security feed closely, intently listening to the conversation that was starting. Everett Ross, the Deputy Task Force Commander of the Joint Counter Terrorist Centre, stood in front of Helmut Zemo.

Zemo, a former colonel, turned terrorist, turned prisoner, was confined to cell 36. The staunch fabric of the issued prison uniform irritated his skin, while the canvas shoes he had been given were almost too small. The metal cuffs that were secured around his ankles sliced into his skin. Ross had done all of this on purpose. He didn't want the terrorist's stay at the agency's headquarters to be a comfortable one. Despite the deputy's best efforts, the prisoner remained unphased by his current conditions.

"Meals at eight and five. Toilet privileges twice a day. Raise your voice, zap. Touch the glass, zap. You step out of line, you deal with me," Ross explained, approaching the prison pod. "Please, step out of line."

Iris' eyes never left the screen, the commotion in the other rooms of the headquarters nonexistent to her. She bit the inside of her cheek as her boss taunted the prisoner. She waited for an outburst, a reaction, a retaliation. She got nothing.

Ross made another jab, trying to locate a wound to press his thumb into. He wanted to watch Helmut Zemo squirm. "So how does it feel? To spend all that time, all that effort... to see it fail so spectacularly?"

Zemo finally gave the agents a reaction but it hadn't been one that Ross had hoped for. The prisoner looked up, his eyes boring into the agent's soul.

A grandeur of silence.

"Did it?"

Thoughts ran rampant in her head, the voices of the dead talking over one another. She tried to tune them out but they were too loud. Her eyes shifted back and forth, trying to catch the tail end of any coherent sentence, decipher the tongues they talked in.

"I have seen empires fall. I have watched as kingdoms crumbled to dust. I have walked the valley of death, bathed in a river of blood. The divide of the Avengers is bound to cause the same for Earth."

"What she says is true."

"She knows our fate. Not the details, only the outline. The dead tell her such things."

His plan hadn't failed.

the glass door, the infrastructure of the wall rattling in his wake. He stomped past the three agents that worked directly under him, a scowl on his face. The three witnessed steam come out of his ears as he vented his frustrations.

"It has been three months and we have not been able to get a single thing out of Helmut Zemo!" He grabbed ahold of the nearest object - a coffee mug - and slammed it against the wooden table in the middle of the room. Pieces of ceramic were sent flying in all directions. "He's been playing the silent game for three damn months!"

"Deputy, with all do respect, what are you trying to get out of him? The man was a terrorist and we locked him up. What more could we get from him?" One of the agents hesitantly asked.

Ross' eye twitched as he turned back around to face his team. "Son, are you a fucking idiot?" His voice raised, his face becoming red in anger, "I wanna know why he did it! I wanna know how he did it! God, how the hell do you work for me?" Venture, the agent who dared to ask, flinched as his boss yelled at him. Ross' expletives and insults continued for another minute.

"The three of you work directly under me for a reason! If one of you doesn't get something out of Zemo by the end of the week, you can all kiss your paychecks goodbye!"

With a wave of his hand for emphasis, the man exited the meeting the room the same way he entered. The three agents were left to discuss their impending termination.

"Well, there goes our jobs," Venture stated, taking a seat in one of the many chairs circled around the table. "If Ross couldn't get anything out of the guy, we definitely can't."

"You just had to open your mouth, didn't you Richard?" The other agent, Beau Sampson asked, chiding his partner. "I knew I should have put in a request for a new partner!"

"Piss off!"

And she thought the dead were annoying. Iris pinched the bridge of her nose, the bickering of the two becoming rather irritating. "Enough!" The two agents looked at her, mouths finally closed. "No one's getting fired. I have a favor to call in. He'll talk."

"Good, I was about to finance a new Challenger. My last one got blown up during our last mission because someone couldn't aim for shit," Beau spoke, harassing his partner.

"I swear to God!"

Another bickering match began. With a roll of her eyes, Iris left the room unnoticed by the others.

elevator down numerous floors, three security checkpoints, and a now finished cup of tea, the woman stood in front of her final destination. Scanning her I.D. badge, the security panel turned green, the deadbolt of the metal door unlocking.

The flats she wore allowed her to silently pass the threshold, sticking to the natural shadows that the fluorescent lights provided. She stood motionlessly in the doorway, the deadbolt audibly locking behind her.

"Deputy Ross, we've been playing the same game for months. I have nothing to tell you." His Sokovian accent filled the silent room, his words reverberating off the thick cement walls of the bunker.

"Then let's play a new game."

She stepped out of the shadows, the lights harshly shining on her. His lips parted slightly in surprise as someone besides the deputy stood in front of him. His lips parted slightly in surprise as she stood in front of him.

He quickly recuperated, his stoic demeanor replacing his genuine reaction. His head tilted slightly as he spoke. "And where have they been hiding you? Had they sent you to interrogate me instead, the JCTC would have answers to all of their questions by now."

Iris tossed her files onto the metal table that was positioned in front of the pod. She stood in front of him, hands pushed into the pockets of her slacks. "Here's the new game. You answer my questions, I answer yours." She knew he had plenty that had been left unanswered in the white landscape of Siberia.

