Freezer Burn (36/?)
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"... no, it's not necessary at all, but I haven't been out here in months and I'm tired of needed prior written authorization to read the latest updates," Steve explained as he walked down the hallway, one eye on the tablet in his hand that functioned as a map of the subterranean city that was HYDRA's Detroit facility. He was the little blue dot moving between a set of yellow lines that instantly updated to reflect his current position.
"And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the current difficulties of life aboard the Helicarrier," Peggy said dryly into his earpiece. "Brooklyn's not far enough away, is it?"
Steve frowned at her, even though she was hundreds of miles away. "I'm not running away. I'm..."
A warning beep-beep from one of the tiny pick-up trucks they used down here -- the things sounded like the Road Runner and looked like a kiddie ride at the fun park -- as it sped down the corridor toward him. They had three wheels and a top speed of twelve miles per hour and were the transport of choice in a network of tunnels that was expansive enough to cross county and country lines. But he couldn't easily ride in one with anyone else (they were supposed to seat two) and there weren't many to spare for him to take solo, so he'd assured the supervising agents that he'd be fine on foot.
"In the way," he continued once the truck had passed, beep-beeping again in thanks as he moved to the side. "Here, not there."
A chuckle from Peggy. "I assumed. There, I'm quite sure that they're happy for you to be a stationary target to hit."
He grunted something that was as close to agreement as he was willing to make aloud, even to Peggy, without fearing that he was sounding like he was complaining. He wasn't enjoying being a bullet sponge for Fury and SHIELD, but that was an unofficial part of his job description and he accepted that because he was, officially, the leader of the Avengers and it was his responsibility to take the blame for their actions. Fury wasn't deploying him in that capacity for his own ease, at least, and was generally mindful that Steve showing up with a firm handshake and an earnest promise that yes, they were doing all they could to manage the utter shambles that the Avengers Initiative had become was not a panacea that could cure all ills. But that didn't mean that Fury wasn't as guilty of the same misguided belief most other people had about his strength and armor: just because he could survive the experience intact didn't mean that it didn't hurt plenty at the time.
"They've assigned more people to the project," Steve said as he consulted the tablet in his hand, which told him he had two hundred yards before a right turn which would take him to his destination. "But I don't know how much is getting done yet with everyone new needing to get caught up and everyone else trying to figure out what on earth Tony and Bruce had gotten up to and what got lost in the... incident."
Two weeks was enough time to repair all of the damage the Hulk had done to the Helicarrier, but not the damage the Avengers had done to each other and to SHIELD. The work on both the cauldron and the potion that had been mixed in it were both on hold because Thor hadn't come back at all -- to Earth, although there was the chance that Jane Foster was neglecting to mention a visit -- while Tony had been recovering from a concussion (not his first; the symptoms had lingered) and Bruce was gone. At first, Steve had wondered if it was actually gone, or just the sort-of gone that went with SHIELD knowing exactly where he was and just letting him be for a while. But after a week passing with no mention of Bruce, Steve had asked because even if Bruce hadn't called in, someone should have noticed a naked man wandering around and would have either called it in to the police or, more likely (according to Hill), posted about it on Twitter or Facebook the way they had when it had been the Hulk. But Hill had admitted that no, they didn't know where he was and Bruce, for all of his quirks, was very resourceful and the most likely option was that he was fine and intentionally avoiding contact and not that he was dead in a gutter somewhere.
(There had been a discussion about whether Bruce could have been captured by HYDRA or some other malevolent entity, but the general consensus was that were that true, SHIELD would have known by now. Either because HYDRA would have announced it or because SHIELD finally had a respectable level of coverage of HYDRA signals traffic and that kind of news would've traveled.)
"And how are the Danes?" Peggy asked as Steve paused to marvel at a snack vending machine standing in a recess along the corridor, next to a triptych garbage can split up to accept glass recycling, paper, and regular trash. These were not SHIELD imports; HYDRA was apparently both environmentally conscious and a believer in junk food.
"The Danes are displeased," he replied with what he hoped was dry understatement. "It took us the better part of three hours to get them to believe that we hadn't made the whole story up just to cover for the original falling into New York Harbor when the Hulk made his departure."
