two walked inside and noticed that it was a SHIELD office.

"This is SHIELD," Natasha commented.

Steve shrugged. "Maybe where it started," he replied as they entered a room with four portraits on the wall, his eye immediately going to Grace's.

"There's Stark's father."

"Howard," Steve muttered, glancing at the portrait briefly. He looked back at Grace's. "She really does look the same..."

"Who's the other girl?" Natasha asked.

"Peggy," Steve replied, looking at it. "She and Grace were good friends. Still are, even if she's in her eighties now and losing her memory." He looked around the room before walking toward a bookshelf. "If you're already working in a secret office..." He pushed the bookshelf and it slid open to reveal an elevator. "Why do you need to hide the elevator?"

Once they got off the elevator, they entered a room with very old-looking computers. "This can't be the data point," Natasha said with a frown. "This technology is ancient."

She noticed a small flash drive port and she placed the flash drive into it which activated the computer. "Initiate system?" it asked.

"Y-E-S spells yes," Natasha said, typing on the keyboard and smiling as the computer turned on. "Shall we play a game?" She looked at Steve. "It's from a movie that—"

"Yeah, Grace showed it to me."

"Rogers, Steven," they heard a voice say. "Born 1918. Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born 1984."

The two looked around. "It's some kind of a recording," Natasha said.

"I am not a recording, Fräulein," it replied. "I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am."

"Do you know this thing?" Natasha asked Steve as a picture was shown on the computer screen.

"Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull," he replied. "He's been dead for years."

"First correction, I am Swiss," Zola said in annoyance. "Second, look around you. I have never been more alive. In 1972, I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body, my mind, however, that was worth saving on two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain."

"How did you get here?" Steve asked.

"Invited."

"It was Operation Paperclip after World War II," Natasha said. "SHIELD recruited German scientists with strategic value."

"They thought I could help their cause," Zola added. "I also helped my own."

"HYDRA died with the Red Skull," Steve retorted.

"'Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.'"

Steve clenched his jaw. "Prove it."

"Accessing archive." The computer showed old footage of Johann Schmidt as well as the original SHIELD founders. "HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. What we did not realize, was that if you try to take that freedom, they resist. The war taught us much. Humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly. After the war, SHIELD was founded and I was recruited. The new HYDRA grew. A beautiful parasite inside SHIELD. For seventy years, HYDRA has been secretly feeding crisis, reaping war. And when history did not cooperate, history was changed."

Natasha shook her head. "That's impossible. SHIELD would have stopped you."

"Accidents will happen," Zola replied, showing them that HYDRA had killed Howard and Maria Stark by making it look like it was a car accident. "His sister left SHIELD after he died so she wasn't a problem. HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security. Once the purification process is complete, HYDRA's new world order will arise. We won, Captain. Your death amounts to the same as your life: a zero-sum. You could have lived a beautiful life with her." In anger, Steve punched the screen and Zola moved onto a different screen. "As I was saying..."

"What's on this drive?" Steve asked.

"Project Insight requires insight," Zola replied. "So I wrote an algorithm."

"What kind of Algorithm?" Natasha asked him. "What does it do?"

"The answer to your question is fascinating," Zola said. "Unfortunately, you shall be too dead to hear it."

Steve looked behind him as he heard the doors start to close. He threw his shield in an attempt to stop it, but it simply bounced off the door. "Steve." He looked at Natasha. "We got a bogey. Short-range ballistic. Thirty seconds tops."

"Who fired it?"

"SHIELD."

"I am afraid I have been stalling, Captain," Zola said. "Admit it, it's better this way. We're both of us... out of time."

⸻ ~~~ ⸻

𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐏𝐀𝐂𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐇𝐄 length of Sam's living room, trying to think of any way that she could try and contact Steve and Natasha. "You have a communication device," she said, looking at Adelaide who was watching the brunette move from end to end. "Have you tried to in touch with Nat?"

"Eight times," Adelaide replied and Grace sighed. "Every time, I just get static. We're on our own with this one."

Grace shrugged sheepishly. "Or we could try a ninth time?"

"Still nothing?" Sam asked, having returned from his morning run.

She shook her head. "They're basically sitting ducks at this point. For all we know, they've been taken by the people we don't want them to get taken by."

"And that is...?"

"Rumlow for one," Grace replied, collapsing on the couch and holding her head in her hands. "How could this happen?"

The three of them looked up when they heard a knock on Sam's front door. "Are you expecting somebody?" Adelaide asked Sam who shook his head. "Well, lucky for everyone, I still have a gun." She took hold of the weapon and walked to the front door and opened. "Oh, my God."

Grace walked over to the door and relief instantly flooded her face before it was replaced with worry seeing Steve holding most of Natasha's weight. "Oh, thank God," she sighed before ushering them inside. "Get in here." She poked her head out the door, making sure nobody had seen them and closed the door.

