Chapter 2: Chapter 2
December 16th, 1991
Stark Mansion, Manhattan.
Later, when recalling that afternoon using his Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing, Tony saw a tense but calm scene: his mother played the piano and sang, his father walked in with Maggie in tow, casting passive-aggressive barbs in his direction. Maggie, a vibrant five-year-old with a dark brown braid and keen eyes, giggled at Tony's joke about throwing a toga party before climbing the piano stool to perch by her mother.
When his mother stood and warned him to "say something. If you don't, you'll regret it," he told his father that he loved him. He told his mother that he knew she did the best she could. And he allowed his little sister to hug him on the way out, saying "I'll miss you, Maggie. Be good."
In reality, the traded barbs with Howard led to Tony shouting at his parents and storming out of the room while Maggie watched, crying. Tony didn't remember the last thing he said to Maggie, only that he'd felt sick at himself, as he always did, for yelling at mom and dad in front of her, and deeply jealous that dad still had hope for her. Before he knew it, his mom had whisked his dad and sister out of the house, and he watched the car drive away with a bottle of whiskey already in his hand.
Maggie stopped crying by the time night fell, instead choosing to watch the trees darken and fall into shadow outside the car window. Before they'd left the mansion, mom turned in her seat to stroke Maggie's cheek, and offered her a smile. At that, dad had said "Don't mind your brother, Maggie. He's got a lot of growing to do."
Mom and dad spoke intermittently for the rest of the trip about things Maggie didn't care about – someone in the White House they had to call, arrangements for their stay in the Bahamas. Sometimes she asked questions, like: "what kind of plane will you be flying us in, dad?" and "why did my programming tutor use MATLAB instead of Mathematica for my last project?" After the fifth question, dad asked for some quiet time, so she pressed her lips together to remind herself not to ask anything. She brought her feet up onto her seat, curled in a ball behind her mother, and watched the scenery flash by.
She'd never been to the Bahamas before. She'd travelled a lot more than the other kids at school, to places like L.A., London, and Beijing, but she didn't really get to sight see – most of the time she was sat in the waiting room of an office building with a book. She was more excited about the Pentagon, but she didn't think she'd be let out of the car for that. She thought she might try to sneak out of the car while Dad was inside, just to get a better look. She'd be able to tell Tony about what she saw, and he might explain it for her. He once told her that he'd hacked into the Pentagon in high school.
She already missed Tony. She always missed him. And now she wouldn't get to have Christmas with him. She also missed Dum-E and Jarvis. Maybe she could make her own Dum-E in the Bahamas, so she wouldn't get lonely. But she couldn't make a Jarvis. Or a Tony.
Maggie was wondering how people got made, while simultaneously reminding herself not to ask about it, when she heard the rumble of the motorbike behind them. She lifted her head to watch it go past – she wanted to see what kind of engine it had – and saw a man's face surrounded by dark hair, a flash of metal, and then the world lurched around her.
Metal crunched and glass shattered. Maggie was flung forward in her seat, and the world went fuzzy around the edges. It felt a bit like when she'd accidentally set off a small rocket while she was still holding it: all she could hear was the ringing in her own head, and time felt sluggish, dripping around her instead of pulling her with it.
"Howard!" she heard mom cry, when her head got a bit clearer. "Maggie, say something!"
Maggie tried, but pain erupted in her head, blooming from a spot above her right eyebrow and reverberating to the back of her skull. As if that pain was an invitation, the rest of her body began to hurt, from a pressing ache in her chest and hips to a sharper pain in her leg. She was slumped in her seat, one leg flung forward and the other stuck under her hips.
Orange light was flickering beyond her eyelids, and sound began to trickle back in – she registered the roaring of a fire, and her mom making a weird noise. With a struggle, Maggie opened her eyes and squinted at the front seat. First she saw dad, his head turned toward mom. The only way she recognised him was by his white hair, because there was only red where his face should be.
"Dad?" Maggie croaked, and looked to the right. There was a man with a metal arm standing outside mom's door, reaching through her window. The man wore some kind of black leather armor. Mom was gasping and spluttering, and Maggie registered the hand around her neck. "Mom?"