The accusations had flown, from the pedestrian to the outrageous and then beyond. SHIELD was covering up for the Hulk, SHIELD was covering up for Natasha (who'd been gone for weeks by the time the cauldron had left Copenhagen), SHIELD was backdating and fabricating the test results Bruce and Tony and their team had run, SHIELD had made a deal with the government of Ireland to secretly swap their fake for the original in return for unknown future benefits or favors. There were threats of a diplomatic incident, of going to the International Court of Justice, of somehow securing the revocation of SHIELD's charter (Fury had simply raised his eyebrow there). But in the end, the Danes were forced to back down because SHIELD's analysts had been able to use the Nationalmuseet's own printed material against them: a photograph of the cauldron from a 2012 publication did not quite match a photograph from a 1998 catalog and there was no way that could be blamed on SHIELD or any of its personnel.
"They're conducting their own internal investigation into how and when," he added. "We offered to help them because of the HYDRA connection, but they said no and I don't think we care enough about the answer to browbeat them into agreeing."
He made the right turn, which put him in another corridor illuminated with fluorescent track lighting and regularly-spaced single colored lights to indicate exits, emergency equipment, and other accouterments. It was remarkably like the subterranean bunkers he'd visited during the war in many ways, but the biggest difference was not the lights or the signage, rather that the entire place didn't smell like stale cigarette smoke and even staler body odor. Hooray for modern ventilation systems.
"Hey, do remember when we came back from France with the cognac?" he asked as he pushed open a stuck door and looked inside. The map said what he wanted was through another door on the far side of this room, which was apparently a storage closet, although it hadn't been while HYDRA had had run of the place. "Colonel Phillips was ready to break the bottles over my head because we brought booze instead of HYDRA weapons?"
It had been a misbegotten mission from the start, a meeting with a resistance group previously unknown to any of them and vouched for only by one of the Communist cells that spent half of its time sabotaging the nationalists' work, had gotten them supposedly first-hand testimony of a weapons depot that contained some of the HYDRA blue-laser blasters. But when the Commandos raided the place, it had turned out to be a regular old storehouse full of grain and booze and tinned meat and cheese wheels. Not even Nazi cheese, although the goods belonged to a collaborator who'd been making a tidy profit supplying the Boche and they'd had no qualms about filling themselves and then making sure the rest was given over to (more trusted) resistance cells. They'd trudged home well-fed but empty-handed save for a couple of bottles of cognac and a few other edible rarities.
"How could I forget?" Peggy laughed. "Poor Jacques nearly had a breakdown at the idea of wasting ninety-year-old Chabanneau on your thick skull."
Steve smiled as he stepped carefully around a stack of crates that were not piled straight. Jacques had been the reason they'd taken the booze in the first place; he'd nearly fainted at seeing such a large supply of what had apparently been very expensive liquor.
"What brought that up?" Peggy asked, amused but more thoughtful. "Have you stumbled upon a cache of luxury goods in the tunnels?"
"Nah," he replied, pausing to figure out the best way around the rest of the piles of boxes and crates that littered the floor. SHIELD had been though everything already, so they were all labeled with their contents, but the placement was haphazard and the organization nonexistent. "I found a vending machine with a surprising variety of M&Ms, though. I didn't know they came with pretzels in them."
"Those are the best kind," Peggy replied. "And to answer the question you aren't going to ask, we drank that last bottle at yours and Sergeant Barnes's gravesites after the opening of the memorial. The two of you got sips only; it was decided that any more would be wasted on the both of you, for different reasons."
Peggy was right, of course, he wasn't going to ask. Which was different from not wondering, but it had seemed needy to ask. After the Colonel had calmed down, they'd given him one of the bottles of 1850 Chabanneau and drunk another between them (and Peggy and whoever else had been around at the time). There'd been a third bottle that they'd set aside, in the romantic gesture of the slightly tipsy, for the end of the war. It had been given to Peggy for safe keeping, although that had been a relative term because even if she wasn't spending weeks at a time behind enemy lines like they were, she had usually still been far from safe.
"Bucky was better with beer and wine," Steve said, since he had to say something.
"You say that out of loyalty and I respect that," Peggy retorted. "But Sergeant Barnes couldn't tell a good vintage from a poor one from grape juice with antifreeze in it. He made his judgments purely on the size of the container."
Steve might have giggled, but then stopped to push a stack of crates marked to indicate that they held stone vessels and glassware - why had the SHIELD agents piled these together? - out of the way of the door he wished to reach.
