Steve and Natasha are walking through a busy mall. The two of them are dressed in normal civilian clothing, blending into the crowd as though they were just a normal couple going about their day. "First rule of going on the run is, don't run, walk." Natasha whispers, noticing his movements.
Steve huffs slightly. "If I run in these shoes, they're gonna fall off." He remarks, his head held down slightly, pushing up the glasses Natasha had put on him so they don't slide off his nose. They both head into the nearby Apple store, making their way over to the computers. Other
"The drive has a Level Six homing program, so as soon as we boot up, SHIELD will know exactly where we are." Natasha informs him.
"How much time do we have?" He asks.
"Uh...about nine minutes from…" Her voice trails off as she pops the flash drive into a MacBook Pro. "Now." She starts tapping into, and bypassing the security on the device. "Fury was right about that ship, somebody's trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort of AI, it keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands."
"Can you override it?" Steve questions.
"The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me." She reminds Steve, continuing to try and hack into the account. She stops talking for a moment before continuing; "slightly." She draws her attention back to the computer, trying to bypass the security on the flash drive. "I'm gonna try running a tracer." She tells him, recognising the system on the drive after being unable to bypass it to gain the information. "This is a program that SHIELD developed to track hostile malware, so if we can't read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from." Her voice carries off when footsteps come up beside him.
The man is wearing a blue polo with a white apple ID badge on his chest. "Can I help you guys with anything?" The employee asks kindly.
"Oh, no. My fiancé was just helping me with some honeymoon destinations." Natasha lies smoothly, looking away from the computer, her arm loosely hanging around Steve's shoulders.
"Right! We're getting married." Steve replies with faked enthusiasm.
"Congratulations." He replies. "Where do you guys thinking about going?"
Steve looks at the monitor and sees the signal traced to somewhere in New Jersey. "New Jersey." He answers after a few seconds, looking back up at the employee.
"Oh." He answers, slightly shocked at the choice of location. "I have the exact same glasses." He notices, pointing to Steve's face.
"Wow, you two are practically twins." Natasha chuckles, diverting the employer's attention.
"Yeah, I wish. Specimen." He lifts his hands and gestures to Steve's frame before showing them his badge. "Uh...if you guys need anything, I've been Aaron."
"Thank you." Steve replies. "You said nine minutes, come on."
"Shh, relax." She tries to reassure him. "Got it." The single pops up as coming from Wheaton, NJ and she looks up at Steve. "You know it?"
Steve Rogers: I used to. Let's go. [Steve pulls the flash drive from the computer and they walk out of the store] Standard tac-team. Two behind, to across, two coming straight at us. If they make us, I'll engage, you hit the south escalator to the metro. [as two agents are coming straight towards them]
"Shut up and put your arm around me, laugh at something I said." Natasha orders quickly.
"What?" Steve looks down at her.
"Do it!" She hisses and Steve quickly puts his arm around Natasha and laughs.
Back at the mac store, one of the agents is looking around. "Negative at the source." Rollins says over the radio.
"Give me a floor rundown." Rumlow says.
"Negative on three."
"Negative on two."
"Snake the upper levels, work down to me." Rumlow orders as they are going down the escalator Natasha spots Rumlow on the escalator next to them going up, she turns to Steve.
"Kiss me." Natasha tells him.
"What?" Steve looks at her in confusion, thinking he must have misheard her.
"Public displays of affection make people very uncomfortable." Natasha explains.
"Yes, they do." Steve agrees and he can't even react when she quickly pulls down Steve's head and kisses him, making Rumlow look away as he goes past them on the escalator.
"You still uncomfortable?" She wonders.
"It's not exactly the word I would use." Steve admits as they get off the elevator and head outside, quickly getting into the closest car they find and heading off to New Jersey.
"Where did Captain America learn how to steal a car?" Natasha asks him, placing her feet up, leaning back.
"Nazi Germany." He answers.
"Mm." Natasha muses.
