[Marvel; Narrative] Who/What: Peggy Carter and the Mystery of the Satan Claw Where: Around. When: Recently. Warnings/Rating: Safe enough.
The Stark Tower clean-up was given the codename “Operation Scratch.” Peggy wasn’t sure who had come up with that one, but it irritated her. It was like they thought it all a job for a janitor, a game with no winner, or they thought maybe people like her didn’t play poker. The more work she did, the more she became aware that the remnants of SHIELD were in such tatters that no one would have even noticed if a HYDRA agent had come up with it and wrote it on a Post-It. (Peggy was not irritated by Post-Its. Post-Its were a truly wonderful, fantastic, irreplaceable invention.) The reason that no one would have noticed a HYDRA agent was because they all thought each other were HYDRA agents, and nothing was more effective than paranoia at keeping people from getting things done. That was more irritating than the project name. At this point, it hardly mattered who was HYDRA and who wasn’t, as long as they could write a damned coroner application and catalog belongings, was Peggy’s considered opinion.
That was probably why they put her in charge of the thing. Peggy knew how to get things done, especially when she decided not to care about where the personal allegiances of the people who still had two hands to work it. Personally, as they wrapped up intel-gathering and the more mundane construction, Peggy doubted SHIELD had much of a future as it was. They talked about Nicholas Fury and Maria Hill like they were gods, but gods were eventually forgotten when they stopped answering prayers. God forbid leaders could just be people. In the end it was actually worth just as much for her as any of the others. It turned out that she founded SHIELD. A future version of her… that was now past, to these people.
That made Peggy feel a trifle possessive, really. This thing she had built, it meant something to her, and now some set of bastards in unknown colors had tried to take it apart, and they had started it by taking one of her friends apart first. Bucky had lost an arm, and his life, but Steve had lost a friend. Stark had lost his Tower, but these people had lost colleagues and belief in the institution to which they had dedicated their lives. Peggy decided that Project Scratch was not going to be the last one she headed up, and SHIELD was not going to be a sullied piece of this universe’s past.
There was a long way to go from one clean up project to the top of any organization, but Peggy was a determined woman possessed of a lot of skills, and she didn’t devalue them, even in a different age.
It all started with intelligence. It usually did. Knowledge was always power, and her people were picking it up in little bits and pieces, mostly from corpses, and occasionally from a captured agent that hadn’t taken the bitter pill.
It came in pieces. It usually did. There was never a single piece of everything in one file, or in one mind. That was just bad security. Instead it was bits and pieces. A business card here. A reference in an interrogation there.
And then there was that one final break. A piece of nothing that would mean nothing unless she had a whole bunch of other pieces of nothing to fit together. She might not know anything about the more modern details of electronic espionage, but she knew what it meant when construction and property papers all matched up. It meant that there was a location that something was hidden, and unless she missed her guess, it wasn’t HYDRA’s location. It was one they wanted badly.
The “Satan Claw Rebuild” had been one of many echoes coming out of Operation Scratch, the most interesting to Peggy because it was most like some of what she had worked with before. Two rival organizations posturing and positioning to obtain an object of power. The thing that confused her about the Satan Claw was that it didn’t exist to rebuild, not if Bucky and Steve were to be believed. How, exactly, did either organization plan to rebuild it, and what was the point? With Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit in the mix, what was the point of a single weapon that could only be held by one man?
By the time she shook out a location—an abandoned subway tunnel not far from the Tower, in fact—she had reason to suspect that “Satan Claw Rebuild” wasn’t actually about the original Satan Claw at all. What’s more, the location of those maps and locations suggested to her that Tony Stark was interested in it as well, whatever “it” was. There was some evidence that he had been excavating, but it was all circumstantial. There were bits and pieces of data and paperwork all over the Tower. What was a handful of it in the blistered remains of Tony’s lab anything but happenstance?
Happenstance made Peggy nervous. She didn’t know Tony, but she’d known Howard, boy-howdy, and she wasn’t prepared to ask him outright, or his assistant, whom she happened to like very much. She also wasn’t sure she wanted to follow up on her conversations with Bucky or Steve. She didn’t want to accuse their friend of anything without evidence, and maybe Tony’s intentions were good. Maybe the Satan Claw Rebuild was a vaccine or a bunch of toys for orphans.