Maggie tried to see the man's face, but he wasn't even looking into the car. "Stop it!" She tried to sit up to push the man's arm away, but he had already let go of mom, and mom had stopped making noises. Maggie pulled at her seat belt, feeling tears begin to slide down her face. The world was still ringing, and the fire was hurting her eyes, but she knew that she had to do something. Her heart suddenly registered itself as a frantic drum in her chest. The man with the metal arm stepped toward her door.
Maggie finally wriggled free of her seat belt, screaming between her teeth when her leg twisted and a bolt of pain shot up her spine. Her head pulsed, making her vision fuzzy. She scooted across the back seat by feel, then opened the door and fell out of the car, crying out. Even over the sound of the fire she could hear gravel crunching as the man with the metal arm walked around the car. Gasping, Maggie scrambled to her feet, sending gravel flying, and ran for the road. She was the third-fastest girl in her class, but the man caught her in only a few strides, barely seeming to move at all.
"No!" Maggie screamed, her heart racing as she waited for him to hit her, or grab her throat. But he only seized her upper arm and dragged her back to the car. She looked up at his face – it was framed by long dark hair, and was utterly blank. He didn't even look at her. "Let me go!"
Heels skidding in the gravel, Maggie pummelled her free fist into the man's side, but it came away bloody and the man didn't seem to notice. The hand around her arm wasn't made of metal, but it felt like iron as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp. While she twisted and tried to kick him, the man grabbed something from his motorbike, then carried it and Maggie back to the car. He put the thing where Maggie had been sitting, and she stilled enough to look at it.
It was a little girl, about her age, slumped in the seat. The girl's eyes looked like the man's: grey-blue, and blank. But Maggie knew this girl wasn't alive. There was dried blood crusted beneath her eyes, nose, and mouth, and in her hair.
A new kind of fear prickled over Maggie now. It was cold, and seemed to lock her muscles in place, so she couldn't look away from the girl's frozen, dead, eyes.
Maggie didn't get her feet under her in time to keep up with the man as he moved again, and she slumped in his grip, sobbing. It didn't matter. He dragged her through the gravel by her arm as he made a final circle of the car, sloshing liquid from a flask on his belt. Maggie's nose flared at the chemical smell – kerosene or gasoline, but not quite. She grabbed at one of the buckles on the man's vest to haul herself to her feet, crying at the pain, and tried to yank her arm free again. "Stop! Please, stop!"
But the burning engine had tasted the fluid, and the whole car went up in a whoosh of flame that ripped the breath from Maggie's chest and seared her retinas. She let out a long wail, trying to see her parents. They were only shadows, consumed by fire.
She flinched as a deafening crack erupted – it sounded like thunder, but her father was a weapons contractor: she knew what a gunshot sounded like. She twisted once more and saw the man holding a smoking gun in his metal hand. She followed its aim to a nearby street camera. Maggie looked back at the man's face, but it was still blank. She couldn't read him at all.
"Why are you doing this?" Maggie whispered, choking on the smoke and tears in her throat.
Finally, finally, he acknowledged her. He holstered his gun and looked down at her, emotionless, with only the hint of a furrow in his brow. The fire was reflected in his eyes, but Maggie didn't feel like there was a fire inside this man. It was like he was hardly here at all.
But then he spoke: "You are my mission."
He turned and dragged her back to his motorbike, but Maggie hardly felt it. Her entire body was alight with pain, and her brilliant mind was caught on the image of her father's bloody face and the sound of her mother's gasps. The fire roared in her ears and flickered like a sunburn on her skin.
A wave of fury suddenly erupted in Maggie's stomach, stronger than anything she'd ever known – it gave her the strength to yank against the man with all her might, to kick and push at him every last step of the way back to the motorbike. It still made no difference: he swung her onto the seat and climbed on behind her, gunning the engine. Maggie slumped forward. Her fury scorched her insides with no way to be channelled at the man; impotent. As the man and his motorbike took her away from the fire, from her parents and the dead girl, Maggie clenched her fists.
Over the roar of the engine and the shrieking of the wind, the man heard her whisper: "You're my mission now."