"Finally," he murmured as he opened the door. As with most of the underground network, the lights were rigged to motion sensors, so they flickered on as he entered.
"Have you found the Holy Grail?" Peggy asked. Steve thought he could hear the click of knitting needles. It amused him to no end that Peggy, ferocious Peggy, had taken up knitting. She'd told him tartly that she'd mastered these domestic skills before the war - did he think she'd managed to keep her uniforms in one piece with help of some magical tailor who'd followed her into warzones? - but she'd had to admit that knitting now was a hobby, although not one he could mock her for without consequences. ("Another word and I unravel your scarf and turn it into a sweater for the dog next door.")
"No Holy Grail," he answered, looking around. "The Danes lost that sometime in the last fifteen years."
The room looked more or less like the photographs had indicated that it would: black stone countertops around the perimeter with shelves above and cabinets below and the lab equipment exactly where it had been left when HYDRA had vacated. Only the reagents had been stoppered and some glassware rinsed out, but even with the modern ventilation, there was still a slight chemical odor in the air that no SHIELD photographs or video could capture. It was the reason he'd come to Detroit in the first place, above and beyond any wish to get out of range of the bureaucratic shooting war aboard the Helicarrier.
SHIELD science teams had been permanently stationed in the Detroit complex since it had been secured, descending like locusts upon each room with so much as a test tube in it. HYDRA had been exceptionally careful about removing any kind of evidence that could be useful in figuring out what they'd been up to or what their future plans were, but they hadn't completely sterilized the place - how could they when it was almost as vast as the city above it? - and the longer SHIELD had to go over the place, the more clues they'd found. This had been especially true with the labs, from which the science teams could look at the inventories on the shelves and put together likely projects. It was how they'd ultimately stopped the suicide-by-poison-capsule problem - they'd found the lab where the formula had been designed and, from there, developed a simple antidote with minimal side effects and maximum ease of use.
Some mysteries, however, remained mysteries. They'd never found any hint to where HYDRA's main serum development lab was, since it hadn't been in Detroit. Which was not to say that there'd been no serum work done in Detroit - it's how they'd found out that HYDRA was working off of the strain that Bucky had been shot up with - but instead that it hadn't been the most important place. Everyone at SHIELD believed that the actual testing facility would be in one of their bases in the third world, where disappearing people and appearing piles of failed test subjects could go without notice after the right arrangements were made. But where the lab work would take place, that had been and remained a source of disagreement. Some had believed it would be near the testing site, since modern transportation options meant that getting ingredients and equipment into and out of remote locations was no longer a problem. But there was an equally strong argument to be made that while twenty-first century logistics made more things possible, it was no replacement for the kind of resource access that came with first-world accommodations. Which had been rebutted, as much it could without anyone having the actual answer, by the fact that Detroit would have been the ideal location for such a facility and, to this point, they'd found no evidence that it had been. Around and around it went, an argument Steve had faithfully followed up until the recent document access protocols overhaul had made it an effort not worth putting in more than occasionally.
Until he'd walked into one of the labs aboard the Helicarrier last week and been hit with a smell that he'd last encountered a long time ago and in a place far, far away.
SHIELD was recreating most of HYDRA's experiments, or at least mixing together solutions found in proximity to each other in HYDRA labs; Steve got the impression that the distinction between the two was a little fuzzier than the scientists liked to admit. He'd been walking past one such project en route to the lab where Doctor Peng was waiting for him. Doctor Peng was still waiting for him because Steve had never made it past where a biochemistry team was working on what they had thought was some kind of energy booster, like caffeine or amphetamines but with a longer effect.
Steve had stopped short, nearly choking on the memories of the last time he'd gotten a whiff of that particular odor, and had started asking questions with an urgency that the scientists had confused with menace and Tapper had been summoned by some kind of secret alarm. Once it became clear that Steve was neither on a rampage nor affected by some sort of contact high from the fumes, the questions and answers flowed more freely - although no less sharply - and Fury himself had needed to be called in.
Yes, Steve was absolutely one-hundred percent sure, this was exactly what he'd smelled in the room where he'd found Sergeant Barnes.
