Breaking in, she'd long since learned, was rarely as glamorous as the movies made it seem. Despite all the slick spy thrillers and overproduced Bond knockoffs of the last few decades, reality was a lot duller.
Destiny used to tease her about that, back when things were simpler. Mystique had laughed back then, but the truth was more disappointing than romantic.
Acrobatics and theatrics didn't get you through real security systems. Waiting did. Watching did. People were and always would be the weakest link in security.
She sat perched on a pine branch overlooking the Hydra facility, her avian body blending neatly into the alpine mist. It was an impressive setup, she had to admit.
Hidden in an abandoned Soviet fortress deep in the mountains, half-buried beneath decades of snow and erasure. She'd bet there wasn't a single surviving record of its existence.
From her vantage point, she watched cars roll in and out of the tunnels, headlights carving through the gloom. Guards patrolled in tight, synchronized formations, and once, she spotted a small aircraft dropping onto the runway beside the main compound.
Her scowl deepened. They were much better armed than she'd been led to believe. Her past few run-ins with them had shown nowhere near this level of competence.
All the more reason to crack them open.
A flicker of movement caught her eye. A woman in a lab coat, half-running, half-stumbling under the weight of a box filled with what looked like heavy equipment and folders.
She smiled. Ah, perfect.
Mystique shifted effortlessly, feathers giving way to flesh and fabric as she dropped from the branch. Her form melted into that of one of the countless guards she'd been watching for the past hour. Humanity's love for conformity really did make her job easy.
"Let me give you a hand," she said, voice pitched into the bland, forgettable tone of a tired man doing his duty.
"Oh—thank you!" the woman gasped, relief flooding her face as she handed off part of the load. The boxes were heavy, far heavier than they looked.
Mystique adjusted her grip and nodded toward the door ahead. "After you."
The scientist blinked, then hurriedly swiped her keycard and held the door open. Mystique followed close behind, keeping her stride loose but casual, cataloging every corridor and camera she passed.
It still amazed her how often people made her work easy. Not by weakness or malice—just plain, human carelessness.
As the door clicked shut behind them, she kept pace beside the woman, expression blank, steps measured.
She made sure to memorize the layout in her mind—the number of guards, the size of the tunnels, the rhythm of their patrols.
They finally stopped in front of another door. The researcher fumbled for her keycard and swiped it open in one quick motion.
"Thank you so much for the help!" the woman said, half breathless, as Mystique set the heavy boxes down on a desk. They were filled with folders, all of which she began sorting and typing into her terminal without a moment's hesitation. She didn't even glance back at the guard looking over her shoulder.
Too easy.
"No problem at all," Mystique replied, her borrowed voice carrying that bland, helpful tone of the average grunt. Her eyes, however, were locked on the ID card the woman had carelessly tossed onto the desk beside her coffee mug.
A flick of her wrist, a step back to 'adjust her gloves,' and the card vanished without a sound. On her way out, she discreetly wedged a sliver of metal into the door's latch—just enough to keep it from opening properly behind her.
When she stepped into the hall again, she did so with a new face and pinned the ID card to her chest.
Now dressed in a crisp white lab coat, her new face that of a tired, overworked researcher, Mystique moved deeper into the base's labyrinth of corridors. She adjusted her glasses, walking with the kind of determined hurry that made others instinctively step aside.
She kept her stride steady as she wandered the base, taking in anything of note—until she paused down another hall.
A quick glance into a computer lab showed several other scientists hunched over their monitors, surrounded by stacks of paper, with dozens leaving and entering. She waved her keycard in passing, the magnetic lock clicked, and she slipped into the room with practiced confidence.
All it took was the right posture—focused eyes, tight jaw, purposeful stride—and no one questioned her presence. Another researcher nodded briefly as she passed. Mystique returned it with just enough acknowledgement to seem preoccupied.
At the terminal, she reentered the credentials she'd just memorized and pulled up the internal database. The screen filled with files.
"Tesseract research... mutant genome sequencing... supersoldier prototype schematics," she muttered under her breath.
She'd seen enough horrors to grow numb to most of them, but some lines still turned her stomach. It wasn't even the cruelty anymore, it was the sheer arrogance of these humans. The sheer conviction that they could rewrite the world according to their whims.
She kept her face blank as she scanned through the documents, copying every key name and project detail to memory. No time to pull any of the data. Unfortunate that the ad hoc nature of this infiltration meant she was bereft of her usual tools.
Then two names caught her attention.
Wanda Maximoff. Pietro Maximoff.
She focused on those files, absorbing every trace of their transfer logs, project codes, and experiment details that this researcher could access. They'd been moved after the escape. Typical. But she wasn't about to let Hydra keep her people locked in cages. Not again.
A shout broke through the hum of typing. An older man stalked through the lab, barking orders and slamming papers onto desks.
Time's up.
Mystique logged out and stood, tucking the ID card into her pocket as she turned toward the exit—
"Ashley!"
She froze mid-step.
The man's glare snapped to her. "What the hell are you doing here? Why aren't you digitizing the files I assigned you hours ago?"
She immediately shifted her expression—fear, confusion, the perfect mix of flustered subordination. "I—I was just finishing up, sir, I thought—"
"Don't think, work!" he barked, waving her off before turning to berate another assistant.
Mystique lowered her head, mumbling apologies until he was out of sight. Then she straightened, smirking faintly. Some things never changed—bureaucrats and big egos were universal constants no matter how many years passed.
She slipped back to the hallway, tossed the stolen keycard under the lab door, and moved toward a service exit. A cart rumbled by. When the camera's view was blocked, the white coat was gone—replaced by the tiny gray blur of a mouse skittering across the floor.
