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Location: Director's Office, The Triskelion
The elevator ride to the top floor of the Triskelion was silent, a silence that Deputy Director Maria Hill found unnerving. Usually, prisoners—or "guests," as Fury insisted on calling this one—fidgeted.
They looked at the floor numbers, they checked the mirrors, and they sweated.
Agent 47 did none of these things. He stood in the center of the elevator, hands clasped loosely in front of him, staring at the brushed steel doors with an intensity that suggested he was calculating the tensile strength of the cables holding them up.
The doors slid open.
Nick Fury's office was a testament to power. It wasn't the overt, gilded power of the oligarchs 47 had eliminated in his past life.
It was the quiet, terrifying power of the panopticon. Screens lined the walls, displaying global heat maps, satellite feeds, and threat assessments.
Fury sat behind his desk, the Washington D.C. skyline framed behind him. He didn't stand up. He watched 47 enter, his single eye tracking the Hitman's every micro-movement.
Hill closed the door, remaining by the entrance.
47 walked to the center of the room. He didn't wait to be invited to sit. He didn't acknowledge the view. He looked directly at the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
"I will work with you," 47 said.
The opening statement hung in the air, devoid of preamble or pleasantries.
Fury leaned back, interlacing his fingers. "Is that so? I thought you 'worked alone'."
"The parameters of my environment have changed," 47 replied, his voice level. "Isolation is no longer a viable survival strategy. However, my employment comes with conditions."
Fury raised an eyebrow. "You're in my house, wearing my clothes, standing in a building surrounded by two thousand armed agents, and you're listing conditions?"
"Conditions," 47 repeated, ignoring the threat. "I operate on my own terms. I select the approach. I determine the method of execution. You provide the target and the intelligence. Once I accept a contract, S.H.I.E.L.D. does not intervene. No oversight. No 'support teams'. No shadows."
47 took a step closer to the desk.
"And before I accept any assignment," 47 continued, "I require total transparency. Full dossiers. Backgrounds. Motives. I do not pull a trigger unless I know exactly why the target needs to die. I am not a blunt instrument. I am a precision tool. If you use me blindly, then you will only hurt yourself."
Fury stared at him for a long, heavy silence. He was measuring the man before him.
Most people withered under Fury's gaze. 47 returned it with the indifference of a glacier.
Slowly, Fury reached into his drawer. He pulled out a manila folder and tossed it onto the desk. It slid across the polished surface, stopping inches from 47's hand.
"You want transparency?" Fury asked, his voice dropping to a dangerous low. "Let's talk about transparency."
47 looked down at the file. It was stamped TOP SECRET // EYES ONLY. The label read: SUBJECT 47.
"Open it," Fury commanded.
47 flipped the cover open.
It was empty.
Well, nearly empty.
There were a few sheets of paper stapled to the right side. They contained blurry surveillance photos from the last four months—the "accidents" in New York, the grainy footage from Hell Kitchen and the airport, the aftermath at the Lukin estate.
But on the left side—the side reserved for birth records, social security numbers, psychological profiles, recruitment data—there was nothing.
Just white paper.
"Do you know how much money S.H.I.E.L.D. spends on intelligence?" Fury asked, standing up now. "Billions. We have satellites that can read a license plate in a sandstorm. We have algorithms that can predict a terrorist attack before the terrorist has even bought the bomb ingredients. We know what the President eats for breakfast and exactly which dictators are sleeping with their bodyguards."
Fury slammed his hand down on the file.
"But you? You're a blank page."
Fury walked around the desk, closing the distance.
"No fingerprints on file in any database from Interpol to the KGB. Your DNA? It's a jigsaw puzzle of spliced genomes that our lab boys say shouldn't be biologically possible."
Fury pointed a finger at 47's chest.
"I have a barcode on the back of your head that scans as a box of cereal in a supermarket in Ohio. I have a name that's a number. And I have four months of body bags."
Fury stepped back, letting out a frustrated breath.
"I don't know who you are or which test tube you crawled out of. Hell, I don't even know your goddamn favorite color."
Fury gestured to the empty file.
"You want trust? You want autonomy? You want to call the shots? Then you need to give me something to write in that folder. Because right now, I'm not hiring an agent. I'm hiring a ghost. And ghosts have a nasty habit of disappearing when the heat turns up."
47 looked at the file. He looked at the grainy photo of himself walking away from the crane accident in Hell's Kitchen.
Vittorio's words echoed in his mind.
Tabula Rasa. A blank slate.
To Fury, the empty file was a liability.
To 47, it was confirmation. He truly had no past here. No Providence. No Ort-Meyer.
But he did have an origin in this world. A physical starting point.
"My favorite color," 47 said, his tone unreadable, "is irrelevant. But if you require data to fill your blanks, I can provide it."
He looked at Maria Hill, then back at Fury.
"The barcode is a marker of the Wolf Spider program," 47 stated.