"And we're borrowing. Take your feet off the dash." Steve orders and Natasha takes her feet off the dash.
"Alright, I have a question for you, oh, 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?" She tells him.
"What?" Steve replies.
"Was that your first kiss since 1945?" Natasha asks.
"That bad, huh?" Steve wonders.
"I didn't say that." Natasha defends.
"Well, it kind of sounds like that's what you're saying." Steve says, glancing at her.
"No, I didn't." She argues. "I just wondered how much practice you've had."
"You don't need practice." Steve replies.
"Everybody needs practice." She smiles.
"It was not my first kiss since 1945. I'm ninety-five, I'm not dead." Steve reminds her.
"Nobody special, though?" She wonders.
"Believe it or not, it's kind of hard to find someone with shared life experience." He admits.
"Well, that's alright, you just make something up." Natasha answers.
"What, like you?" Steve asks.
"I don't know." Natasha admits. "The truth is a matter of circumstances, it's not all things to all people all the time. And neither am I."
"That's a tough way to live." Steve tells her.
"It's a good way not to die, though." Natasha argues.
"You know, it's kind of hard to trust someone when you don't know who that someone really is." Steve reminds her.
"Yeah. Who do you want me to be?" Natasha asks.
"How about a friend?" Steve suggests, his eyes glancing over at her slightly.
"Well, there's a chance you might be in the wrong business, Rogers." Natasha says, laughing softly, whether it was at him or not he doesn't know.
The two of them pull up to outside an abandoned military base where the signal had come from. Steve looks at it. "This is it." Steve says, gripping his shield, his hands hanging out of his pocket.
"The file came from these coordinates." Natasha tells him, even though it was obvious he had already known that.
"So did I." Steve admits as they walk around the base trying to pinpoint where the signal came from, his eyes taking it all in. "This camp is where I was trained."
"Changed much?" She asks.
"A little." He answers and he stops walking as Steve has a brief visions of his former, smaller self running past him as he's getting trained with other soldiers.
"Pick up the pace, ladies!" Sergeant Duffy calls in the vision. "Let's go! Let's go! Double time! Come on Rogers, move it!" The smaller frame of his former self stops and stares at Steve as he is now. "Come on! Fall in! Rogers! I said fall in!" Present Steve watches nostalgically as the former Steve runs off and disappears with the others.
"This is a dead end." Natasha admits. "Zero heat signature, zero waves, not even radio. Whoever wrote the file must have used a router to throw people off." She follows along beside Steve, stopping when she notices that Steve had stopped walking. "What is it?" She asks softly, going towards the building.
"Army regulations forbid storing ammunition within five hundred yards of the barracks." Steve explains, getting his shield out. "This building is in the wrong place." Steve opens the lock with his shield and they enter inside. When the lights flicker on, they find themselves standing in between rows of desks and offices and at the very end, the SHIELD logo plastered on the wall.
"This is SHIELD." Natasha notices, looking around at everything.
"Maybe where it started." Steve corrects as they enter into a room where they find old framed portraits of Howard Stark, Peggy and Col. Chester Phillips.
"There's Stark's father." Natasha notices.
"Howard." Steve replies.
"Who's the girl?" Natasha asks, pointing to the photo in the middle but Steve doesn't reply and turns away to walk further down the room, stopping by a massive bookshelf.
His hands tracing the walls of the shelf, feeling the irregularities in it. "If you're already working in a secret office…" He says quietly before he pushes the bookshelf and slides open to reveal an elevator behind it. "Why do you need to hide the elevator?" He looks at Natasha, and eyebrows raised before they go down the elevator which takes them to a room with old looking computers.
"This can't be the data-point, this technology is ancient. Suddenly Natasha notices a small flash drive port, she places the flash drive in it which then activates the ancient computer in the room.
"Initiate system?" The computer asks in its simple monotone voice.
