Previously Steve had the serum forcibly removed from him, which aged him into a much older and weaker man. He was still working for SHIELD, but Sam Wilson took over as Captain America during that period. There was a top secret project that Director Maria Hill was working on that got leaked to the public by Rick Jones, called KOBIK. Hill lied and claimed to shut it down, but instead she experimented on bringing the broken pieces of the cube back together and the girl you know as Kobik was formed, resulting in the death of a number of SHIELD agents.
This event is what pulled Bucky back from his mission in space, where he'd taken over Nick Fury's position as the Man on the Wall. Using Kobik's reality-altering powers, Hill had Kobik create a secret town called Pleasant Hill, where she stationed agents as undercover townspeople and then populated the place with villains and criminals that she had decided were beyond redemption. Kobik was used to completely erase their identities and memories and replace them with mundane small town folk sensibilities.
There was an uprising as Zemo managed to get the memories of his true self back, the Avengers showed up to shut the project down, Kobik seemingly saved Steve by restoring his previous body, the villains rebelled, and Bucky took off with Kobik and joined a team of criminals called the Thunderbolts. Hill was put on trial, removed from her position as Director, and I took over for some time. Until I eventually gave it over to Steve, believing he'd be better suited.
Meanwhile Carol Danvers had been using the predictive abilities of an Inhuman called Ulysseses to prevent crime, who showed everyone a future vision of the young Spider-Man killing Captain America. Bucky reacted to this news by trying to capture him, but ended up in SHIELD custody himself. Except he was taken somewhere off the grid. Bucky tried to tell me about this incident when we first arrived, and... it didn't make too much sense at the time. Steve threatened Bucky, wanting to take the cube back. Technically speaking, the girl was stolen SHIELD property. Ex-Agent Melissa Gold broke into the facility to free Bucky, and that's all I ever really heard because we ended up here instead.
Things have been off ever since, but it was easy to explain away. Everyone has been a little off.
To get to the point, I was approached with information that Steve has been trying to recruit others here to Hydra. I confronted him about his plans, he tried to convince me to join him, and so I stabbed him. I informed Bucky, suggested that Kobik might have something to do with it or could help, since neither of us believed that it could possibly be Steve of his own volition doing this.
We found out the previous owner of Kobik when she was a cube was the Red Skull who had convinced her with bedtime stories that Hydra was some secret friendship club and rewrote Steve's entire history to make him a devoted follower since childhood. Bucky of course didn't take the news well, Kobik blew up part of the Romeo dorms, and Billy Kaplan managed to get her to calm down enough to fix things.
It's... been a lot to recover from, and all the talk about the meeting coming up and there's not much I can do to reassure anyone.