Chapter Text
The world was already rewriting itself before the smoke from the Triskelion stopped rising.
Washington's skyline was a gash of destruction. From the riverbank where they had pulled Steve to safety, you could see the jagged gaps where glass towers once gleamed, their metal frames curling black under the morning sun. Helicarrier wreckage jutted from the Potomac like half-submerged skeletons, and the air stank of scorched steel and ozone.
But more than the physical wreckage, you could feel it -- history tilting under your feet.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was gone.
It wasn't official yet. Not on paper. Not in the press briefings. But in the language of agents, the silence between orders, the way people avoided meeting each other's eyes -- it was already dead. The infrastructure that had been your life for decades was unraveling in real time.
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By the second day after the battle, the field HQ was a skeleton of itself. Portable servers were being dismantled and wheeled out under armed guard. Agents shredded documents by the crate. The communications room where you had monitored Steve's voice in your ear only a day ago was stripped bare, wires dangling like vines from gutted panels.
You stood in the middle of it for a long moment watching the chaos. The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead.
Maria Hill passed you in the corridor, a file clutched under one arm and an expression that didn't invite conversation. Hill paused just long enough to say, "Fury wants to see you."
You followed without comment.
-------
Fury was in what remained of the operations conference room, leaning against the table as if it were any other debrief. Except the table itself was cracked through the middle, and every chair had been shoved haphazardly to one side.
He looked up as you entered. "____."
"Fury."
His one eye tracked you carefully, gauging, but there was no real surprise there. "You've got options," he said. "None of them clean."
You crossed your arms. "And what's the messiest?"
"Staying visible."
You let out a short, humorless breath. "Not exactly my habit."
He gave a low grunt of agreement and straightened. "Officially, you were never here. Not during the Triskelion assault, not during Hydra's fall, not in any capacity since 1945. Your file's off the record again. Buried deeper this time."
Your jaw tightened. "By my choice, or yours?"
"Both. Keeps you alive. Keeps the wrong people from digging to deep." He hesitated, which in Fury terms was practically shouting. "You'll still work -- selectively. I'll call you in when the world's on fire. Otherwise, you disappear."
You thought of Steve -- still recovering, unaware of how quickly the world was erasing people it didn't want to account for.
"And what if I'm not interested in disappearing?" you asked.
"Then you're an open target. And I'm not wasting you on making a point."
You stared at him, and he stared at you, for a long beat. Finally, you nodded once. "Fine. Off the record."
------
By the end of the week, you were gone from the rosters. Your credentials no longer opened the base gates. The secure channels where your name had once pinged green now showed nothing but ACCESS DENIED.
The first time you tried your old log-in and saw the red error message, something in your chest twisted.
Not because you cared about the clearance -- though it had been in your lifeline for seventy years -- but because it was as though you had been cut out of the frame of a photograph. The world would move on, and it would move on without you.
Again.
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You relocated to a safehouse in the Virginia countryside -- a low-profile structure Fury had handed you the coordinates for on a crumpled scrap of paper. "Not in the system," he'd said. "Like you."
It was quiet there. Too quiet. The only sound at night was the cicadas and the faint hum of an old refrigerator. You kept your weapons in a locked trunk at the foot of the bed and your comms kit in a drawer, untouched unless it buzzed with Fury's code.
Every morning, you ran the perimeter. Every afternoon, you tuned into public broadcasts, listening to senators argue over whether S.H.I.E.L.D. should be resurrected, reformed, or left to rot. The word Hydra surfaced in hearings, sharp and dangerous. No one spoke your name.
You didn't expect them to.
-------
When the files went public, you almost didn't look.
Hill had given you the heads-up: They're dumping everything. Every op. Every name they can find.
You sat in front of your monitor, the light casting long shadows in the dim room, and scrolled through pages of redacted text. Your own entries were gone -- not merely blacked out, but missing entirely. Where you had been in the record, there were only blank spaces, as though you had never existed.
You wondered if Steve had looked.
You wondered what he thought when he didn't find you.
------
The days bled together after that. You kept your skills sharp -- shooting drills in the woods, tactical planning exercises in the margins of old notebooks. Occasionally, a message from Fury would appear, and you'd ghost into D.C. or New York for a single meeting before vanishing again.
Once, you crossed paths with Natasha Romanoff in a coffee shop in Georgetown. Neither of you spoke about the past week, or about the fact that both of you were now ghosts in the system. But there had been a flicker of mutual recognition -- you're still here.
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On the anniversary of the Triskelion's fall -- though "anniversary" felt like a strange word for something still so raw -- you drove to the city. You walked past the rebuilt waterfront, the scaffolding wrapping the new towers, the plaques already sintalled to honor "the fallen."
Steve's name wasn't there. Neither was yours.
You stood looking at the river for a long time. The water was calm now, deceptively so, glinting under a thin layer of cloud. You thought about the moment you had seen Bucky pull Steve from its depths, about how both men had slipped away from you in different ways in the hours that followed.
The world thought it had all the pieces of the story now. But you knew better.
Off the record didn't mean gone. It meant waiting.
And you were very, very good at waiting.