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Part 2 of the "Hydra took over SHIELD before Steve came out of the ice" concept! This is in the back of my head as one of the concepts that's likely to turn into a full story, but I know better than to make any promises. (Note: I use the 2008 date from the BW deleted scenes for Natasha's defection.)

This sequence immediately follows the previous sequence.

About 5.3K below the break.

*****

Alexander Pierce had come to tell Peggy personally the day after he had forced Nick Fury out of SHIELD.   At that point Howard’s son had been dead for six months, killed in an industrial accident that most newspapers had written off as the tragic but natural outcome of Tony Stark’s increasingly erratic behavior.  Howard had kept the two halves of his life so separate that Peggy could count on one hand the number of times she had actually met Tony Stark, even considering the years when he had still been in nappies.  She hadn’t gone to the elaborate funeral that Obadiah Stane had thrown for his erstwhile employer.

Pierce she had known quite well from his SHIELD days, before he had moved over to the State Department and later to the World Security Council.  He had been quiet and apologetic, with barely concealed anger underlying his words and a couple of SHIELD agents posted at the door to keep anyone from overhearing their conversation.

“Nick got away,” he told her after he had given her the Cliff’s Notes of the situation over at SHIELD – much worse than he had given out, Peggy had found out later, since there were still active sieges going on at half a dozen SHIELD stations worldwide even while he had been sitting in her room drinking tea.  “We’re doing what we can to find him, but cleaning up SHIELD is going to take priority.  Besides, he knows the entire playbook – he wrote the playbook, at least the parts of it that you and Howard Stark didn’t write.”

“You’re absolutely certain?” Peggy had asked.  “Turning us against each other is the sort of thing our enemies have tried in the past –”

Pierce had put down his teacup to gesture one-handed at the sling on his left arm.  “I got this when he shot me.  Personally.”  He picked up his teacup again.  “I wish I had any doubt at all.”

Peggy nodded slowly.  “Will you be all right?”

He smiled a little.  “Flesh wound.  It will take us months – probably years – to untangle all the damage he and his people have done.  We’re not sure yet how deep it goes.  I’m sure you can imagine the calls I’m getting right now.”

“Certainly an eventful start to a new administration,” Peggy observed; President Obama had taken office barely a month previously.

Pierce winced.  “The White House is responsible for a fair number of those calls.”  He glanced over at the door, then said, “I’m going to leave a protective detail here for you.  Right now Nick’s acting erratically and there’s a chance that he might come after you.  A small chance,” he hastened to assure her, “but a chance nevertheless.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” Peggy said.

“You’ll hardly know they’re here,” Pierce said.  “Madame Director –”

“It’s been Peggy for years, Alex.”

He smiled again.  “Peggy.  It’s just until we catch Nick and his people.  Better safe than sorry, that’s what you taught me, remember?”  He hesitated a little, and Peggy might have passed the better part of her century, but she could still tell when he was acting.  Whatever he was going to say next, he had come here expecting to tell her.

“Spit it out,” she instructed him.  “It can’t be worse than anything else you’ve just told me.”

Pierce sighed. “Like I said, we’re still digging and will be for a while, but – it looks like Nick might have been involved in the Stark murder.  Howard, not Tony, I mean.”

Peggy actually stopped breathing for a moment, then started coughing.  Pierce jumped to help her, getting her a glass of water instead of more tea.  She waved him off until she had gotten her breath back, then croaked, “You’re sure?”

“No,” Pierce said, watching her.  “But it’s looking that way right now.  This didn’t start recently and it didn’t start when he became director of SHIELD.  He’s been at this a long time.  A regular Philby.”

Yes, Peggy had thought later, after Nick Fury had finally gotten in to see her without being shot or arrested.  A regular Kim Philby.  Only Pierce had been talking about himself, not Nick Fury.

After more than three years she knew her security detail quite well, since Pierce didn’t rotate them.  That was probably for Peggy’s benefit more than theirs; the more familiar with them she was the less she would suspect them of anything, like, for instance, being Hydra.  She was fairly certain that they were all Hydra; it wasn’t to Nick’s benefit to waste any of his SHIELD loyalists on her, not when every single one of them was needed in the Triskelion or at one of the satellite SHIELD stations.

She waited a full twenty-four hours after Nick had left before she got out her photo albums, trying not think about what he had said in the meantime.  There was nothing suspicious about that, she told herself; it was an old woman’s prerogative to dwell on her past if that was what she wanted to do.

There weren’t many photographs from the war – not hers, anyway.  She had a few from Bletchley, one from SOE, and a dozen or so from the SSR.  None of the SSR photographs in her album had copies in SHIELD’s files or anywhere else; Peggy thought that she was owed the privacy of her own memory, at least for a few more years.  After that, it would be up to Sharon to decide what to do with them.