The scientists hadn't quite believed him at first. ("With all due respect to Captain America here, he's talking about getting a nose full of something for a few minutes in the middle of a gunfight that took place seventy years ago." "It's more like five years to me and those few minutes correspond to me finding my best friend strapped onto a gurney in a HYDRA lab. It's a distinct memory.") Most of them still hadn't quite believed him at the end, either, but Fury had and, ultimately, that's what was important. That's what had gotten him permission to fly to Detroit and wander around the tunnels unfettered and with all resources at his disposal.
"I've gotten through three rows and recovered from one dropped purl," Peggy began. "Do you feel like sharing what you've found or are we to continue this companionable silence that drains your cell phone battery?"
Steve sighed as he made a slow tour of the room. "I didn't come out here because I was feeling cooped up."
"You don't say," Peggy replied dryly. Steve could imagine her rolling her eyes. "Did you find what you did go out there for?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I think so."
He explained about that afternoon in the biochemistry lab. "They're still not sure if it was part of the serum formula or not," he went on. "What they've been able to piece together from the blood they took from Bucky once we got back and what they've been able to take from here, none of it is very clear. They're all incomplete and not entirely compatible and so while yes, everyone agrees that an enhancer like that one would be necessary, nobody will go out on a limb to say that it's this one."
It was all ass-covering and while he could accept the kind of reservations that went along with not wanting to commit too many resources to a dubious idea, this wasn't that and it annoyed him. Annoyed Fury, too, although not enough to force them to change their tunes without more evidence. Which he'd allowed Steve to go get. So Steve had gone back to the files to see where in the Detroit tunnel city the inspiration for the experiment had come from and there, in a room that hadn't been found until four months ago and hadn't been given a whole lot of thought since then, he'd found what he had been waiting to find since Andreas von Strucker had wept with relief at someone finally believing him.
"Are you standing in HYDRA's serum lab after all?" Peggy asked.
"Not the main one," Steve replied as he stopped in front of shelves that were meticulously and particularly organized. "They're right about that, at least until we find some other secret room somewhere."
"But," Peggy prompted.
"But remember when I was telling you about the HYDRA Mona Lisa, back before we knew that Schmidt was still alive?" Steve asked by way of reply. "This lab isn't just part of the School of Johann Schmidt. This is the master's studio."
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"... no, it's not necessary at all, but I haven't been out here in months and I'm tired of needed prior written authorization to read the latest updates," Steve explained as he walked down the hallway, one eye on the tablet in his hand that functioned as a map of the subterranean city that was HYDRA's Detroit facility. He was the little blue dot moving between a set of yellow lines that instantly updated to reflect his current position.
"And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the current difficulties of life aboard the Helicarrier," Peggy said dryly into his earpiece. "Brooklyn's not far enough away, is it?"
Steve frowned at her, even though she was hundreds of miles away. "I'm not running away. I'm..."
A warning beep-beep from one of the tiny pick-up trucks they used down here -- the things sounded like the Road Runner and looked like a kiddie ride at the fun park -- as it sped down the corridor toward him. They had three wheels and a top speed of twelve miles per hour and were the transport of choice in a network of tunnels that was expansive enough to cross county and country lines. But he couldn't easily ride in one with anyone else (they were supposed to seat two) and there weren't many to spare for him to take solo, so he'd assured the supervising agents that he'd be fine on foot.
"In the way," he continued once the truck had passed, beep-beeping again in thanks as he moved to the side. "Here, not there."
A chuckle from Peggy. "I assumed. There, I'm quite sure that they're happy for you to be a stationary target to hit."
He grunted something that was as close to agreement as he was willing to make aloud, even to Peggy, without fearing that he was sounding like he was complaining. He wasn't enjoying being a bullet sponge for Fury and SHIELD, but that was an unofficial part of his job description and he accepted that because he was, officially, the leader of the Avengers and it was his responsibility to take the blame for their actions. Fury wasn't deploying him in that capacity for his own ease, at least, and was generally mindful that Steve showing up with a firm handshake and an earnest promise that yes, they were doing all they could to manage the utter shambles that the Avengers Initiative had become was not a panacea that could cure all ills. But that didn't mean that Fury wasn't as guilty of the same misguided belief most other people had about his strength and armor: just because he could survive the experience intact didn't mean that it didn't hurt plenty at the time.