"How do you know I have questions to be answered?" He countered, leading her along as he always did with Ross. It was his only form of entertainment.

"You completed your mission. You watched an empire fall. You got your revenge on the Avengers. Well, what used to be the Avengers. The price was your freedom, one you happily payed. However, a man such as yourself can only go so long without stimulating his mind. It must be excruciating only having the ghosts of the past and Ross for company."

Zemo yielded, accepting a conversation with her, "Do the ghosts of your past keep you company?"

"No but others do. Tell me about your family."

She had found the unhealed wound so easily, knew exactly where it was. Jabbing her finger into it, she tore the stitches at the seams. Now she would watch him bleed.

Zemo stared off into space, the haze of the past surrounding him, the ghosts walking the halls of his mind. "My father lived outside the city. I thought we would be safe there. My son was excited. He could see the Iron Man from the car window. I told my wife, 'Don't worry. They are fighting in the city. We're miles from harm.' When the dust cleared... and the screaming stopped. Well, you know the rest."

He finally returned to the present and looked pointedly at her, "Does Deputy Ross know about our coincidental history?" By now, she was sitting in the chair behind the metal table, dutifully taking notes.

"There's no such thing as a coincidence and Ross knows nothing of my past. As far as he's aware, I underwent extensive training with a nongovernmental agency before I began to work for him. S.H.I.EL.D. is rather good at creating a fake history for their allies. Why did you bomb the U.N. building and frame the Winter Soldier for your crimes?"

"You know exactly why."

"Zemo, please," she sighed, looking up from the notes she had been scrawling as he recounted his past. "I have to give Ross something."

He yielded once more, "I found my father... still holding my wife and son in his arms. And the Avengers? They went home. I knew I couldn't kill them. More powerful men than me have tried. But, if I could get them to kill each other..."

Each word he spoke carried more weight than the other, causing her heart to sink further and further into the abyss of grief she was constantly fighting. She empathized with him, understanding his reasons.

Grief. It all led back to grief.

She placed her pen down, closing the file she had been writing in. Her eyes met his once more, "Thank you." She rose from the chair, gathering her things.

"The dead," he began, "what do they say?"

"A lot of things."

She neared the door.

"And my family?"

She turned around, a soft smile on her lips, "They're at peace."

reading the notes that Iris had obtained during her interrogation with the terrorist. She had gotten farther with him in one meeting than he had managed to in three months. He was absolutely baffled.

"How did you get him to talk?" Ross asked, closing the file. He looked up at the three agents standing in front of his desk, hands behind their back, feet shoulder width apart.

She opened her mouth to answer but he cut here off, "You know what, it doesn't matter! I don't care how you did it, I just need you to do it again. We already had speculations as of why he did it. Turns out, we were right. I need to know how he did it."

"Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception."

Ross blinked, "What?"

"When I asked him how he did it, that's what he told me."

"I need fucking details!" The deputy yelled, his fist hitting the desk.

Iris nodded, telling him that she would continue to earn the prisoner's trust until she got what she deemed to be the whole truth.

Ross focused his attention on his laptop, mashing the keys a few times before an expression of confusion quickly followed by frustration passed over his face.

"There's no video from your meeting with him," he stated, moving the mouse around the screen, clicking a few times. "There may have been a system error. I'll have I.T. look into it. I want to look back over the video and see if there's anything we missed."

He addressed his agents, "Venture and Sampson, your next assignment has been emailed to you both. Reign, you'll meet with Zemo tomorrow morning."

looked at the blueprints of an old building they were set to infiltrate in the next week. A source had tipped off the JCTC about the bunker, claiming it was an old HYDRA facility in which a stockpile of weapons and invaluable information had been left to waste away when the place was evacuated and left to waste away.

"We just don't have a lot of information about this place," Sampson verbalizing what Iris herself had been thinking.

"I have an idea but the new deputy definitely isn't going to like it."

Beau looked up at her, leaning back in his chair. "Does it have to do with our little HYDRA expert being held in cell 36?"

She looked back down at him, nodding her head. Standing up straight, she grabbed the tablet that was attached to the wall. "He knows just as much about HYDRA as he knew about the Avengers. We both know he could be useful."

Sampson fiddled with his knife, throwing it up and down continuously. Catching it by the blade, he smirked, "I guess it's a good thing Ross left you in charge of the terrorist. Technically, you don't need the deputy's approval for anything regarding 36."

"And that's why I just informed Level Six that I'm going to be meeting with him," she replied, putting the tablet back on the wall once she was done. "The guards will have him prepared in under an hour."

"Meeting him outside of his box? Isn't that a little risky?" Sampson quirked an eyebrow.

"He hasn't tried to kill me yet," she shrugged. "Besides, I know you'll come running to my rescue if I need you to. The C.I.A. taught you how to take down a man smaller than you, right?"

