Chapter Text
There is sand fucking everywhere. Sand in his clothes, in his hair. In his boots and in his socks, just to cover all its bases. Rumlow had had two guns jam on this fucking nightmare of a mission because of the goddamn sand.
He hates desert missions. He hates short notice. And he especially hates being put on short notice desert missions when there's important shit happening back at home base.
It’d be just his fucking luck if the sand had fried his phones, too. Doesn’t look like there’s any holes in the ziploc bag he’d shoved them into four days ago, but he’s not betting on anything at this point. Sure, day one with no signal, no phone service, had been kinda nice – first day in months he hadn’t got a cryptic pep talk from Pierce or had to listen to Rollins' bitching. But now, he’s just glad this shitshow’s over.
He's itching for this plane to land. SHIELD can always spring for a quinjet, or call in a favor from the Air Force if nothing else. But Hydra? His exfil is a fucking economy ticket on LIAT, which is apparently Sitwell’s idea of discretion. Shoved into a middle seat between a 300-pound metalhead who’s cranked up the volume so high in the last hour that Rumlow can hear screaming through his headphones, and a balding accountant who snores.
He needs a shower. A beer or six. He needs to know everything went okay in D.C., because it's been stressing him out this whole time.
He can't believe Pierce put him on this bullshit while Insight was going down. Yeah, fine, he’d been their lead the last time they’d talked to AIM, actually has a working relationship with Rappaccini and can list the litany of fuckups that had led to this particular clusterfuck backwards, by order of body count. Pierce had pointed all that out. It’s not that Rumlow disagrees with his logic. He rarely does, to be honest. But he would much rather have been in D.C. watching the Helicarriers go up. That would have made the fucking library of memos he’d had to read about them worth it.
But no. Stupid dumbass desert mission.
His last Hail Mary argument to stay hadn’t worked either, since apparently Pierce didn’t think they’d need to pull the Asset out of cryo. And so, no need for Rumlow to stay and act as primary handler. Just before he’d left, he’d cornered Kane, the guy who'd probably be heading STRIKE Alpha while he was gone, and given him a bunch of instructions just in case. Read the new notes I made in the manual and remember: clear instructions, no ambiguous wording and don't do that thing where instead of having it quietly snipe from a rooftop you give it the coolest new artillery just ’cause you can and it ends up all over the fucking news. Rollins had said he’d sounded like a paranoid mom hiring her first babysitter. Asshole probably had front row seats to the launch.
“Folks, we have begun our descent to Washington Dulles International Airport.” Fucking finally. Rumlow shifts in his seat to peel his sweaty, sandy arm from where it’s glued to the fat fuck next to him. It feels like forever until the plane sets down on the tarmac. “Local time is 10:26 AM and the temperature is 57 degrees Fahrenheit. There is still an active air quality warning and local authorities are advising people to stay indoors until the smoke over the Potomac clears. It is now safe to turn on your electronic devices.”
Smoke warning. Rumlow frowns. Weird.
He pulls out his Hydra phone first. There’s two passwords and an eye-scanner that never works on the first try, so while that’s ‘verifying’ he gets the SHIELD phone out, too. Just one password there and a thumbprint reader, but garbage service. Fucking xfinity.
While he’s waiting for the bar to load, next to him the fat guy’s phone switches off airplane mode and explodes with notifications. Popular dude. It takes Rumlow a second to notice that, no, those aren’t texts or missed calls, for the most part – they’re news alerts.
The most recent one, dated this morning, reads: The Hunt for Hydra Continues: Forty-six More Convictions from Romanoff Data Dump.
Rumlow’s heart fucking stops.
He watches the guy scroll through an article too fast for him to read – catches SHIELD and Hydra in the same sentence, not a good sign – and sees a photo of Pierce. Underneath is written: 1936-2014.
What. The fuck.
His Hydra phone finally turns on. Literally two hundred and twelve new notifications. Nineteen missed calls. He starts scrolling.
He sees the codes for the security protocols first, bright red and in a font size Pierce can – could? he thinks hysterically – read comfortably. There’s the agreed ones for Insight, from three days ago – Instituted: Protocol I-113. Instituted: Protocol Delta 6.
And then. D-17 Activation. They’d used the Asset. Rumlow checks the time and seethes. Those fucking assholes. They’d started defrosting it like two hours after Rumlow’d left. The texts from Rollins start around the same time.
11:02: Freezer’s open
11:02: Assuming you okd this?
13:12: It’s asking where you are LOL
14:00: Ok so you didnt ok this
14:00: We’re going anti-stealth
14:00: Kane’s orders
14:00: He’s giving it the magnetic disc grenade launcher (?) thing
Rumlow already knows exactly what Rollins is talking about before he sees the photo. It is exactly the kind of over-the-top shit he hates. Rumlow glares at the metal hand that’s carefully holding the barrel. Even the Asset seems uncomfortable using this thing. Unbelievable.
14:08: It’s like this guy put your manual through a blender before reading it. Fuck. This is a shitfest.
14:09: I’ll send pics
There’s a whole van full of gear, a little rolling armoury. There’s so much shit there they’ve even got Dave coming along to hand the Asset guns because it’s too much for it to fucking carry all at once.
And there’s a video. The thumbnail is the Asset standing in the middle of a city block in broad daylight with a fireball shaped like Fury’s car flying over its head. Rumlow can already tell he’ll end up with an aneurysm if he actually watches it. He keeps scrolling, faster now, skipping through the days – Triskelion compromised, Fridge compromised, Hub compromised, every fucking base compromised – until the last text. It’s from yesterday.
13:43: Ignore the protocols – Hydra’s down. Go to ground. See you when I see you.