They had all been so young, she thought, turning pages slowly.  It had been a lifetime ago, almost three-quarters of a century, and Peggy had buried everyone in those photos except for the ones who had never had graves – and who hadn’t died at all, as it turned out.

Steve’s alive, Peggy told herself, staring at a photograph of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes sharing a bottle of Coke and laughing, both of them looking impossibly young.  Nick had told her about Barnes a few years ago and that had been hard enough, even though Peggy had never had much to do with Barnes.  Steve’s alive, and Hydra has him.  They’ve had him for the last six months.

Peggy wished she didn’t know exactly what Alexander Pierce had done once he had made the decision to use sex with Steve.  She had done it herself – sat at her desk with a stack of personnel files, trying to determine which SHIELD agent would have the most appeal for their target.  It wasn’t just about looks, though looks helped.

An operator, she thought.  Someone physically capable, even if there was no one else who could go toe to toe with Captain America for more than a minute or two.  That she would be beautiful went without question.  Probably not someone who physically resembled Peggy herself, which meant that it wasn’t Sharon; that was something of a relief to Peggy.  Pierce was too subtle to be so heavy-handed.  Someone who wasn’t going to be overly-impressed by Captain America; Steve had never had much patience for that.  Someone with a sense of humor who could keep up with him intellectually.  Maybe a veteran, but maybe not.

And most importantly, someone whom Pierce thought was willing to sleep with Captain America for Hydra.

*

She was still thinking about that a week later when one of Pierce’s agents on her security detail knocked on her door.  The woman came in after Peggy had called her agreement, still holding her mobile phone.

“Madame Director, I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said.  “There’s been an incident at the Triskelion and Director Pierce would like to take you into protective custody for the time being.”

“What kind of incident?” Peggy asked, startled.

“Agents were killed,” said the Hydra agent.  “That’s all I know, ma’am, I’m sorry.  Let me help you pack a bag; Sarah’s bringing around the car.”

“Well, that’s dreadful, but I don’t see what it has to do with me,” Peggy said, hoping that her poker face could still hide an adrenaline spike.  The only reason she could think of for Pierce to want her moved was that something had happened with Steve.  Nick got him out.

“There might be some threat, ma’am,” the agent said apologetically.  “Where do you keep your bags, ma’am?”

Since she searched Peggy’s room regularly, she knew perfectly well, but Peggy directed her anyway.  She packed up her jewelry and her photographs while the agent packed her clothes; Peggy knew Nick well enough to guess that he had his own agents watching the home and they would be moving in at any moment.  Once they took her, she wouldn’t be coming back; better that Hydra do her packing for her than waste time making Nick’s SHIELD loyalists do it.

“I need my pictures,” she told the agent, who nodded in understanding and wrapped the framed photographs carefully in several scarves before closing the suitcase lid on them.  She helped Peggy into her coat and turned towards the door, where the man who had just come quietly in promptly tazed her.

“Phil Coulson, Madame Director,” he said, catching the Hydra agent and lowering her to the floor.  “Nick sent me; Abe’s boy is out of the hospital and Nick thought it would cheer him up if you came to visit.  Is this everything?” he added, looking at her suitcase.  “I hate packing.”

“That’s everything,” Peggy said, amused.  “Is Abe’s boy all right?  Our friend told me there was some trouble with the surgery.”

“He’s sleeping now, but he’ll be all right,” Coulson said, and Peggy felt a knot of unease loosen in her chest. “Not to hurry you, but we’ve only got a fifteen minute window.”

He bundled Peggy and her bags out of the home and into a waiting a car, which was driven by an Asian woman who looked vaguely familiar.  At the other end of the block, two identical cars turned out of a shaded driveway and peeled off in opposite directions; through the window Peggy saw that they had the same license plate as the car she was in.  She sat quietly in the back with Coulson for another twenty minutes of circuitous driving until the Asian woman said, “I think we’re clear.  Melinda May, Madame Director.”

“Pleasure,” Peggy said, then looked at Coulson. “Is Steve – Captain Rogers – really all right?  Give me a situation report.”  She hesitated.  “This is about Captain Rogers, isn’t it?”

“Last I heard,” Coulson said.  “I don’t know much; Director Fury can tell you more when we reach headquarters.”

“Tell me what you do know,” Peggy ordered.

Coulson exchanged a look with May in the rearview mirror, then said, “Sometime in the last five hours, Captain Rogers killed the scientist Hydra’s had working on – on him, along with some STRIKE agents.  The agent Pierce and Sitwell have had handling him is one of ours; she was meeting with Fury today while Captain Rogers was supposed to be in the lab.  Captain Rogers broke out of the Triskelion and trailed her to the meet, where he disabled another half-dozen SHIELD agents – ours, this time.  He apparently had a nice conversation with Fury before Hydra realized he was gone and activated his governor implant.  That was about half an hour ago.  Last I heard he was going into emergency surgery to remove the implant.”