"They've assigned more people to the project," Steve said as he consulted the tablet in his hand, which told him he had two hundred yards before a right turn which would take him to his destination. "But I don't know how much is getting done yet with everyone new needing to get caught up and everyone else trying to figure out what on earth Tony and Bruce had gotten up to and what got lost in the... incident."
Two weeks was enough time to repair all of the damage the Hulk had done to the Helicarrier, but not the damage the Avengers had done to each other and to SHIELD. The work on both the cauldron and the potion that had been mixed in it were both on hold because Thor hadn't come back at all -- to Earth, although there was the chance that Jane Foster was neglecting to mention a visit -- while Tony had been recovering from a concussion (not his first; the symptoms had lingered) and Bruce was gone. At first, Steve had wondered if it was actually gone, or just the sort-of gone that went with SHIELD knowing exactly where he was and just letting him be for a while. But after a week passing with no mention of Bruce, Steve had asked because even if Bruce hadn't called in, someone should have noticed a naked man wandering around and would have either called it in to the police or, more likely (according to Hill), posted about it on Twitter or Facebook the way they had when it had been the Hulk. But Hill had admitted that no, they didn't know where he was and Bruce, for all of his quirks, was very resourceful and the most likely option was that he was fine and intentionally avoiding contact and not that he was dead in a gutter somewhere.
(There had been a discussion about whether Bruce could have been captured by HYDRA or some other malevolent entity, but the general consensus was that were that true, SHIELD would have known by now. Either because HYDRA would have announced it or because SHIELD finally had a respectable level of coverage of HYDRA signals traffic and that kind of news would've traveled.)
"And how are the Danes?" Peggy asked as Steve paused to marvel at a snack vending machine standing in a recess along the corridor, next to a triptych garbage can split up to accept glass recycling, paper, and regular trash. These were not SHIELD imports; HYDRA was apparently both environmentally conscious and a believer in junk food.
"The Danes are displeased," he replied with what he hoped was dry understatement. "It took us the better part of three hours to get them to believe that we hadn't made the whole story up just to cover for the original falling into New York Harbor when the Hulk made his departure."
The accusations had flown, from the pedestrian to the outrageous and then beyond. SHIELD was covering up for the Hulk, SHIELD was covering up for Natasha (who'd been gone for weeks by the time the cauldron had left Copenhagen), SHIELD was backdating and fabricating the test results Bruce and Tony and their team had run, SHIELD had made a deal with the government of Ireland to secretly swap their fake for the original in return for unknown future benefits or favors. There were threats of a diplomatic incident, of going to the International Court of Justice, of somehow securing the revocation of SHIELD's charter (Fury had simply raised his eyebrow there). But in the end, the Danes were forced to back down because SHIELD's analysts had been able to use the Nationalmuseet's own printed material against them: a photograph of the cauldron from a 2012 publication did not quite match a photograph from a 1998 catalog and there was no way that could be blamed on SHIELD or any of its personnel.
"They're conducting their own internal investigation into how and when," he added. "We offered to help them because of the HYDRA connection, but they said no and I don't think we care enough about the answer to browbeat them into agreeing."
He made the right turn, which put him in another corridor illuminated with fluorescent track lighting and regularly-spaced single colored lights to indicate exits, emergency equipment, and other accouterments. It was remarkably like the subterranean bunkers he'd visited during the war in many ways, but the biggest difference was not the lights or the signage, rather that the entire place didn't smell like stale cigarette smoke and even staler body odor. Hooray for modern ventilation systems.
"Hey, do remember when we came back from France with the cognac?" he asked as he pushed open a stuck door and looked inside. The map said what he wanted was through another door on the far side of this room, which was apparently a storage closet, although it hadn't been while HYDRA had had run of the place. "Colonel Phillips was ready to break the bottles over my head because we brought booze instead of HYDRA weapons?"
It had been a misbegotten mission from the start, a meeting with a resistance group previously unknown to any of them and vouched for only by one of the Communist cells that spent half of its time sabotaging the nationalists' work, had gotten them supposedly first-hand testimony of a weapons depot that contained some of the HYDRA blue-laser blasters. But when the Commandos raided the place, it had turned out to be a regular old storehouse full of grain and booze and tinned meat and cheese wheels. Not even Nazi cheese, although the goods belonged to a collaborator who'd been making a tidy profit supplying the Boche and they'd had no qualms about filling themselves and then making sure the rest was given over to (more trusted) resistance cells. They'd trudged home well-fed but empty-handed save for a couple of bottles of cognac and a few other edible rarities.
