I climbed off the plane with my backpack and suitcase, "Baron Strucker," I said, extending a hand to him. Strucker was dressed in a crisp black suit, a mirror to my own in some ways, his hair was cut very short and his monocle was on his face. He ignored my handshake and stepped to walk alongside with me.

A rude way to greet a man who had left his pregnant wife to help you. Hail Hydra, I suppose.

"I hope," he said, "You are prepared to clean up your mess."

"I will do my best," I said, which was not a yes. "Our local allies are interested in the pacification of the Maximoffs?"

"Pacification will not be enough for your little lab mice," Strucker said. "I must insist on their corpses."

"Ah, yes. Vicious repression. A strategy that has never backfired in history."

"If it backfires, Mr. Trent, it will backfire onto me. Surely that is a benefit to you and your… experimental faction."

To be fair to Hydra Heads, they usually did get around to the point. "I am not interested in any of our factions failing, Baron Strucker, and I hope you would not be either. We are all one Hydra, are we not?"

To be fair to me, I was a duplicitous opportunist.

"Your concern," Strucker said, pressing his lips together as if to stop any profanities from slipping out. "Is quite touching. But I am confident that I know how to handle a little protest movement."

He wasn't. "Tell me, what are they demanding?"

"The Sokovia for Peace movement demands the removal of peace keeping forces, an end to the SHIELD presence, and a transition to democratic rule."

I sighed. Well. That wasn't really a negotiable set of priorities for us. "Democracy has not been prohibitive to Hydra's working agenda and a population with at least the semblance of democratic rule would be helpful."

"After your electoral defeat, haven't you had enough of elections? American sentimentality at its most repugnant. The world needs a strong, guiding hand right now. These people have no vision, and where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained." I understood that reference.

"It seems to me the people are unrestrained right now." Frankly, the United States elected officials were doing fine by my lights. We'd gotten plenty of funding for SWORD and SHIELD and the security council were working overtime to co-ordinate national defenses in the event of an attack. Whole new protocols were being erected for mind control, cutting down on the unilateral power of the nuclear football. It was a good situation all around.

"I do not like your snide insinuations for a mess that is, by rights, a result of your own stupid experimentation."

"We cannot all be so hungry and desperate for the past, Strucker. I look to the future. It was unforeseeable that my subjects would distrust me before I betrayed them, due to a catastrophic risk for which you were completely unprepared and to which my plans were vital. Tell me, how did your Tesseract project contribute to it, again?"

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Strucker snarled and we walked on.

"Tell me, Baron Strucker. Is there anything which your lackeys would be prepared to part with for peace?"

"No. They are furious that my allies and SHIELD have undercut them with the presence of super-soldiers."

To be fair, right now the twins were hardly functioning as Super Soldiers. Mostly they seemed to have gone back to their old life - Organizing. They were doing a good job of it, too. The structures they'd used hadn't been crackable, their protests were often shocking or funny or conveniently timed for first world prime time. They picked discernible targets and ripped them to bits in dissident press. They had provoked confrontations with the international forces in their homeland.They even snuck out secure information about backing entities for the oligarchs to sympathetic media in the west which was, so far at least, most of the media in the West.

I'd have to do actual work to crack where they were, even just to get to talk to them. "Well, Strucker," I said after a moment, "Not that I don't enjoy these… spirited conversations of ours, but can you take me to what you have on them?"

Strucker made a gesture and I followed him into a waiting state car. He took out a briefcase and handed it to me. It was all in Serbian, perhaps a calculated slight on his part, but I could read Serbian just fine if I bothered. My speed reading suffered for it, but I started thumbing through it. Lesson number one: The local government really, really hated the Maximoff twins at this point. It leaked off the page. Strucker probably wasn't kidding - These people had real contempt for the Maximoffs. One of their members had been exposed for child molestation and they were ringing up his associates for letting him get away with it in the press. The police forces were being named and identified, with regular leaks of conditions inside the prisons.

Honestly, the Maximoffs were probably on their way to winning. You can have all the power you want, but when your security forces' children march out against you, it's over for you, and the Maximoffs were already well on the way to it. The smart thing for the locals to do would be to either reach a negotiated peace or make off with the family gold. But if I went back to Hydra with that assessment, this black mark would go on my record and not Strucker's and I didn't really need another policy failure on my end of things. And there was no guarantee that they would fail without my help.

My phone started ringing and I picked it up. It had a SWORD number, which meant it should be important. I knew most of my researchers' numbers, they could leave a message, but I didn't know this one.

"We've lost Foster," a voice on the other end said.

"How did you lose Foster? She is a scientist, not a ninja."

"Thor picked her up sir. They've vanished."

Goddamn it.