“Pierce put a governor implant in Steve?” Peggy said, shocked and then annoyed with herself for being shocked.  Of course Alexander Pierce would have put a governor implant in Steve Rogers.  “Of course he did.  Steve – Captain Rogers – broke himself out?  What’s been happening in there?  What have they been doing to him?”

Coulson just shook his head.

*

Nick told her more once they had arrived at the SHIELD black site.  Peggy had no idea where he and his SHIELD loyalists had been hiding out for the past three years, but since they were still running around, apparently Pierce didn’t know either.

“Rogers wiped the computers in the lab, stole the data, and set a time-delayed explosive on his way out,” he informed her.  “The Triskelion’s on high alert right now, so none of our people still inside have been able to tell us exactly how much Hydra knows or if they managed to save any of the data or biological samples.  We have to assume they’ve got some of it stored off-site.  A good kill on Nagel,” he added. “Rogers is still under and can’t tell us what sent him over the edge today, but from everything I know about Nagel he’s a nasty piece of work.  Romanoff says he did a number on Rogers while they were at the Triskelion; he’s been working on him ever since he came out of the ice.”

“Wilfred Nagel?” Peggy said. “I recognize that name –”

“Yeah, he’s a son of a bitch.  When Romanoff – my agent – found out what he was doing to Rogers she told us we had to exfil him first chance we got.  That was a couple weeks ago.”

Peggy took a deep breath. “What was he doing to Captain Rogers?”

“Testing his enhanced healing, among other things.  Romanoff said Rogers was terrified of him.”

“Steve’s not afraid of anything,” Peggy said reflexively, but she knew from Nick’s expression and the gentle tone in his voice that it was the truth.  She also knew that “testing his enhanced healing” was a polite way to say “torture,” though from what she knew about Dr. Nagel he probably hadn’t even thought about that.  He would have been one of Arnim Zola’s protegees if Zola had lived longer.  She shut her eyes, breathing hard, before she looked at Nick again and said, “Where is he now?”

“Just came out of surgery.”

“I want to see him.”

Nick nodded.  He took her down several hallways to a makeshift but very clean series of rooms being used as a medical bay, stopping her in a room with a large window into a second room.  Beyond it, Peggy could see a woman sitting by a hospital bed.  She was young and very pretty, currently engaged in braiding her curling red hair into a thick plait.  Most of her attention seemed to be fixed on the man sleeping beside her.

It was Steve.

He looked like Steve, Peggy thought with a shock.  He looked like the Steve Rogers who lived only in her memory and her photographs, like he hadn’t aged a day in sixty-seven years of Sleeping Beauty slumber.  The shield was propped up at the foot of the bed.

Peggy took a deep breath, her heart hammering.  She pressed her hand to her chest in an attempt to calm herself down, then made herself ask, “Is that her?”

“Natasha Romanoff,” Nick said.  “Alexander Pierce’s handpicked choice to handle Captain America and fortunately one of our agents; she would have been my choice too.”  He hesitated for an instant, then went on, “You’re not going to like this part.  She’s ex-SVR, Red Room-trained; defected in ’08, the same week that the fiasco at Stark went down.”

He was right; Peggy didn’t like it.  She was a little shocked that Steve evidently had.  “Red Room?” she repeated, focusing on that.  “I thought the program had been shut down in 1993, 1994, not long after the Soviet Union met its ignominious end.  That girl’s, what, twenty-five?  Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-seven, same age as Rogers, give or take seven decades and a few years.” Nick shook his head. “The Red Room just went underground.  Romanoff killed the guy running it when she left.”  The corner of his mouth quirked a little. “So she and Rogers have got that in common.”

“Pierce isn’t dead, is he?” Peggy said, startled.

“Not that I’ve heard, but I doubt he’s going to last much longer,” Nick said.  His fingers flexed a little, like he was thinking about wrapping them around Alexander Pierce’s neck.  “This is it, Peggy, I can feel it.  This is how they lose and we win.”

*

“I’m sorry about this, Nat.”

Natasha finished tying off the end of her braid and looked up at Clint, frowning.  “About what?”

“Getting you into this.”  He pushed away from where he had been slouching by the door and came over to her, pulling up another chair next to Steve’s bed but angling it so he wasn’t looking at Steve.  “I made you some promises four years ago and six months later you were dumped into Hydra.”

Natasha shrugged.  “I knew what I was doing.  You and Fury and Hill made it pretty clear to me what I was getting myself into when I decided to stay.  Besides, it’s nothing I’ve never done before.”

Clint tipped his head towards Steve and said, “Not this.”

