"How much longer until our pajama baby gets here?"
Tony Stark paced the length of the Avengers Tower penthouse. His expensive leather shoes clicked rhythmically against the polished hardwood.
Hank Pym sat slumped at the massive conference table, vigorously rubbing his temples. He looked completely exhausted. "He is a high school student, Tony. He has curfew. He has AP Algebra. Is there a specific, world-ending reason we absolutely had to drag him away from his homework?"
"This meeting doesn't happen without him," Tony fired back, not breaking his stride. "Look around, Hank. Even the big guy is waiting patiently."
Tony gestured toward the corner of the room. The Hulk sat cross-legged on the reinforced floor, his massive green shoulders hunched forward.
"Stupid meeting," Hulk grumbled, his deep voice vibrating the glassware on the wet bar. "Stupid metal room."
Steve Rogers leaned against the glass wall overlooking the Manhattan skyline. He crossed his massive arms over his chest. "Let's just wait, everyone. If Tony is taking things this seriously, it means something is severely broken."
When Tony Stark turned off the music and stopped making jokes, the world was usually on fire.
A soft thwip echoed from the balcony.
Peter Parker dropped silently onto the terrace. The black symbiote rippled over his frame, absorbing the ambient light of the city. He walked through the sliding glass doors, pulling the mask back to reveal his face. He looked around the room, immediately clocking the heavy, suffocating tension.
"Hey, guys," Peter said, his voice quiet. "Did I miss something?"
Tony didn't say hello. He simply raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.
The penthouse instantly transformed. A series of advanced Stark-tech holographic projectors whirred to life, projecting an image of an empty, peaceful living room outward toward the city. A split-second later, two-foot-thick titanium blast doors slammed down over the floor-to-ceiling windows with a deafening, hydraulic CRUNCH.
The main lights died. The room plunged into pitch darkness, save for the eerie, pale blue glow radiating from the arc reactor in Tony's chest.
Hulk didn't even flinch, though his eyes narrowed in the dark.
"Don't panic, kid," Tony said, walking over to the conference table. "I'm just following your paranoia protocols. I completely severed JARVIS from the mainframe. I dropped the Faraday cage. I killed every single electromagnetic signal in this room except my heart."
Tony reached into a lead-lined lockbox on the table. He pulled out a single, heavily reinforced glass test tube and set it down.
Steve Rogers stared at the vial. The color completely drained from his face. His jaw locked, the leather of his gloves creaking as his hands curled into fists.
"Hydra," Steve whispered.
"Surprise, Cap," Tony said, a bitter, humorless smile twisting his lips. "They never died. They just went to sleep in the walls while you were frozen in the ice. One of Peter's... acquaintances stole this exact vial from a black site in Eastern Europe. It's a remnant of Hydra's infiltration into the Soviet Union."
Tony leaned forward, resting his knuckles on the table. "And do you want to guess what happened to all this 'Soviet' serum after it was smuggled into the United States?"
The room was dead silent.
"They rebranded it," Tony answered his own question. "They handed it to the Pentagon. They called it American innovation, and they started funding illegal human experimentation right under our noses."
The revelation hit Steve like a physical blow. He closed his eyes, a ragged breath escaping his chest. "Hydra has already infiltrated the United States government."
"It's worse than just one serum, Captain," Peter spoke up, stepping into the blue light of the arc reactor. The black biomatter on his shoulders shifted uneasily. "Think about the timeline. The genetically modified spider that bit me. The Savage Force project. This alien symbiote I'm wearing. They are all cutting-edge, military-contracted super-soldier initiatives. If Hydra is secretly pulling the Pentagon's strings, they've been funding and supervising all of it."
Hulk let out a low, rumbling growl. "Bad men crawled into a bad house. Now they make bad things."
"The big guy hits the nail on the head," Tony said grimly. "And it gets more complicated. Cap, remember your old World War II buddy? The android? Jim Hammond?"
Steve's eyes snapped open. "The Human Torch. His body was lost."