The man drove for hours. Maggie didn't watch the road, didn't think about where they might be going. Her mind could handle advanced mathematics and engineering, could even sometimes keep up with her dad and brother, but on that night it ground to a halt. There was nothing but the pain shrieking across her body, and a cyclone of emotions coursing through her heart. She cried until she couldn't see, couldn't swallow, unable to process what had just happened to her.
Somehow, impossibly, she slept. Her body simply shut down, sheltering her from the pain. The man with the metal arm held her firmly in her seat, eyes focused ahead as they rode through the night.
When she woke they were still driving. The man with the metal arm had his hand against her throat, and for a moment she thought he was going to choke her, like he'd choked her mom. But he had only two fingers pressed to her pulse, which he soon removed. Maggie hung her head, shivering against the cold wind. She felt numb; physically and emotionally.
The sun broke over the horizon to their right, and Maggie winced at the light, feeling raw.
Her head was a little clearer, but all she could think was mom and dad are dead. I want Tony. Those two thoughts manifested in a deep ache in her chest, and she hunched further in her seat.
The man with the metal arm drove them through a snow-capped forest and came to the edge of a bay; the water a dark blue in the dawn light. Maggie couldn't see any signs of buildings or civilization besides the dirt road that brought them here, and a dinghy with an outboard motor moored at the beach. The man turned off the motorbike, and the sudden lack of the engine vibrating felt like a slap in the face. The air was cold and clear, and there was silence but for the lapping of water on the rocky shore.
The man climbed off the bike, holding Maggie steady with one hand, and removed a briefcase from the back. She only dimly recognized the briefcase as belonging to her father before the man scooped her into his arms, like Jarvis did when he was putting her to bed. She was too startled and too numb to resist. She watched the man's face as he carried her across the beach and lay her in the boat: the same empty expression he'd had before, aimed straight ahead. But he didn't jostle her wounds when he carried her and was careful putting her down. The freezing metal hull of the boat pressed against her sore skin.
When the man gunned the outboard motor and steered them out onto the ocean, Maggie considered climbing over the lip of the boat and jumping into the water to swim away. But she was already so cold – she'd only been wearing a jacket to protect against the New York December, and wherever she was now was much colder. And she knew that this empty man with a mission would not let her get away. So she lay where he'd put her, looking up at the sky.
Maggie didn't see the route the speedboat took, but after what seemed like hours she noticed huge cliffs rising up on either side of the boat. With a groan, she sat up and looked around.
They must have crossed the ocean to an island. The dinghy motored up a river cutting between two soaring cliff faces, slate grey and topped with snow-shrouded pines. The purring of the outboard motor echoed back and forth across the ravine, sending a shudder down Maggie's spine. The cliffs seemed to lean in towards her, crowding out the sky, as the man with the metal arm steered them resolutely on.
After peering around at the cliffs, Maggie turned to scrutinise her kidnapper more closely. His metal arm gleamed silver in the sunlight, and she noticed a scarlet star emblazoned on the shoulder. Apart from the arm he was dressed entirely in black; a heavy-looking suit with buckles and pockets and weapons stashed across it. She eyed a knife on his ankle, but almost as soon as she noticed it, the ankle shifted. Her eyes flicked up to the man's face, and she flinched when she saw his steely-blue eyes locked on her. His gaze was intense, as if he could read her mind. Maggie shrank back, and his eyes flicked back up to the river ahead.
She didn't look at his knife again, but she continued to assess the man. His long brown hair was lank around his ears, and there was stubble along his clenched jaw, like the kind her dad got when he spent too long in the workshop. He was rigid and intent as he sat beside the outboard motor, every muscle of his body focused on his goal. What his goal might be, Maggie had no idea. She'd been warned about people who might want to take her because her parents had a lot of money, but surely if this metal-armed man had wanted money he wouldn't have...
Maggie flinched as the image of her father's bloody face jumped to the front of her mind. To push it away, she sat up further in the boat, wrapped her arms around her bruised knees, and watched the water lapping against the granite cliffs.