Fury's eye narrowed. "Wolf Spider. That's the Red Room myth. The male equivalent of the Black Widow program. Romanoff said it was a graveyard. All failures."
"It was," 47 said. "I am the exception. The singular success."
"Romanoff said she destroyed that facility," Fury countered. "She buried it years ago."
"She destroyed a building," 47 corrected. "She did not destroy the architect."
47 walked over to the window, looking out at the Potomac.
"You believe the Red Room is a cold war relic. A dead piece of history. You are mistaken."
He turned back to Fury.
"General Dreykov is alive."
The name hit the room like a physical blow. Maria Hill straightened up, her tablet lowering. Fury's expression didn't change, but the air around him seemed to tighten.
"Dreykov died in Budapest," Fury said slowly. "Romanoff and Barton confirmed the kill. The building was leveled. There were... casualties. But Dreykov was confirmed."
"Dreykov is a man of contingencies," 47 said. "The man who died in Budapest was a body double. A necessary sacrifice to convince the world—and his defectors—that the head of the snake had been cut off."
47 walked back to the desk and tapped the empty file.
"I woke up in a containment tank four months ago. In Siberia. Sector 4. It was an active facility. Scientists. Guards. Logistics. They were not salvaging a ruin. They were maintaining an army."
47 paused, his gaze shifting slightly as he recalled the memory.
"Three months after my escape, I returned. My intention was to terminate the project at its source. To burn it down. But when I arrived, the facility was already gone. Not just abandoned—erased. Scoured clean. Structures demolished. Data cores slagged. They didn't just leave; they vanished. That level of logistical retreat requires resources that a 'dead' organization should not possess."
Fury looked at Hill. "Get Romanoff up here. Now."
"She's down in the training center," Hill said, glancing at her tablet. "Working off the extraction."
"I don't care if she's sparring with a tank," Fury snapped. "Get her."
He turned back to 47.
"You're telling me the Red Room is active? That the Widows are still operating?"
"They never stopped," 47 said. "They merely went underground. They are global. Infiltrated into governments, corporations, and military hierarchies. They are not just spies anymore. They are a resource. Controlled by Dreykov."
"Have your analysts decrypted the drive I retrieved from the estate?" 47 asked abruptly.
Fury scowled, a vein pulsing in his temple. "Tech is still banging their heads against the wall. They say the encryption shell is unlike anything they've ever seen. They're still in the process of decrypting it."
"It is a personal design," 47 noted calmly. "Since you cannot access the data, you will have to trust my analysis."
47 paused.
"Lukin—the man I killed in the Carpathians—was his logistics officer. The drive contains shipping manifests for chemical precursors sent to coordinates in the mid-Atlantic, and wire transfers to shell companies in Ohio and Budapest. But his primary trade was flesh. He was selling 'rejects'—Widows deemed unfit for service—to the highest bidder. And every file bore a recurring insignia—a spider web over a globe. If Lukin was active, Dreykov is active."
Fury sat down heavily on the edge of his desk. He rubbed his temples. This was an intelligence failure of catastrophic proportions.
S.H.I.E.L.D. prided itself on seeing everything, yet an entire shadow empire had been operating under their noses.
"Why tell me this?" Fury asked, looking up. "You could have kept this. Used it as leverage later."
"I am using it as leverage now," 47 replied. "You asked for my history. I am giving you the source of my existence. My origin. In exchange, I get the autonomy I requested."
47 leaned forward, placing his hands on the desk, leaning over the empty folder.
"The Red Room is a variable that disrupts order. They create chaos. I despise chaos. You want them gone. I want them gone. Our interests align."
Fury looked at the file. He picked up a pen. He opened the folder to the blank 'Origin' page.
He didn't write 'Wolf Spider'. He didn't write 'Red Room'.
He wrote a single word: ASSET.
Fury looked up at 47. A grim smile touched his lips.
"Alright," Fury said. "You get your long leash. You pick your approach. But if you burn down a city block to catch a cold, I will personally air-drop a tank on your head. Are we clear?"
"Crystal," 47 said.
"Hill," Fury barked. "Set him up with a Level 7 clearance and a secure comms channel. And get him out of that damn tweed jacket. He looks like a librarian who kills people."
"Well... he does kill people," Hill muttered, opening the door.
47 turned to leave.
"One more thing," Fury called out.
47 stopped at the door.
"If Dreykov is alive..." Fury's voice was low, dangerous. "That means Romanoff's ledger is still dripping red. She's going to want blood."
"Then she will have to get in line," 47 said.
He walked out.
The empty folder on the desk was no longer empty.
It was the beginning of a contract.
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AN: For everyone that was disappointed because he joined SHIELD, don't be, because he didn't technically join them; he partnered with them. He works 'with' them. And if you're still disappointed about that, then don't be.
SHIELD is just another chapter in his life here... I'll just leave it like that. And if you're disappointed still, 47 can deny the jobs that Fury gives, and he can also find a job, contracts, etc., that he wants to do on his own.