The Captain's daughter | Rogers ¹ ✔️

11 - Shall we play a game?

We pulled up to the outside of an abandoned military base. Why would the signal lead us here?

"This place looks sketchy." Barry said. "The file came from these coordinates." Natasha said.

"So did I. This camp is where I was trained." Dad said. He looked around as if this was his childhood home.

"Changed much?" Natasha asked.

"A little." Dad replied.

"This is a dead end. Zero heat signature, zero waves, not even radio. Whoever wrote the file must have used a router to throw people off." Dad stared at a building not far ahead. "What is it?" I asked. The four of us headed over to it.

"Army regulations forbid storing ammunition within five hundred yards of the barracks. This building is in the wrong place." Dad opened the lock with his shield and we entered. Barry turned on the lights. It looked like an old SHIELD office.

"This is SHIELD." Natasha said.

"Maybe where it started." We entered a room where we found old frames of Howard Stark, Peggy, Col. Chester Phillips.

"Morgan's grandfather." I said.

"Howard." Dad looked at me.

"Who's the chick?" Barry asked. Dad didn't reply and turned around to walk further down the room and stopped by a massive bookshelf.

"If you're already working in a secret office... " he started. He pushed the book shelf and it slid open to reveal an elevator behind it. "Why do you need to hide the elevator?" We went down the elevator which took us to a room with old looking computers.

"This can't be the data-point, this technology is ancient." Barry said. Natasha noticed a small drive port. She placed the flash drive in it and it activated an ancient computer in the room.

"Initiate system?" The computer said. Great. Another computer that talks. Natasha typed using the keyboard.

"Y-E-S, spells yes." Natasha smiled as the old computer started to crank up. "Shall we play a game?" She then turned to dad. "It's from a movie that..."

"Yeah, I saw it." Dad said. Suddenly, we heard an accented voice speak. "Rogers, Steven. Born, 1918. Romanoff, Natalia Alianovna. Born, 1984. Rogers, Brooklyn. Born in 1995. Banner, Barry. Born in 2004." I saw an old camera moving above us as it analyzed us.

"It's some kind of a recording." Natasha said. "I am not a recording, Fräulein. I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am." The computer showed an old photo of Dr. Arnim Zola.

"Do you know who that is?" Barry whispered to me.

"Arnim Zola. He was a Russian scientist. I heard he worked for Red Skull. He's been dead for years." I replied.

"First correction, I am Swiss. 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." Wait. The computer is Arnim Zola?

"How did you get here?" Dad asked. "Invited."

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

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

"I thought HYDRA died with the Red Skull." I said.

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

This is terrifying me not going to lie.

"Prove it." Dad said.

"Accessing archive." Zola said. The computer showed us old footage of Red Skull and 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."

"That's impossible, SHIELD would have stopped you." Barry said.

"Accidents will happen." The computer screen showed us a video. HYDRA killed Howard and Maria Stark and made it look like an accident all along with the recent 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." In anger Dad smashed the computer screen. "As I was saying..."

"What's on this drive?" Dad asked. "Project Insight requires insight. So I wrote an algorithm." Zola answered.

"What kind of algorithm? What does it do?" Natasha asked concerned.

"The answer to your question is fascinating. Unfortunately, you shall be too dead to hear it." Suddenly the doors started to close. Dad tried to stop it by throwing his shield in between but it was too late.

"Steve, we got a bogey. Short range ballistic. 30 seconds tops." Natasha said.

"Who fired it?"

"S.H.I.E.L.D."

"I am afraid I have been stalling, Captain. Admit it, it's better this way. We're both of us...out of time." Zola said. Out of nowhere, Barry threw me into an opening in the ground. The building then exploded. We hopped out from under the rubble and ran out of the back door to the outside. We went to the front and looked inside. I didn't see dad at all.

He must have escaped. I thought. I then saw Rumlow. He must have noticed our footprints in the dust.  "Call in the asset."

950 words
Sorry this took so long to update!