Natasha leans forward, her hands typing onto the keyboard. "Y-E-S, spells yes." Natasha smiles as the old computer starts to cranks up, the machines whirring in the background. "Shall we play a game?" Natasha reads before looking at Steve. "It's from a movie that…"
"Yeah, I saw it." Steve buts in before they suddenly hear an accented voice speaking.
"Rogers, Steven. Born, 1918." A deeper, more human voice says, a voice which Steve recognises as being Dr Arnim Zola. "Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born, 1984." It greets again, and the two look up, seeing an old style camera moving above them as it analyses them and their movements.
"It's some kind of a recording." Natasha guesses.
"I am not a recording, Fräulein." Zola corrects, sounding slightly offended. I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am." The computer screen flickers and shows an old photo of Dr. Arnim Zola.
"Do you know this thing?" Natasha asks.
"Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull. He's been dead for years." Steve answers.
"First correction, I am Swiss." He corrects them. "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 asks, suspicious.
"Invited." Zola admits and Steve's eyes thin, confused and not believing him.
"It was Operation Paperclip after World War II. SHIELD recruited German scientists with strategic value." Natasha explains to him.
"They thought I could help their cause." Zola tells them. "I also helped my own."
"HYDRA died with the Red Skull." Steve argues.
"Cut off one head, two more shall take its place." Zola reminds him, reciting their moto.
"Prove it." Steve challenges, leaning forward.
"Accessing archive." Zola's voice calls out from one of the speakers and the computer screen shows them old footage of Johann Schmidt - the Red Skull - and of how the original SHIELD founders became through clippings of newspapers and snippets of the news videos. "HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. What we did not realise 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." He shows clippings of bombs, of pain and anguish around the world, then followed with pictures and newspapers of a ghost, ghosts, a sniper on a roof, Soviet records of their boogeyman. "And when history did not cooperate, history was changed."
"That's impossible, SHIELD would have stopped you." Steve argues, his hands gripping white.
"Accidents will happen." Zola reminds him, showing him footage of the night Howard and Marie died, the ghosts there once again, followed by the confirmation of the death of Fury. "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." Steve's eyes darken and in anger Steve suddenly smashes the computer screen, it fizzing and going black, Zola's face transferring over to a screen in the corner. "As I was saying…"
"What's on this drive?" Steve interrupts him, asking in anger.
"Project Insight requires insight. So I wrote an algorithm." Zola answers simply.
"What kind of algorithm? What does it do?" Natasha questions, leaning forward, nearly at the end of her tether but not willingly to show it. She won't let herself crack.
"The answer to your question is fascinating." He replies before making a sound that closely resembled a laugh. "Unfortunately, you shall be too dead to hear it." The door then suddenly starts to close. Steve tries to stop it by throwing his shield in between it but he's too late, the door closes and the hydraulic clamp engages.
"Steve, we got a bogey. Short range ballistic. 30 seconds tops." Natasha warns quickly, showing him a small black and green screen.
"Who fired it?" He asked.
Natasha's eyes darken, her face falling ever so slightly. "S.H.I.E.L.D." She replies bitterly, a hint of betrayal in her tone, her mind reeling to find out why.
Steve and Natasha glance back over at the computer, looking back over at the distorted face of Zola on the small screen on the side. He chuckles ever so slightly, the voice glitchy. "I am afraid I have been stalling, Captain." He says without even a hint of remorse. "Admit it, it's better this way. We're both of us… out of time." The screen goes black, the lights plunging the room into darkness only moments afterwards.
Steve notices a small opening on the ground, he throws the metal door aside and just as the place explodes he throws himself and Natasha into the hole and protects them with his shield, he then manages to get them out from under the building rubble just as STRIKE agents arrive to roam the area for them.
Rumlow glances down at the ground as he leaves, examining the ground for anything. His eyes single onto a footprint in the dark dust and his eyes darken, his hand gripping tighter. "Call in the asset." He says darkly.
An agent glanced over at him. "And the soldier?" He asks softly, a hint of fear in his voice.
"Set up a tracer." Rumlow answers.