"How could I forget?" Peggy laughed. "Poor Jacques nearly had a breakdown at the idea of wasting ninety-year-old Chabanneau on your thick skull."
Steve smiled as he stepped carefully around a stack of crates that were not piled straight. Jacques had been the reason they'd taken the booze in the first place; he'd nearly fainted at seeing such a large supply of what had apparently been very expensive liquor.
"What brought that up?" Peggy asked, amused but more thoughtful. "Have you stumbled upon a cache of luxury goods in the tunnels?"
"Nah," he replied, pausing to figure out the best way around the rest of the piles of boxes and crates that littered the floor. SHIELD had been though everything already, so they were all labeled with their contents, but the placement was haphazard and the organization nonexistent. "I found a vending machine with a surprising variety of M&Ms, though. I didn't know they came with pretzels in them."
"Those are the best kind," Peggy replied. "And to answer the question you aren't going to ask, we drank that last bottle at yours and Sergeant Barnes's gravesites after the opening of the memorial. The two of you got sips only; it was decided that any more would be wasted on the both of you, for different reasons."
Peggy was right, of course, he wasn't going to ask. Which was different from not wondering, but it had seemed needy to ask. After the Colonel had calmed down, they'd given him one of the bottles of 1850 Chabanneau and drunk another between them (and Peggy and whoever else had been around at the time). There'd been a third bottle that they'd set aside, in the romantic gesture of the slightly tipsy, for the end of the war. It had been given to Peggy for safe keeping, although that had been a relative term because even if she wasn't spending weeks at a time behind enemy lines like they were, she had usually still been far from safe.
"Bucky was better with beer and wine," Steve said, since he had to say something.
"You say that out of loyalty and I respect that," Peggy retorted. "But Sergeant Barnes couldn't tell a good vintage from a poor one from grape juice with antifreeze in it. He made his judgments purely on the size of the container."
Steve might have giggled, but then stopped to push a stack of crates marked to indicate that they held stone vessels and glassware - why had the SHIELD agents piled these together? - out of the way of the door he wished to reach.
"Finally," he murmured as he opened the door. As with most of the underground network, the lights were rigged to motion sensors, so they flickered on as he entered.
"Have you found the Holy Grail?" Peggy asked. Steve thought he could hear the click of knitting needles. It amused him to no end that Peggy, ferocious Peggy, had taken up knitting. She'd told him tartly that she'd mastered these domestic skills before the war - did he think she'd managed to keep her uniforms in one piece with help of some magical tailor who'd followed her into warzones? - but she'd had to admit that knitting now was a hobby, although not one he could mock her for without consequences. ("Another word and I unravel your scarf and turn it into a sweater for the dog next door.")
"No Holy Grail," he answered, looking around. "The Danes lost that sometime in the last fifteen years."
The room looked more or less like the photographs had indicated that it would: black stone countertops around the perimeter with shelves above and cabinets below and the lab equipment exactly where it had been left when HYDRA had vacated. Only the reagents had been stoppered and some glassware rinsed out, but even with the modern ventilation, there was still a slight chemical odor in the air that no SHIELD photographs or video could capture. It was the reason he'd come to Detroit in the first place, above and beyond any wish to get out of range of the bureaucratic shooting war aboard the Helicarrier.
SHIELD science teams had been permanently stationed in the Detroit complex since it had been secured, descending like locusts upon each room with so much as a test tube in it. HYDRA had been exceptionally careful about removing any kind of evidence that could be useful in figuring out what they'd been up to or what their future plans were, but they hadn't completely sterilized the place - how could they when it was almost as vast as the city above it? - and the longer SHIELD had to go over the place, the more clues they'd found. This had been especially true with the labs, from which the science teams could look at the inventories on the shelves and put together likely projects. It was how they'd ultimately stopped the suicide-by-poison-capsule problem - they'd found the lab where the formula had been designed and, from there, developed a simple antidote with minimal side effects and maximum ease of use.