"I think you know the answer to that, Reign. We've killed plenty of assassins together, brought in a villain here or there."

across from one another, one chained, the other free. Zemo's hands were cuffed to the center of the table as was standard procedure for such meetings. The woman took a sip of her tea from the disposable cup, setting it down once she was ready to proceed.

"That's my final offer. Your information for my ticket to luxury."

The man hummed as he contemplated her offer. It was the best one he was ever going to get. This was his only chance to be unearthed from the bunker he was held in.

"I'm starting to see a pattern of you only coming to me when you need something," he quipped.

The woman rolled her eyes, uncrossing her legs under the table, sitting up a little straighter. "You're a terrorist and I'm a JCTC agent. We have no other reason to fraternize."

"Ah, except I know your secrets vöglein. You were flying where you definitely weren't supposed to," he chided her, dangling their past experiences together in front of her face.

He was right. If the Joint Counter Terrorism Centre ever found out that she had unregulated abilities that they couldn't control or extort, knew that she had been associated with S.H.I.E.L.D., or that she was associated with Captain America and the Winter Soldier, she would have to go into hiding just as her friends had.

She would be labeled an enemy of the state, an enemy of the world, and have a permanent target painted on her back. There would be no coming back from that.

"Zemo, you know I'm your only ally in this world," she spoke softly, hoping the security cameras wouldn't be able to pick up the audio. She hadn't jammed the feed as she had in their previous meetings. "I am the only thing standing between you and death."

"Death, it doesn't seem so bad," he replied, yanking on the cuffs, a clang resonating through the room as metal hit metal. "I would be free."

"Momento mori, Zemo. Death is inevitable, each day unpromised. However, I have the gift of bending this harsh truth. As long as I'm here, you will not be meeting your maker. T'Challa told you the living weren't done with you. I am certainly not done with you."

She leaned over, grabbing a silver key from her pocket, and inserting it into the lock of the handcuffs.

"You're Death's Mistress. As his loyal lover, can you ever truly be alive?" The Sokovian asked, leaning closer to her, looking up the woman.

Before turning the key, her gaze met his, the distance between them slowly diminishing to mere inches.

"I am as alive as you and you're just a dead man walking."

"Arent we all?" He tilted his head slightly.

"Exactly."

front of the stone monument that had been erected in mourning to commemorate the innocent lives lost two years before. Surrounded by a placid body of water, framed by a stone ledge, and built on a circle of bricks, the memorial couldn't even begin to make up for the country that was destroyed.

"It's odd that destruction can create something so devastatingly beautiful," she mused, taking in the memorial for a third time since the accident. "Is it true that the stone used to carve the statue was originally salvaged from surviving building infrastructure in Novi Grad?"

"Yes, destruction is capable of creating beauty, some of it not so devastating," Zemo replied, his eyes swiftly glossing over her. "It's stone from my father's home in the country side. I wanted my family to be a part of the memorial in some way."

The atmosphere surrounding the Sokovian memorial was silent, the boundaries between life and death translucent, bleeding into one another. Where one began and the other ended was unclear. Death was reaching out to life, pulling her closer, begging for her to listen.

A moment of death spread across her mind like a strike of lightening creeping through the sky in all directions. The necromancer let out cry of pain, her hand grabbing onto Zemo's.

He looked down at her, confusion written plainly on his face. She had been content seconds ago, focusing on the ironic beauty of such a place as the one they were in. He placed his free hand on her shoulder, bringing her into his chest.

"Vöglein, what's the matter?" Zemo asked softly, her grip on his hand growing tighter.

Death was lunging for her, sinking it's claws into her skin. The dead demanded to be seen, demanded to be heard.

Iris' eyes shot open and she screamed at what she saw before her. The mangled corpses of the dead stood around the statue, unmoving. Their lifeless eyes stared into hers, envious of the life that danced behind her irises.

With their message sewn into her mind, Death undug it's claws from her skin, leaving a few open wounds which now trickled blood down her arms.

"The dead, they aren't at peace," she shakily spoke, regaining her voice. "No one would listen but they needed to be heard. Your country is still mourning the loss of it's people."

Zemo gingerly touched her arm, studying the fresh cuts that had appeared out of thin air. He kept her close, his fingertips pressed into her skin to reassure her she was going to be okay.

"Sokovia became hell on earth after Novi Grad fell. The Avengers, they got to leave and return to paradise. But the citizens of Sokovia? They were left to burn. It pains me to know that their souls are still burning."

"Zemo," Iris said, her words falling into the atmosphere, drowning in the grief that slowly drowned the two. "I promise your family is at peace."

He sighed softly, a mixture of contentment and sadness. While he was relieved that his family didn't burn, he grieved that his country did. "Perhaps one day, the others will know peace as well."

The agent's phone vibrated in her back pocket. She didn't need to check the notification to know what the message said. It was time to leave.

Just as it had in Siberia, their time together at the edge of the world had come to an end once again.

He nodded, knowing what the vibration meant. She pulled away from him and bent down to shuffle through the backpack she had set on the ground when they first arrived. Standing back up, she held a book in her hand. She gave it to him, their fingertips touching as she did so.

"Machiavelli?" He questioned, reading the title of the hardcover.