By the time the snow met her paws, she'd shifted again—this time into a fox darting through the white expanse toward the tree line.
From the safety of the forest, she pulled a small satellite phone she'd stashed, the metal cold against her fingers. She dialed without hesitation.
"Raven?" came the deep voice on the other end.
She smiled. "Hello, Erik."
—
Nick liked to think he was a competent man. You didn't climb the ranks of S.H.I.E.L.D. by being anything less. He'd earned his place the hard way—through long nights, bad coffee, and a career's worth of dealing with galactic-level nonsense that would've broken most men.
In his book, anyone who got promoted without pulling their own weight was either lucky or an overconfident twit.
Lately, though, he was starting to suspect that he might be the overconfident one.
It started small—just a few casual checks. Nothing out of the ordinary for a man in his position. A few old files here, some cross-referenced mission logs there. He'd asked a couple of quiet questions, run a light audit on the bookkeeping. Standard procedure.
But the more he dug, the uglier it got.
On paper, the official investigation turned up nothing major—some internal disputes, a few shady expense reports, minor cases of corruption. The usual bureaucratic sludge. What caught his eye wasn't the noise. It was the lack of it.
A single report about a paper pusher misfiling the inventory for one of their Quinjets. Normally, it'd be a throwaway error. Except that particular Quinjet was the same one his top agents had used during their supposed "approved vacation."
He double-checked the records. Every signature, every timestamp, every excuse lined up perfectly. Too perfect.
That was when the alarm bells started ringing. If one report had been scrubbed that clean, how many others were buried under layers of neat handwriting and falsified logs?
Something was rotten inside S.H.I.E.L.D., and he was going to find out what.
Nick leaned back in his chair, rubbing at his temple before standing. He grabbed a coffee from the tray his assistant held out and gave her a curt nod. She vanished back into the maze of hallways without a word, her expression blank.
He watched her go, jaw tightening. You knew things were bad when you trusted aliens more than your own people.
Relying on Skrulls for this kind of work was a last resort he'd rather not use. Calling his relationship with them "good" would've been generous. Even with all the promises and favors he'd pulled as Director, Talos had warned him—some of the Skrulls were getting impatient.
So far, it had been nothing more than grumbles and complaints, but Nick knew better than to take that lightly. Talos had promised to keep things contained, though he'd have to use them sparingly from now on.
He took a sip of the coffee—bitter, as always—and frowned when he noticed a slip of paper stuck to the bottom of the cup. A single word, handwritten in neat, deliberate strokes.
Sokovia.
He stared at it for a long moment before exhaling through his nose.
By the time he stepped out of the S.H.I.E.L.D. compound, the sun had already dipped behind the skyline. The streets were quiet, city lights flickering against wet asphalt as he moved through the chill evening air.
He'd crossed, double-checked, and backtracked more times than he could count, making damn sure he didn't have a tail.
An old gym sat wedged between two shuttered stores—one of those places the world forgot but never quite let die. The paint was peeling, the windows fogged from years of trapped humidity.
Inside, under the dim yellow glow of flickering lights, two figures waited.
Steve Rogers was in the middle of dismantling a punching bag, fists landing in a steady, brutal rhythm. The chain rattled with each hit until the whole thing tore open, sand spilling onto the floor. Natasha Romanoff sat nearby on a worn bench, one leg crossed over the other, watching with mild interest.
She glanced up when Fury entered, gave a small nod in greeting.
Steve exhaled hard, wiping the sweat from his brow before turning toward him.
"Fury." His tone was even. "You don't usually call in the middle of the night."
Nick dragged a chair over and sat, folding his hands over his knee. "For what else, Captain?" His one eye caught the dim light, glinting. "I've got a job for you two."
—
"Now in breaking news, Sokovian Prime Minister Alshaz states that…"
Helmut took a long drag from his cigar, letting the smoke curl slowly toward the ceiling as the radio crackled through another speech. The third puppet this year, parroting promises of unity and renewal for a country that hadn't known either in decades.
"Americans," he muttered under his breath. "No… not this time. The Russians, perhaps. Alshaz has family ties to the Kremlin."
"Helmut," his wife called from the hallway, voice warm but firm, "stop talking politics! We have Carl's recital in an hour, and I'm not letting you show up smelling like a furnace."
He smiled faintly, raising his free hand in mock surrender. "Yes, dear."
She disappeared deeper into the house, the faint sound of her footsteps mixing with the soft hum of the radio.
Helmut stood, leaning by the open window as he looked out over Novi Grad. From this height, the city looked serene—warm lights flickering across the river, clean facades gleaming under the morning sun. But he knew the truth behind the pretty picture.
Sokovia was dying, and had been for years.
He'd spent half his life serving a nation that could barely stand, propped up by foreign powers who saw it as little more than a pawn. It was an unpleasant feeling, seeing behind the veil and knowing how broken it was. Even worse, from what his few remaining contacts managed to whisper, he could sense the faint movements of others finally closing in to devour Sokovia whole.
"Helmut!" his wife called again, closer this time. "Five minutes! And for God's sake, open a window—I can smell that smoke from the kitchen!"
"Alright, alright!" he said with a small laugh, stubbing the cigar out in the ashtray. Brooding could wait.
Just as he started toward the bedroom, the phone rang.
He frowned, glancing at the caller ID. Baba.
He picked it up. "Father?"
"My son!" his father's voice came through, excited, almost trembling. "Two spirits came to my house today! You must bring Carl—he must be blessed by their magic!"
"…What?"
***
Comments and Thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Likes are like a drug to me and boost my creative juices. If you want more, please comment your thoughts and ideas.
I have advanced chapters on my Pa tre on/daisyberry if you wanna read ahead.