The man with the metal arm steered them resolutely on, and after a few minutes reached down to press a button set into the side of the boat. Maggie stared at it, then him, and then jumped when a new, louder mechanical sound echoed in the ravine. She spun around, eyes wide. A whole section of the rocky cliff was moving, sliding upwards on hinges that had seemed invisible before. When the false rock wall had risen high enough, revealing a cave with lights inside it, the man steered the boat inside.
It wasn't like anything Maggie had ever seen. Beyond the cliff face was an enormous space, like an airport hangar. The walls were the same layered granite as the cliffs outside, but the floor was concrete. There was a small water inlet where several other boats were docked, and it was there that the man steered the boat. Maggie stared around at the cave, peering at the fluorescent lights installed on the ceiling, the pipes running along the walls and ground, the half-cylinder tunnels leading out of the cave. And the armed men assembling at the dock.
There were five men in white and grey camouflage uniforms, cradling rifles in their arms as they watched the boat approach. Maggie eyed them nervously. Rhodes had taught her about the different uniforms used by the armed forces, and these didn't match up with anything that she recognised. After the man with the metal arm docked the dinghy and stood up, one of the men with guns shifted his weight and spoke:
"Rapport, Soldat." ["Report, Soldier."]
Maria had been teaching Maggie and Tony French for the last two years. So he's a soldier, Maggie realised, and filed the information away.
"Mission réussie," ["Mission successful,"] the metal-armed soldier said, taking Maggie's arm in one hand and the briefcase in the other, and stepping from the dinghy to the concrete floor. "Extraction terminée, pas de témoins." ["Extraction completed, no witnesses."]
No witnesses. The fury inside Maggie flared again – he had killed her parents because they were witnesses?
Once she was on solid ground, the soldier dropped her again, with far less care than when he'd placed her on the boat. She stumbled, but kept her legs under her. Her body protested the movement, making her aware of the wounds on her head, chest and leg. Her shoulder was aching from being carried around like a rag doll. She balled her fists by her sides and eyed the men around her from under her fringe.
"Walk," said the man in snow camouflage, gesturing his gun at Maggie. He had a curved scar running under his left eye, in the shape of the letter 'u'.
Maggie shook her head, and started crying again when she saw anger flash in the man's eyes. "I don't want to," she rasped, her throat sore from the smoke and the crying. "I don't want to, I want my brother. My brother needs to come get me." Tears were slipping down her cheeks, and she hugged herself.
"Tony Stark is dead," said the man with the scar, sneering at her.
Maggie crumpled, falling forward on her knees and pressing her face into her ripped and bloody jeans. She stared at the hard concrete floor beneath her, eyes wide as tears continued to fall. You are the last, was the only clear thought in her head.
She dimly noticed that the man who had spoken was laughing, a rough bark that felt like blows raining down on her. Then there was a blow – a cold sting of metal on the back of her neck, which made her flinch and look up. The man with the scar had tapped her with the barrel of his rifle. Once he had her attention, he put the muzzle under her chin and lifted, so she had to rise to a kneel.
"Up," he said, his eyes hard. "And walk."
Shaking, Maggie got to her feet and followed the men as they went down one of the tunnels. She was tripping and stumbling on her twisted leg, but kept up.
She'd never understood the word heartbreak before, but she did now. Something her chest felt like it had been cracked open, left to bleed and wither. She pressed her hand to her chest as she stumbled after the soldiers, to check that her heart was still beating.
The soldier with the metal arm walked to her right, taking one step for every three of hers. He stared resolutely ahead, ignoring the looks she shot at him. This is his fault, Maggie thought, and her hands balled at her sides. He is my mission.
At the end of the corridor they turned right, and the man with the scar under his eye stepped up to a door with a picture of a skull with tentacles on it. Maggie recognized it from a Sunday morning cartoon about Captain America – the tentacled skull was the bad guys' logo. She furrowed her brow and watched the man type a passcode into a keypad beside the door.
The door swung open to reveal another large room, that looked a little bit like her dad's workshop. It was filled with machines and computers, though it was a lot tidier than the workshop at home. Maggie spotted things she recognized, like engines and weapons, and others she didn't, strange contraptions that she couldn't guess the purpose of. The room was also filled with more men, and a few women. About a third of the room wore the same snow camouflage as the soldiers around Maggie, another third wore green and grey camouflage in a different design, and the rest were in lab coats. Maggie noticed that the green uniformed men were in separate groups from the white.