"It was lost, until it popped back up decades later," Tony corrected. "When our favorite neighborhood Spider went to Madripoor a few weeks ago, Hammond's android body was seen standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Weapon X. Yet another classified United States super-soldier program."
Tony pushed off the table, the blue light of his chest casting long, sharp shadows against the titanium blast doors.
"The conclusion is mathematically absolute," Tony stated. "Every single super-soldier program in this country is compromised. Unless an enhanced individual was created by a complete, undocumented accident—like Peter—we have to assume every super-soldier manufactured by the United States is a sleeper agent for Hydra."
Hank Pym rubbed his eyes, looking thoroughly sick. "Wait. S.H.I.E.L.D. runs its own internal enhancement programs. What about Nick Fury's projects?"
"Not safe either," Tony shot back. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a thick stack of physical, glossy photographs. He tossed them onto the table. "Rhodey hand-delivered these to me two hours ago. The Pentagon doesn't trust S.H.I.E.L.D., and they definitely don't trust us. So, they are actively recruiting their own team. An American Avengers."
Steve picked up the first photo. It showed a man trapped inside a heavy, glowing containment suit.
"Jack Hart," Tony narrated. "They call him the Jack of Hearts. His father invented a highly volatile liquid fuel called Zero Fluid. Corporate espionage got messy. The thieves murdered his dad right in front of him and pushed the kid into a vat of the fuel. The explosion mutated him into a pure energy entity. He has to wear that suit just to keep his atoms from dispersing. The military has owned him ever since."
Tony flicked the second photo across the wood. It showed a humanoid silhouette made entirely of jagged, yellow electricity.
"Miguel Santos. Codename: Living Lightning. A maintenance worker down at the Gamma Labs in Arizona. He was fixing an electrical box during the exact same gamma explosion that created the Hulk. The radiation fused with the grid. He turned into a living lightning bolt. They keep him in a grounded, insulated vault."
The third photo showed a sleek, aggressive black suit of armor streaking through the sky.
"Chris Powell," Tony continued. "He was just a kid when he stumbled onto an extraterrestrial combat amulet. The U.S. military snatched him away from his corrupt cop father and spent a decade training him to be an attack dog. Codename: Darkhawk."
Tony threw down the final photograph.
It was a humanoid robot. Its chassis was painted in a garish, overly patriotic American flag motif, complete with a flowing red cape.
"And finally," Tony said. "Citizen V."
Peter froze. The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up. He stared at the photograph of the flag-draped android.
"Wait," Peter said, his voice dropping into a tense whisper. "Is that Zemo?"
Steve's head snapped toward Peter.
"In the alternate timeline," Peter explained quickly, looking directly at Tony. "The Wasteland. Baron Zemo impersonated a hero called Citizen V. He formed the Thunderbolts. He gained the trust of reformed villains, stole the global superhero database, and then slaughtered everyone. Before I jumped back to our reality, my suit transmitted the data of his betrayal directly to JARVIS."
"I know," Tony nodded, his expression dark. "I isolated that exact data packet the second you got back. I buried it behind six blind firewalls to make sure nobody could alter JARVIS's code. But the Citizen V in this photograph isn't a man in a mask, Peter. It's a DARPA combat drone. It's a machine."
Steve turned away from the table. He stared at the solid titanium blast doors.
Heinrich Zemo had died seventy years ago. Steve had watched it happen. But Hydra had survived. Jim Hammond had survived. Steve himself had survived the ice. The past refused to stay buried.
"Cut off one head," Steve whispered, the old, hateful oath tasting like ash in his mouth. "Two more shall take its place."
Steve turned back to face the room. The grief was gone. In its place was the hardened, unbreakable resolve of a soldier going to war.
"If we want to completely destroy Hydra, we have to find all the heads simultaneously," Steve commanded, looking at each Avenger in turn. "From this moment forward, assume anyone outside this room is compromised. Vet your contacts. Check your blind spots."
Steve reached down and picked up the photograph of Citizen V.
"If they grow two heads for every one we cut," Cap said, his voice ringing like steel in the dark room, "then we are just going to have to cut them all off."
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