All the security protocol notifications after 14:00 start getting clustered together, sometimes only a couple minutes between them. Emergency Protocol B-15. Emergency Protocol Sigma 3. And then ones he’d never even heard of. Emergency Protocol Hal kirīma. What the fuck is that? What alphabet is that, even?
Rumlow looks to his left and – yep, on his other side, the accountant just swipes away his own news alerts. Rumlow’s pretty sure one of them says something about Captain America’s statement. He looks back at the article the fat guy’s scrolling through.
Oh shit, there are photos of Stern. Markowitz – fuck, that guy had led Kappa. There’s one of Blair. Ptomlyn.
Rumlow suddenly feels extremely aware of the people around him on this cramped little plane. He stays very still and slowly slips on his sunglasses. If Pierce and Stern and a bunch of guys he’s worked with have been outed as Hydra – possibly in some data dump by Romanoff; he really needs to figure out what the fuck went on in the past four days – he can’t rule out that he’s been outed too. There’s definitely a good chance it’s game over and some civilian’s gonna recognize him in the airport. Or on this plane. Maybe SHIELD’s gonna be waiting for him at the gate, with cuffs.
The seatbelt light still hasn’t gone out. He keeps scrolling. Probably catches one in ten pieces of information – did they wipe the Asset in the middle of a mission? What the hell was that about? Cap was – captured? Free? He squints at one code – that can’t be right, because Rumlow is pretty sure that’s the code for an unidentified airborne combatant.
He suddenly realizes that a code he hasn’t seen is D-17 Standing Down. Unlike all the rest, that is a problem he can manage. That is – was? – his job to manage. He starts looking for the deactivation notice, the Confirmation: Received at Base. It’s not there. It has to be there. It—
His SHIELD phone finally turns on. It’s almost as bad as the Hydra one. There’s forty missed calls. Ninety-eight new notifications. And way too many of the security protocols screaming into view are the exact same ones Hydra sent through.
Triskelion compromised. Fridge compromised.
And then Emergency Protocol: Foxtrap. This one comes with a note.
Friends and Colleagues – Be advised that all files on SHIELD personnel, past and current, as well as ongoing and concluded operations have been made public. If you are in the field, take what precautions are required to ensure your personal safety. Otherwise, stand down. Co-operate with local law enforcement as needed and do not attempt to access SHIELD equipment or facilities. Contact your direct supervisor with any concerns.
It’s signed Nicholas J. Fury. Just Nicholas J. Fury. Rumlow keeps staring at the screen, even tries highlighting the blank space under the name, just to see if Director of SHIELD will show up. Nothing.
It feels like forever until they’re allowed to exit the plane and Rumlow starts shuffling down the aisle with everyone else. He sweats bullets all through customs – his passport doesn’t raise any flags, but it’s a Hydra-issued fake anyway, so that doesn’t really help clear anything up – and all the way through the gate until he’s out into arrivals. The airport TVs have the news playing, talking about – what else – the fucking fall of SHIELD and investigations into Hydra.
He doesn’t see his own face in the row of SHIELD ID photos crawling across the bottom of the screen, under the ‘Known Hydra Members at Large’ banner. So that’s something. He’s not planning on waiting around the terminal to see if he does come up. Better assume he’s been made and get out of dodge.
Duffel over his shoulder – fuck, he’s going to be wearing sand for the next… maybe for the rest of his life – he walks through the airport carpark until he finds a corner without cameras and a half-decent Honda Accord. He’s not going to go on the run in a Prius, for fuck’s sake.
It’s not long before he’s in – bless Murphy’s side hustle, he’d given all of STRIKE Alpha a test version of his HotWire app last Christmas – and on the road, putting DC behind him. He sets the bluetooth up to his phone.
“Call Rollins,” he tries, and the line rings three times before it goes to voicemail. “Fuck,” he says out loud. “Call Sitwell.”
Nothing.
“Call… I don’t know. Tanaka?” Line’s dead. “Alright, Murphy. Call Murphy.” And then, when that fails, “Kane?”
He can’t get through to anyone. Desperate, he puts his comms in and blurts out, “Is anyone live? Agent Rumlow, STRIKE Alpha, seeking any active personnel on this frequency. Hello?”
Nothing.
“Soldier,” he tries desperately, “are you there?” Static. Dead air. Rumlow starts to get a very bad feeling. “Search through notifications,” he tells his phone. “Phrase: ‘D-17 Standing Down.’”
“Searching,” Cortana tells him. They couldn’t get Apple phones for Hydra, for some reason. “Phrase not found.”
So the Asset hasn’t been put back in cryo.
“Search phrase: ‘received at base’,” he tries, because maybe they just haven’t gotten around to it yet—
“Phrase not found.”
Fuck.
If the Asset hadn’t made it to an extraction point, then where the fuck was it? Injured somewhere? Reacquired by whatever was left of SHIELD? It’s been out of cryo now for what – four days? Without an active handler, this could turn… gruesome. And fast.
The Asset missing wasn’t the worst news he’d gotten today – not by a long shot – but it was the only bit that was technically his responsibility to deal with. Not to mention the only thing he could do anything about, now, with Hydra… no. Not gone. Cut off one head, two more take its place – that’s been the line for like eighty years, right? There’s gotta be something to it. There have to be others that made it out.
The frantic tension he’s been stewing in for the past hour starts to fade as he lays out a plan. Okay. Step one, find and secure the Asset. Step two, gather whoever’s left standing. Step three, figure out where they went wrong on Insight and what can be saved.
And, oh, yeah – try not to get arrested, or killed. That’s kind of a big one.