Standing in the middle of the room, behind a table covered in computers and files, were two men without guns. One of them wore the green camouflage uniform, and a red hat. He had a patch on his left sleeve with the Russian flag on it. This man looked up at the metal-armed soldier first, then spotted the briefcase, and then Maggie. He scowled.
The other man wasn't in a uniform. He wore a nondescript black suit, with a black shirt and a black tie and everything. His white-blond hair was slicked back, and he scrutinised the new arrivals from under a heavy-set brow.
Maggie, the metal-armed soldier, and the rest of the men with guns came to a stop a few feet away from these two men. Maggie tried to make herself small. The soldier stepped forward and placed the briefcase on the table.
The man in the red hat – Maggie could now see that the hat had a gold star on it – opened the briefcase. Whatever was inside glowed blue, illuminating his face.
"Otlichno, Soldat," ["Well done, Soldier,"] said the man in the red hat, nodding slightly despite the unhappy look on his face. Maggie didn't know he'd said, but she knew it was Russian.
There was a long, quiet moment after that. No one moved, save for the soldier, whose eyes flicked up to look straight at Maggie. She wanted to shrink under his empty gaze, but she straightened and glared right back at him. For the first time, a flicker of something went through his eyes – not anger or fear, but… it was gone before she could identify it.
Suddenly the man in the black suit spoke, in English: "Yes, the Soldier has done well. Sanders, remove the amount the Director promised us."
A pale, bald woman in a lab coat, who must have been Sanders, hastened to the briefcase and lifted out a bag of blue liquid. With a nod to the man in the black suit, she and a few more armed men left the room. Maggie noticed that the man in the red hat's scowl deepened. The man in the black suit must have noticed this too, because he smiled and clapped a hand on his shoulder.
"Ah, Karpov, I do not understand why you glare. Your asset has done well, and you will have your Winter Soldiers, imitations that they are." He spoke with a faint Russian accent. "I know you are sceptical of my program, but it is the future."
The man in the red hat – Karpov – knocked the man's hand off his shoulder and said in rapid-fire Russian: "Eto otkhody, chtoby ispol'zovat' yego u rebenka. Nash otryad - elita Rossii, i prestupleniye lishayet odno-" ["It's a waste, to use it on a child. Our squad is the elite of Russia, and it is a crime to deprive one-"]
The man in the black suit was calm in the face of Karpov's clear anger. "Russia is falling apart. I have no nation now, only HYDRA, and you ought to feel the same. The Director told me to be sure when using this resource, and I am sure of this child. A Stark's mind, combined with HYDRA's might and the serum, will soon be the only weapon we need."
Despite her shock and exhaustion, Maggie had put together enough to know that she wanted no part in this. Russia? HYDRA? Whatever that blue fluid was?
Taking advantage of the distraction of the two men and the obvious effort of all the soldiers in the room to ignore the argument, Maggie turned on her heel and bolted for the door. She wasn't very hopeful about her chances, but it still stung when she only made it ten steps before one of the soldiers seized the back of her singed jacket and hurled her to the concrete floor.
Maggie let out an oof as she slammed into the floor, bruising her already sore shoulder, and then wailed as the soldier kicked her square in the back, sending her sprawling forward. With the breath knocked out of her, Maggie could only scrabble at the ground with her fingers, fighting for breath with tears streaming down her face.
"That's enough," called the man in the black suit. His voice was low, and calm.
Maggie sensed him move, stepping out from behind the table and striding toward her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw clean black loafers, like the kind her dad's business partners wore.
"Sit up."
She did. She knew there'd only be more pain if she refused. Now that he was closer, Maggie could see the calm, calculating light in the man's ice blue eyes, glinting under the shadow of his brow. It reminded her of Obie.
"Do you know why he did that?" the man asked, gesturing at the soldier who'd kicked her. Maggie's eyes flickered toward him, and then to the passive soldier with the metal arm, still standing beside the scowling Karpov.