Some mysteries, however, remained mysteries. They'd never found any hint to where HYDRA's main serum development lab was, since it hadn't been in Detroit. Which was not to say that there'd been no serum work done in Detroit - it's how they'd found out that HYDRA was working off of the strain that Bucky had been shot up with - but instead that it hadn't been the most important place. Everyone at SHIELD believed that the actual testing facility would be in one of their bases in the third world, where disappearing people and appearing piles of failed test subjects could go without notice after the right arrangements were made. But where the lab work would take place, that had been and remained a source of disagreement. Some had believed it would be near the testing site, since modern transportation options meant that getting ingredients and equipment into and out of remote locations was no longer a problem. But there was an equally strong argument to be made that while twenty-first century logistics made more things possible, it was no replacement for the kind of resource access that came with first-world accommodations. Which had been rebutted, as much it could without anyone having the actual answer, by the fact that Detroit would have been the ideal location for such a facility and, to this point, they'd found no evidence that it had been. Around and around it went, an argument Steve had faithfully followed up until the recent document access protocols overhaul had made it an effort not worth putting in more than occasionally.
Until he'd walked into one of the labs aboard the Helicarrier last week and been hit with a smell that he'd last encountered a long time ago and in a place far, far away.
SHIELD was recreating most of HYDRA's experiments, or at least mixing together solutions found in proximity to each other in HYDRA labs; Steve got the impression that the distinction between the two was a little fuzzier than the scientists liked to admit. He'd been walking past one such project en route to the lab where Doctor Peng was waiting for him. Doctor Peng was still waiting for him because Steve had never made it past where a biochemistry team was working on what they had thought was some kind of energy booster, like caffeine or amphetamines but with a longer effect.
Steve had stopped short, nearly choking on the memories of the last time he'd gotten a whiff of that particular odor, and had started asking questions with an urgency that the scientists had confused with menace and Tapper had been summoned by some kind of secret alarm. Once it became clear that Steve was neither on a rampage nor affected by some sort of contact high from the fumes, the questions and answers flowed more freely - although no less sharply - and Fury himself had needed to be called in.
Yes, Steve was absolutely one-hundred percent sure, this was exactly what he'd smelled in the room where he'd found Sergeant Barnes.
The scientists hadn't quite believed him at first. ("With all due respect to Captain America here, he's talking about getting a nose full of something for a few minutes in the middle of a gunfight that took place seventy years ago." "It's more like five years to me and those few minutes correspond to me finding my best friend strapped onto a gurney in a HYDRA lab. It's a distinct memory.") Most of them still hadn't quite believed him at the end, either, but Fury had and, ultimately, that's what was important. That's what had gotten him permission to fly to Detroit and wander around the tunnels unfettered and with all resources at his disposal.
"I've gotten through three rows and recovered from one dropped purl," Peggy began. "Do you feel like sharing what you've found or are we to continue this companionable silence that drains your cell phone battery?"
Steve sighed as he made a slow tour of the room. "I didn't come out here because I was feeling cooped up."
"You don't say," Peggy replied dryly. Steve could imagine her rolling her eyes. "Did you find what you did go out there for?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I think so."
He explained about that afternoon in the biochemistry lab. "They're still not sure if it was part of the serum formula or not," he went on. "What they've been able to piece together from the blood they took from Bucky once we got back and what they've been able to take from here, none of it is very clear. They're all incomplete and not entirely compatible and so while yes, everyone agrees that an enhancer like that one would be necessary, nobody will go out on a limb to say that it's this one."
It was all ass-covering and while he could accept the kind of reservations that went along with not wanting to commit too many resources to a dubious idea, this wasn't that and it annoyed him. Annoyed Fury, too, although not enough to force them to change their tunes without more evidence. Which he'd allowed Steve to go get. So Steve had gone back to the files to see where in the Detroit tunnel city the inspiration for the experiment had come from and there, in a room that hadn't been found until four months ago and hadn't been given a whole lot of thought since then, he'd found what he had been waiting to find since Andreas von Strucker had wept with relief at someone finally believing him.
"Are you standing in HYDRA's serum lab after all?" Peggy asked.
"Not the main one," Steve replied as he stopped in front of shelves that were meticulously and particularly organized. "They're right about that, at least until we find some other secret room somewhere."
"But," Peggy prompted.
"But remember when I was telling you about the HYDRA Mona Lisa, back before we knew that Schmidt was still alive?" Steve asked by way of reply. "This lab isn't just part of the School of Johann Schmidt. This is the master's studio."