Adelaide took Natasha from Steve who was immediately engulfed in a tight hug by Grace. "Oh!"

"If my hair could go gray, you would be making it much worse," she said, pulling away and kissing him quickly. "You really have to stop getting shot at so much."

"Gracie..."

She looked at him and nodded. "I know."

"SHIELD is—"

"—compromised," she finished for him before nodding again. "Yeah, I sort of figured that part out for myself, funnily enough. Well, actually, Addy did, but..."

"There's more," he said and she furrowed her brows. "It's about how your brother died."

"It was a car crash."

Steve shook his head. "That's what they wanted people to think," he said and she raised her eyebrows.

"They?" She pressed her lips together. "You mean, HYDRA. HYDRA killed my brother." He nodded wordlessly and she clicked her tongue. "How? How did they do it?"

"I don't know," he replied and she swallowed the lump in her throat. "Zola didn't show us that part. It was only a headline."

Grace looked up in confusion. "Zola? Where exactly did the two of you end up?" she asked.

"The old military base," he said. "Zola is in a computer — wait, shouldn't you know this? He said that SHIELD recruited him after the war."

Grace shook her head. "No. After the war, I..." She let out a breath. "When Howard asked me and Peg to help him found SHIELD, he already had ideas of how it was going to work. But he told me of those things after the fact. Peggy did all she could to include me beforehand, but Howard kept me in the dark. What a surprise..." She cleared her throat. "The only thing I really had input in was the name. Which was meant to honor you.

"I started to take a bigger role as he got older since I was still young and 'spritely'. Then he died and his picture was everywhere. It was too hard and I had a nephew who was inconsolable from his mother's death that I left. Partly. I was still acting as a founding member, I just wasn't in the building as often. Before he died, Howard told me that he had recruited Zola but apart from that, I only knew of his terminal illness diagnosis. I assumed everything died with him."

Steve sighed. "Well, his mind is still alive and well. Or at least it was before it blew up and almost me and Nat."

"Lovely."

"I should go make sure she's alright," Steve said, gesturing to where Natasha was and Grace nodded. He kissed her forehead before his spot was taken by Adelaide.

"Are you okay?"

Grace nodded. "Yeah. I just hate my brother."

⸻ ~~~ ⸻

"𝐒𝐎, 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐈𝐒: who in SHIELD could launch a domestic missile strike?" Natasha asked at Sam's kitchen table. Grace sat next to Steve while Adelaide was next to Natasha.

"Pierce."

"Who happens to be sitting on top of the most secure building in the world," Adelaide reminded the group.

"But he's not working alone," Steve said and Grace looked at him. "Zola's algorithm was on the Lemurian Star."

"So was Jasper Sitwell," the two agents said in unison.

"So, the real question is: how do the two most wanted people in Washington kidnap a SHIELD officer in broad daylight?" Steve asked and Grace shrugged, clearing her throat.

"I am technically still his boss," she said. "I'm everyone's boss. He has to do what I say."

Steve shook his head. "No, it's too dangerous."

"All due respect, Steve, but you can't tell me what I can and cannot do," she replied. "Welcome to the twenty-first century."

"She's right," Sam said, walking over to the group and dropping a file on the table. "You guys can't do anything but we three aren't wanted for anything."

"What's this?" Steve asked as he and Grace looked at the file.

Sam shrugged. "Call it a resume."

Natasha and Adelaide looked at the photo that the blonde was holding. "Is this Bakhmala?" Natasha asked him. "The Khalid mission, that was you." She looked at Steve. "You didn't say he was para-rescue."

"We've been a bit occupied," he replied before looking at the photo. "Is this Riley?"

Sam nodded and Grace smiled lightly. "He looks so sweet."

"I heard they couldn't bring in the choppers because of the RPGs," Natasha said, turning back to Sam. "What did you use, a stealth chute?"

"No." Sam shook his head before handing a file to Grace who opened it with Steve looking over her shoulder. "These."

"I thought you said you were a pilot," Steve said, looking at Sam.

He shook his head. "I never said pilot." He looked at Grace. "Did I say pilot?"

Steve sighed. "I can't ask you to do this, Sam," he said, shaking his head. "You got out for a reason."

"Dude, Captain America needs my help," Sam quipped and Grace snorted in amusement. "There's no better reason to get back in."

"Where can we get our hands on one of these things?" Steve asked.

"The last one is at Fort Meade behind three guarded gates and a twelve-inch steel wall," Sam replied.

Steve looked at Adelaide and Natasha who both shrugged in response. He nodded. "Shouldn't be a problem."

Grace picked up the file and looked at the front.

FALCON — CLASSIFIED