"Because he's evil," Maggie spat, still curled on the floor. A sharp pain radiated from her lower back whenever she breathed, and she could feel dust clinging to her tearstained cheeks. The man who'd kicked her let out a huff of laughter, but the man in the black suit only made a hmming noise. He was standing right over her, so she had to crane her neck to look up at his face. He was staring down at her.
"Perhaps," he said, not even glancing away from her. "But regardless of his morality, he did it because it was easy. It was easy for him to stop you and kick you. It was easy for them to drag you into this room. It was easy for us to kill your family. It was easy for us to take you. Because you are weak."
The words silenced Maggie like the kick had failed to. Weak. She considered it. She'd never felt weak before, because she'd more or less been able to do what she wanted. But she hadn't been able to stop the crash. She hadn't been able to stop the soldier with the metal arm from killing her parents and taking her away. Maggie's eyes flickered back to the soldier. He was watching Maggie and the man in the black suit, but his eyes were just as cold and dead as they had been when he wrenched her away from the fire.
Maggie clenched her jaw and looked back up at the man in the black suit. He was still staring at her, peering into her eyes. He must have liked what he saw, because he smiled.
"You're weak now, but you don't have to be. I can make you strong." At this he crouched, bringing himself level with Maggie. He had symmetrical features, the sort her mom might have called handsome. She wasn't sure. The only thing she was sure of was that his eyes were sharp with intellect, like her father's eyes, but without any of the warmth. They definitely weren't like Tony's eyes; vibrant and dancing with excitement for his creations.
"I can make you stronger than him," the man said, tipping his chin at the man who'd kicked Maggie. She looked over her shoulder at him, and saw his sneer.
"I can make you stronger than everyone in this room," he continued, gesturing at all the soldiers and their guns. "I can even make you stronger than him." He nodded toward the soldier with the metal arm. Maggie looked at the soldier, taking in his enormous bulk, the glint of his arm, his cold eyes. Her scepticism must have shown on her face, because the man in the black suit let out a laugh. "Yes, even him. He's a relic of an old world, an old order." Maggie heard Karpov take a sharp breath through his nose, and didn't have to look at him to know he was glaring. The soldier did not react. "With your youth, your intelligence, your potential, I can make you a greater weapon than he ever was. You will be the strongest of HYDRA's weapons, their final solution. Do you want to be strong, child?"
Maggie looked down at her knees: bloody and covered in gravel, smearing the concrete as she knelt on the ground. She was so small next to these men. Weak, like he'd said. Her genius mind had already figured out that whatever happened if she said no would not be pleasant. She had no chance of escape. She was injured and helpless, closely watched by men much larger and with more guns than her. She supposed she could come up with some form of plan if she had enough time and materials, but… she wanted what this man was offering. She hated him, she hated this group of people, she hated the man who kicked her and the man in the red hat and especially the man who killed her parents.
To be stronger than all of them? It called to the anger that burned impotently in her chest. She could do something about it. She looked up at the metal-armed soldier again, but this time she wasn't assessing his size. She glared at him, wishing she could burn a hole through his head with her glare. She saw him recognise her anger – he didn't react, but she saw that he had seen her fury, acknowledged it. It was bitterly satisfying. The flicker of something passed through his eyes again – something colder than fear or anger. Something like sadness. But once again, before she could identify it, his eyes deadened again, so you wouldn't think there was anything in his head but the mission. She wanted him to be her mission. She wanted to be able to carry it out.
"Well?" said the man in the black suit, standing up again. He didn't take a single step back, continuing to loom over her. "Do you want to be strong?"
Her parents were dead. Tony was dead. She was the last.
"Yes," Maggie bit out, wiping the tears and grime from her face. "I do."
The man in the black suit smiled, and without looking away from Maggie called: "You and your Soldat may go back to the wastes of Siberia now, Colonel Karpov. We have work to do here."
"Mudak," ["Asshole,"] spat Karpov, but within a minute had rallied his green-uniformed soldiers and marched out of the room with the briefcase. Maggie looked up as the soldier with the metal arm strode out after Karpov. Siberia, she thought. My mission is in Siberia.
The soldier with the metal arm didn't look back.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone