Nick Fury didn't sleep that night.
Sleep was for people who weren't being hunted by HYDRA.
Instead, he stood alone in his operations room, staring at the last frame on the monitor — the HYDRA courier disappearing into the World Security Council building through a door only Pierce's inner circle could access.
Hill returned a few minutes later carrying two mugs of bitter black coffee. Fury accepted his without a word. He took a long sip, staring at the steam rising from it as if it carried answers.
Hill waited. She knew Fury well enough to recognize when he was thinking hard rather than doubting.
Fury finally set the mug down and tapped the table, sharp and precise.
"They've got everything they need to start the show. And I know exactly which angle they'll use."
Hill frowned. "What angle? They can't exactly accuse you of anything serious. You saved the damn planet today."
Fury let out a humorless breath.
"Yeah. And that's exactly why they'll hit me where it hurts."
Hill took a sip from her cup. "Sir… what do you mean?"
Fury looked up at her with a cold, tired eye.
"They'll blame me for the missile."
Hill blinked, confused. "The missile? The one the World Security Council forced through? Sir, that order didn't come from you. It didn't even go through standard military command. That was their decision."
Fury turned fully toward her, voice low.
"Hill, what does the public know about that decision?"
She paused. "…nothing."
"And what happened?"
"The Council panicked and bypassed protocol."
"And who controlled the Helicarrier that fired the missile?" Fury asked.
Hill's expression froze.
"…our carrier."
"Exactly," Fury said quietly. "To the world, that missile came from a S.H.I.E.L.D. platform under my command. They don't know the Council took the controls from me. They don't know I tried to stop it. They don't know I had three seconds to react to a forced fire command."
Hill swallowed. "But they can't just say you authorized it. There are logs. There are authorization codes. Everything that happened is recorded."
Fury pointed at her tablet.
"Hill… who controls those logs?"
She blinked.
"…Pierce."
"Who controls S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal comms servers?"
"…also Pierce."
"Who can erase, forge, rewrite, or 'lose' digital evidence whenever he wants?"
Hill's breath caught. "Pierce."
Fury nodded slowly.
"And who is one of the most powerful and respected men on the planet? Someone the Council trusts? Someone the world believes is a hero after this mess other than Avengers?"
Hill whispered, "Pierce."
"He'll convince the Council to pin it on me," Fury said, voice steady. "He'll tell them I panicked… that I tried to launch that nuke myself. That I ignored oversight, broke every protocol, and nearly turned Manhattan into a crater."
He tapped the table once.
"And the worst part? They'll go along with it. Because the Council is already under pressure after approving that missile. They're scared. They know the moment the truth comes out, their careers, their reputations, their lives fall apart. So when Pierce gives them a story that protects them… they'll grab it with both hands."
"But there were witnesses," Hill insisted. "Agents on the bridge saw the Council override you."
Fury gave her a dry look. "And you think those agents won't be 'reassigned,' 'disappear,' or have their reports 'misfiled' by morning?"
Hill's jaw clenched.
Fury continued, voice steady.
"All Pierce needs is one falsified authorization log, one doctored voice line, one junior agent testifying that he 'heard' me give the order. That's it."
Hill exhaled slowly. "So that's their plan. Pin the missile on you. Turn the Council against you. Remove the only person who could expose them."
"Exactly," Fury said. "They make me the villain. They clean their hands. And Insight stays on track."
Hill shook her head. "So what do we do?"
Fury finally smiled..a thin, sharp smile.
"We don't counter them."
Hill frowned.
"We expose them," Fury said. "Before they even finish writing the story."
He then walked to the far wall, opened a locked panel, and pulled out an old case packed with analog tools, burner phones, secure keys, untraceable devices. Real spy equipment, not the flashy digital stuff that HYDRA could hack.
Hill stared. "We're… going old-school?"
Fury smirked. "If HYDRA can't hack it, they can't touch it."
He handed her a burner phone. "One for you… one for me. No logs. No digital footprints. If I don't say it to your face or through this, it didn't happen."
Hill pocketed it silently.
Fury continued, "And first thing on our list is securing every piece of proof that I didn't authorize that missile."
Hill straightened. "Without tripping Pierce's alarms."
Fury nodded. "Exactly. The moment HYDRA senses I'm collecting evidence, they'll scrub everything clean."
Hill took a slow breath. "So nothing through S.H.I.E.L.D.'s systems."
"Right," Fury said. "No digital trail. Analog only."
She moved closer. "What's our starting point?"
Fury raised one finger.
"One — the raw Helicarrier bridge feed. Audio, visuals, system pulses. Half of it's recorded without the techs even realizing."
Hill frowned. "That's stored on the backup drives under the main console, isn't it?"
"Old emergency units," Fury confirmed. "Pierce can't hack them remotely, but he can order them destroyed the second he's ready."
Hill nodded. "I'll get them before that happens."
"No uploading," Fury said. "No scanning. No duplication. Keep them off-grid."
"I'll secure them personally," Hill replied.
Fury raised a second finger.
"Two — Ellis."
Hill blinked. "…the flight officer?"
"The one who tried to override the missile launch," Fury said. "HYDRA will target him early."
Hill nodded, this time more serious. "I'll get him out quietly. No official chains."
"That's the idea," Fury said. "Anything in the system is compromised."
Hill hesitated. "And his written report?"
Fury gave a flat look. "Already gone."
She absorbed that quietly.
Fury raised a third finger.
"Three — the Council override signals."
Hill looked thoughtful, but unsure. "Pierce can edit those logs."
"Digital logs," Fury said. "But not the analog signal pulses from the transceiver bay."
Hill's eyes widened slightly. "Those old units… they're still active?"
"They record raw bursts," Fury said. "Not audio, but enough to prove who sent the order and who didn't."
Hill nodded slowly. "So those three are our insurance."
"Only if Pierce never sees us collecting them," Fury added.
She shifted her weight. "He'll assume you're too busy dealing with the aftermath of New York...and the information Walker provided us."
"That's what I want him thinking," Fury said.
Hill took a moment, piecing it together. "And once we have the evidence..."
"We wait," Fury interrupted.
Hill's brow furrowed. "Wait for Pierce to move?"
"He won't be able to resist," Fury replied. "He'll try to suspend me, remove me, or frame me the moment he feels confident."
Hill exhaled. "And when he does… he exposes himself."
"Exactly," Fury said. "We watch who he uses. What he erases. What he manipulates. We see his whole hand. Down to the last card."
She looked at him carefully. "So this wasn't just a response. You're choosing where the fight happens."
Fury smirked.
"I'm not setting a trap, Hill."
He tapped the empty mug on the table.
"I'm choosing the battlefield… down to the last inch."
--
---
A few days passed, each one heavy with the weight of rebuilding a world that had almost ended. Manhattan was still nursing its wounds, and so was S.H.I.E.L.D. But Nick Fury was not resting. Not even for a minute.
He played the part everyone expected of him, the overwhelmed Director, the man buried in post-battle chaos, juggling government committees, reconstruction orders, and cleanup demands along with confirmation of HYDRA's existence. The perfect disguise.
But in reality, every night was a battlefield.
By the end of the first day, the Helicarrier's emergency drives were already locked away in an offline storage unit so deeply buried in the city that even S.H.I.E.L.D.'s map wouldn't find it.
On the second day, Fury took care of Agent Ellis. He didn't just hide Ellis. He killed him on paper. During a late-night maintenance shift, Ellis suffered a sudden "cardiac arrest" inside an isolated section of the Helicarrier where only two med-techs were present, both secretly loyal to Fury. They followed protocol exactly as HYDRA would expect: a frantic emergency call, failed resuscitation, time of death recorded, and the body covered on a stretcher.
The security cameras captured everything a Hydra mole reviewing the footage would want to see, a stressed, overworked officer collapsing days after the New York invasion. But the stretcher never made it to the morgue. Between two decks, a thirty-second blackout in a damaged hallway gave Fury the opening he needed. The real Ellis slipped through a maintenance hatch into a service crawlspace and was immediately escorted to a sealed safehouse under a fresh identity.
The "body" that continued toward the morgue was a weighted medical dummy prepped earlier by Fury's trusted techs. The death was logged, autopsied on paper, filed, and archived. To SHIELD and to HYDRA, Ellis was dead and buried. In reality, he was alive, protected, and ready to testify the moment Fury chose to strike back.
On the third day, Fury had Hill retrieve the analog transceiver logs from a dusty mechanical room under the carrier bay. They were stuffed into a metal case, wrapped in cloth, and moved by hand, never touching a computer.
On the fourth day, Fury reached out to two Ghost Unit operatives using burner phones, ordering them to chart Pierce's inner circle's movements inside the Council building, tracking who entered which floor, which elevator, and which office.
By the fifth day, Fury had expanded his preparations even further. He quietly pulled together a complete personnel list of every agent who had worked under Pierce in the past five years. He didn't take it from official databases.. those were already compromised, but from scattered fragments of outdated rosters, archived duty logs, and handwritten clearance ledgers that HYDRA had likely forgotten existed. Piece by piece, he rebuilt a picture of Pierce's inner circle without touching a single digital system.
From a sealed storage locker beneath an old S.H.I.E.L.D. field office, Fury recovered a stash of pre-digital passports, genuine S.H.I.E.L.D. identities created before modern registries existed. They were clean, untraceable, and perfect for moving people or evidence without HYDRA ever noticing. He also located a row of unregistered S.H.I.E.L.D. vehicles, long abandoned in a forgotten warehouse near the docks, each one still fueled and operational despite being wiped from the active fleet years ago.
