Steve's Diary

May 11, 2014

Dear Diary,

I'm kind of fed up with all the secrets that have been going around S.H.I.E.L.D. so, I guess it's my turn to speak up about it.

That's the only way there's ever gonna be any kind of change, right?

—————

I made my way to the Triskelion, which is one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s three main headquarters and is, more specifically, on Theodore Roosevelt Island, located on the Potomac River between Washington D.C. and Virginia.

As I walked into Nick Fury's office, I didn't hesitate to go at him, head-on, almost immediately.

"You just can't stop yourself from lying, can you?" I confronted him.

"I didn't lie," he said. "Agent Romanoff had a different mission than yours."

"Which you didn't feel obliged to share," I added, walking right up to his desk.

"I'm not obliged to do anything," he told me, staying put in his desk chair, looking out the massive windows at his side.

"Those hostages could have died, Nick," I pushed at him, as if I was reminding him that he would have been the one to blame if that would have happened.

He spun his chair around and looked right at me this time. "I sent the greatest soldier in history to make sure that didn't happen."

"Soldiers trust each other," I reminded him. "That's what makes it an army, not a bunch of guys running around shooting guns."

"Last time I trusted someone," he stood, "I lost an eye." I just looked at him. "Look," he continued. "I didn't want you doing anything you weren't comfortable with. Agent Romanoff is comfortable with everything."

"I can't lead a mission when the people I'm leading have missions of their own."

"It's called compartmentalization," he pointed out. "Nobody spills secrets, because nobody knows them all."

I smiled and gestured towards him. "Except you."

He leaned back and looked around. "You're wrong about me. I do share... I'm nice like that."

After all that, we made our way out of his office and into a hallway which led us to an elevator, which then began speaking to us as if it had a mind of its own after Fury told it our destination.

"Insight Bay," he began, his face appearing on the elevator hologram screen.

My face appeared with the words ACCESS DENIED written across it. "Captain Rogers does not have clearance for Project: Insight," it relayed to us.

"Director override. Fury, Nicholas J." he replied.

"Confirmed," the computer answered, proceeding to close the elevator doors and move downwards towards Insight Bay, wherever that was.

I waited a moment in silence as we descended. "You know, they used to play music," I told him.

"Yea," he agreed, almost like he knew. "My grandfather operated one of these things for 40 years. My granddad worked in a nice building, got good tips. He'd walk home every night, a roll of ones stuffed in his lunch bag. He'd say 'hi', people would say 'hi' back. Time went on, the neighborhood got rougher. He'd say 'hi' they'd say 'keep on steppin'. Granddad got to gripping that lunch bag a little tighter."

"Did he ever get mugged?" I asked, curious.

He chuckled. "Every week, some punk would say 'what's in the bag?'"

"What would he do?"

"He'd show them," he replied. "A bunch of crumpled ones, and a loaded .22 Magnum." I nodded at him, realizing the severity of it all. "Yea, granddad loved people. But he didn't trust them very much."

He's always gotta find a way to relate back to our previous conversations. Meaning, me and my inquiries about not trusting Fury.

I looked out the clear glass elevator and had to do a double take- I could not believe my eyes.

"Yea, I know," he said, seeing my reaction. "They're a little bigger than a .22."

There were three massive aircrafts in the warehouse-type before us and, Hell, every single person in there was working.

"This is Project: Insight," he informed me as soon as we reached the ground level and exited the elevator. "Three next-generation helicarriers synced to a network of targeting satellites."

"Launched from the Lemurian Star," I said, referring to the S.H.I.E.L.D. launch ship Nat and I saved last month from those damned pirates.

"Once we get them in the air, they never need to come down," he told me. "Continuous sub-orbital flight, courtesy of our new repulser engines."

"Stark?" I wondered.

"He had a few suggestions once he got an up close look at our old turbines." He walked us up to one of the helicarriers to show me, in better detail, what they were all about. "These new long-range precision guns can eliminate 1,000 hostiles a minute. The satellites can read a terrorist's DNA before he steps outside his spider-hole. We're gonna neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen."

"Thought the punishment usually came after the crime," I reminded him, feeling uneasy about all this... it all sounds too good to be true and, frankly, unjust.

"We can't afford to wait that long."

"Who's 'we'?" I asked, seriously debating this lapse in judgement he was seemingly going through right now.

"After New York, I convinced the World Security Council we needed a quantum surge in threat analysis. For once," he continued. "We're way ahead of the curve."

"By holding a gun to everyone on Earth and calling it protection," I said, really trying to show him with the tone of my voice that he was out of hid goddamn mind.

"You know, I read those SSR files," he told me, facing my direction more so than he was before. "'Greatest Generation'? You guys did some nasty stuff."

"Yea," I agreed. "We compromised. Sometimes in ways that made us sleep not so well. But we did it so that people could be free. This isn't freedom. This is fear."

"S.H.I.E.L.D. takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be," he reminded me. "And it's getting damn near past time for you to get with that program, Cap."

I looked at him right in the face, my hands on my belt as he approached me, leaving only inches between us as he attempted to intimidate me and said, "don't hold your breath," just before I walked away, leaving him standing there all alone.

I then left the facility and drove over The Theodore Roosevelt Bridge on my motorcycle and made my way back into Washington D.C. where I had been staying the whole while.

I really needed to just get back to that hotel, I've had enough today.

—————

And, you know, I basically just watched television (in color!) for the rest of the day, unable to even begin thinking about everything wrong with Fury and his ideas for now.

~ Steve R.