Nick Fury stood at the center of the Bridge in the Triskelion, his silhouette framed by the panoramic windows that offered a god's eye view of the Potomac River. For decades, this view had represented his absolute control over the world's chaos. It was a vantage point from which he moved pawns, sacrificed knights and kept the monsters at bay.
Then, the screens went red.
Every monitor on the command deck… flickered in unison and began scrolling names, offshore bank accounts and redacted mission logs at a speed the human eye could barely track.
"Director, we've lost the uplink!" Maria Hill's voice cracked over the deafening cacophony of klaxons. "Someone is dumping the Deep Storage archives into the public domain! Level 10 encryption is being bypassed like it's a paper door! The firewalls aren't even registering the intrusion… it's like the system is opening itself from the inside!"
Fury felt a cold stone drop into the pit of his stomach. He looked at the lists cascading down the main viewscreen. He saw names of men he'd shared whiskey with in Saigon and Berlin. He saw the digital stamp of "Hydra" blinking rhythmically over his most trusted lieutenants, his operations chiefs, his world.
Pierce, he thought, the betrayal tasting like copper. You son of a bitch.
"Sir! Incoming signature! Mach 3 and climbing! It's coming straight for the main deck!"
Fury looked out the window. He saw the golden red streak of light tearing through the sky, trailing a wake of shattered glass and sonic booms that rippled the water of the river below.
As Tony Stark slammed into the plaza below, the impact shook the Triskelion to its bedrock. Fury grabbed the tactical railing to steady himself. Through the internal security feeds, he watched the massacre unfold in the lobby.
It wasn't the Tony Stark he knew. This wasn't the man who struggled with a drinking problem and a narcissism complex. This Stark was moving with a fluidity that defied physics. Fury watched, his eye widening, as Tony caught bullets in mid air… literally stopping a hail of high velocity lead with a casual gesture of his hand before sending them screaming back at the shooters.
He watched the monitors in horror as the structural steel of the Triskelion twisted like living snakes to impale the Hydra agents who dared to fire on him. Fury's mind began to scramble, discarding options as fast as he could formulate them.
Plan A: Lockdown. Failed. Stark had turned his own doors against him.
Plan B: The Winter Soldier. Pierce had likely already activated him and Stark was chewing through the defense grid like it was tissue paper.
Plan C: Escape.
As the heavy blast doors to the Bridge began to shrivel and melt under a crushing magnetic pressure, Fury reached into his inner jacket pocket. His fingers grazed the cool leather of a file he had carried for years. The truth about Howard and Maria Stark. The video. The autopsy reports.
He had kept it because he believed a directionless Tony Stark was a useful Tony Stark. He thought he could guide that grief, mold it into the "Avenger" the world needed. He had traded Tony's peace for a "Greater Good" that turned out to be seventy percent Hydra.
I miscalculated, Fury admitted to himself as the metal of the doors shrieked in agony.
BOOM.
The blast doors exploded inward from sheer kinetic stress. Tony Stark stepped through the smoke, his faceplate retracted.
Fury stood his ground. He saw the rage in Tony's eyes… a blue white heat that could melt the metal in the walls. He saw the veins pulsing in Tony's neck, the unnatural stillness of his posture. Before Fury could speak, a blur of motion erased the distance between them.
He felt the cold iron of the Mark VIII's gauntlet close around his throat.
As he was slammed against the reinforced glass of the window, gasping for air, his feet dangling inches off the floor, Fury looked into Tony's face. He saw a man who had been reborn through the fires of betrayal.
"Tony... listen..." Fury wheezed, his vision swimming.
He wanted to tell him that he had been trying to protect the world from itself. He wanted to say that the vacuum left by S.H.I.E.L.D. would be filled by something worse. But as Tony roared about Howard and Maria, about the snakes in the bedsheets, Fury realized his words were hollow. He had sat on the graves of Tony's parents to build a throne for himself and now the heir had returned to burn it down.
After Tony dropped him like a sack of garbage and ignited his thrusters, crashing through the ceiling and leaving the Bridge to crumble around them, Fury sat in the wreckage. He watched the "Icarus" virus wipe his life's work in real time, screen by screen going black.
He thought about the retro pager in his pocket. He thought about calling Carol Danvers. But he hesitated. If he brought her here now, she'd be fighting a world that had just been "saved" by the truth. She would be fighting the will of the people.
He stood up, his joints aching, his pride shattered. He wasn't the Director anymore. He was just a man who knew too much and owned too little. As he made his way to the secret escape tunnel hidden behind a false panel, he was already thinking about the "Grey" files… the ones even Hydra didn't know about.
Hours later, Nick Fury sat in the dark of a safehouse in Maryland that technically didn't exist on any map. His one good eye was fixed on the tactical tablet in his lap, watching the live satellite feed of the Potomac. The Triskelion was a hollowed out ribcage of concrete, still smoking from Stark's orbital entry level tantrum.
Fury thought back to the early days. He had inherited the Stark files from his predecessors. He knew about the Winter Soldier. He knew the Starks hadn't just 'missed a turn' on a rainy road in Long Island. But in 2009, with the world getting weirder by the hour, he had made a calculation. He needed the Stark legacy, the tech, the mind. He needed the S.H.I.E.L.D. infrastructure intact to fight threats that were falling from the sky. To tell Tony would have been to lose his most valuable asset to a vendetta.
He had bet on his ability to keep the secret. He had bet on his ability to control the "Aryan" variable. He had lost both bets spectacularly.
"You played the man, Nick," he muttered to himself, pouring a glass of stale water. "But you forgot the man was holding a royal flush."
As he watched the Umbrella's data dump scroll across his backup monitors, Fury felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. Umbrella had been patient. They let S.H.I.E.L.D. feel secure, let the cancer grow and then surgically remove the heart while it was still beating.
Did he regret it? As he watched the video of Howard and Maria Stark dying on a loop… he felt the crushing weight of it. He had betrayed the very foundation of the agency. Howard had been his friend. Maria had been a light in a dark world. And Fury had traded their justice for a seat at a table that was already infested with Hydra.
The government would be looking for someone to blame for the Hydra infiltration and his face was the biggest target in the world.
He looked at his reflection in the darkened window. He saw a man who had tried to play God with human lives and found himself replaced by a man who didn't have to play.
"You want a new world, Tony?" Fury whispered into the shadows. "You got it. But you better hope you're as perfect as you think you are. Because when you fail and everyone fails… there won't be a Shield left to catch the pieces."
He stood up, the old soldier reasserting himself. He grabbed a burner phone from a hidden cache in the floorboards and dialed a number he hadn't used in years. A number for the few "Clean Alphas" he had left in the wind.
"This is Fury," he said when the line clicked open. "Initiate Protocol: Retribution. We're going underground."