To protect everything he was gathering, Fury set up three independent data vaults spread across the city, each rented under a different civilian alias, each impossible to link to S.H.I.E.L.D. or to him.
Fury was building a war machine in the shadows.
And the most important part:
Pierce saw none of it.
Because to Pierce, Fury looked exactly how Pierce wanted him to look — overloaded, drowning in paperwork, distracted.
Fury had bought himself the most dangerous weapon any man could have against HYDRA.
Time.
--
---
[S.H.I.E.L.D. operations room. Early morning.]
Fury was buried in paperwork when Maria Hill stepped inside, her footsteps brisk but controlled.
Fury lifted his eye an inch. Hill only moved like that when something big broke loose.
She set a slim file on the table. "Sir. We have a situation."
"How bad?" Fury asked without looking up.
"The worst kind," Hill replied. "The kind that shouldn't be possible."
Fury put his pen down.
"Talk."
Hill inhaled, steadying her voice.
"Loki's sceptre is gone."
Fury didn't move. He simply became very, very still.
"When was it taken?" he asked.
"Five days after the cleanup started," Hill said. "But the disappearance was only flagged yesterday."
Fury's eye narrowed. "What caused the delay?"
Hill flipped open the folder.
"They used legitimate-looking clearance codes. Perfect timing. A transport vehicle with the right signatures. Nothing tripped the system. It looked like a normal transfer."
Fury clenched his jaw. "Go on."
"One of the analysts saw a scheduling mismatch," Hill continued. "The transport's arrival time didn't match the departure logs. Fifteen minutes difference."
"Sloppy for HYDRA," Fury muttered. "Almost like they wanted us to find the trail."
"That's what I thought too," Hill said.
She pulled out a marked sheet.
"Once we had the anomaly, we tracked the route. It moved east. Stayed under radar. We lost digital trace in Eastern Europe… but we caught the last confirmed checkpoint before it vanished."
Fury scanned the word printed clearly across the page.
Sokovia.
"Hm," Fury murmured. "Remote. Broken infrastructure. Weak government. Lots of blind spots."
Hill nodded. "Romanoff was the one to follow the trail asntis still waiting for further orders."
Fury leaned back in his chair.
"HYDRA knows I know about them," he said. "They know I found their tap. They know I watched the footage."
"And they still moved the sceptre," Hill said. "Bold."
"Too bold," Fury corrected. "That's bait."
Hill frowned. "A trap?"
Fury nodded.
"If I hadn't seen that tap, if I didn't know they were listening....I'd think the sceptre was the biggest priority in the world right now for collecting proof. I'd send the Avengers immediately. Loud. Fast. Desperate."
Hill nodded. "Which Pierce would twist into 'reckless Director trying to cover his tracks."
"Exactly," Fury said. "Pierce wants me to look unstable. Like a man losing control. And if I take that thought one step further, he doesn't want any of the Avengers anywhere near me when he makes his move."
Hill crossed her arms. "So what's the move? Let it go?"
"No," Fury said. "We follow it. Quietly."
Hill hesitated. "Even knowing it's bait?"
"Especially because it's bait," Fury said. "Pierce wants to see how I react. He wants confirmation that I didn't notice the tap. So we give him exactly what he wants."
Hill considered that. "A team?"
"Not the full Avengers," Fury said and stood up. "Rogers. Romanoff. Walker."
Hill raised a brow. "Walker? Considering everything…?"
"That's why," Fury said. "Pierce misread him. HYDRA misread him. They don't know his limits or loyalties. He's chaos on two legs. HYDRA hates unpredictability."
Hill accepted that with a slow nod. "So sending them makes Pierce think you took the bait."
Fury nodded. "He'll relax. He'll think his tap worked. And while he thinks they are one step ahead of us…"
Hill finished quietly, "We tear down HYDRA here."
Fury smirked. "That's the plan."
Hill set the folder aside. "And if Sokovia is more dangerous than expected?"
"Then we trust our people to survive," Fury said. "And bring back whatever HYDRA left exposed."
He reached for his coat.
"Get a secure line prepped. I'll brief Rogers in an hour."
Hill nodded and headed for the door.
Just before she stepped out, Fury added:
"And Hill…"
She paused.
"Bring Banner in."
She looked back. "For Sokovia"
"No. For tracking. HYDRA moved the sceptre once. They'll try to hide it again. Banner tracked it before. He can do it again. But only from here. Quietly. Off the record."
Hill nodded. "Understood."
"HYDRA wants us stuck in Sokovia for as long as possible. They'll bury the trail. Banner is our best chance of staying ahead without tipping them off."
"I'll get him." Hill moved to leave.
Fury's voice came again. "Also Make sure Pierce hears exactly what I want him to hear."
Hill allowed herself the faintest hint of a smile. "Yes, sir."
Nick Fury stood alone in the room, staring at the Sokovia report. It wasn't fear he felt. It was anticipation.
Because war was coming.
And he was finally ready to fight it on his terms.