Natasha glanced up at him, frowning. “What you think I did?  I’ve done it before.  Besides, this wasn’t that.”

“They made you sleep with him.”

“No, they wanted me to sleep with him,” Natasha corrected.  “I slept with him because I wanted to.  There’s a difference.”

His mouth worked briefly.  “You should never have been in a position where we ended up having this conversation.”

“I had plenty of chances to get out, Clint,” Natasha reminded him, flicking a glance at the two-way mirror that took up most of one wall.  She was pretty sure that there was someone behind it, keeping an eye on them; whoever it happened to be was certainly getting an earful.  “It was my choice to stay under, not yours.”

“But you shouldn’t have –”

“Four years ago you said I had the right to be able to make my own choices,” Natasha cut him off. “That means all of my choices, Clint, even the ones that you wouldn’t make.  Even the ones that you wouldn’t have to make.”

He winced.  Clint was more of a soldier than a spy; he could flirt with the best of them, but like Americans Natasha had known he didn’t have the temperament for the kind of work she had been trained for.  Even if he hadn’t already been too closely associated with Fury to pull it off, he wouldn’t have lasted more than a year undercover with Hydra.  Natasha had no idea who the other loyalists at the Triskelion were and had forced herself not to speculate; it was safer for all of them if no one knew who the others were.

“Sitwell and Pierce couldn’t have made me sleep with him,” Natasha added. “They knew that.  If they had wanted someone who would try to jump into bed with him immediately, there are other people they could have chosen.  It wouldn’t have worked, anyway.  He’s not that kind of guy.”

“And I’ve got no idea what kind of guy he is, Nat,” Clint said. “Everything I know about him comes out of reports and History Channel documentaries.”

“Didn’t one of those say he was abducted by aliens?”

“Yeah, but according to the alien I know, that one’s not true.”

Natasha’s eyebrows went up. “What alien?”

Clint waved that aside.  “That’s not important.  What is important is that I don’t know anything about this guy except that Hydra’s had its fingers in his brain for the past six months and he didn’t even notice.”

“He noticed,” Natasha said pointedly, “or he wouldn’t be here right now and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Convenient,” Clint said suspiciously.  “So what the hell were they doing to him in that lab today that finally made him snap?”

“Does it matter?”  There was a scratchy note but no emotion in Steve’s voice.

Clint and Natasha both jumped; Natasha hadn’t realized he was awake and Clint clearly hadn’t either.  Steve flinched when she bent over him, his mouth trembling a little and tears leaking slowly from the corners of his eyes, and Natasha knew immediately that he had been awake for a lot longer than he had let on.

“It’s just me,” she assured him.  “It’s just me.  Ignore Barton, he’s being an idiot.”

Clint had already gotten up to pour some water from the pitcher on a nearby table, his expression suggesting that he knew he had fucked up by having this conversation where Steve could overhear it.

“They took the implant out,” Natasha assured Steve before he could bring himself to ask about it.  “Mine too.”  She turned her head and held her braid out of the way so that he could see the bandage on the back of her neck.  “Mine was easy to take out, yours not so much, but it’s gone.  How do you feel?”

He moved one shoulder in a shrug and didn’t say anything, but he let Natasha help him sit up.  He looked suspiciously at the cup Clint brought over and didn’t make any move to take it; Natasha finally took the cup out of Clint’s hand and took a sip to prove to Steve that it was just water.  His hands were shaking, but he took it from her, and she closed her hands over his and held it steady until he could drink without spilling water all over himself.

“I’ll tell Fury you’re awake,” Clint said, beating a hasty retreat.

“I knew you were under orders,” Steve said eventually.  “I’m not – I knew.”

“You shouldn’t listen to anything Brock Rumlow says, either,” Natasha told him, which got the corner of his mouth to turn up briefly before he went back to frowning.

“If I hurt you –”

“You didn’t hurt me.”  Natasha put her hand to his cheek to make certain he was looking at her and said, “You never laid a hand on me I didn’t want you to.”

Steve stared at her for a long moment, then nodded.

“Do you hate me?” Natasha asked him softly.  “For lying to you?”

He shook his head. “You didn’t lie to me.  You didn’t tell me everything, but you didn’t lie to me, either.”

Natasha took the empty cup from him and set it aside, returning to her seat on the bed next to him.  “I am so sorry that this happened to you,” she said when his gaze flickered up to hers.  “I wish I’d been able to get you out earlier.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I still should have tried,” Natasha said, and was a little surprised to realize that she meant it.  She had weighed the chances of an exfil early on and discarded the option as unviable in those first few months; Steve was watched too closely.  Even the ops they had had been on had always been in company with STRIKE and had been in isolated areas that made it nearly impossible to run.

“It would have gotten both of us killed,” Steve said bleakly, his mouth working silently.

Natasha wondered if he had been running the same math that she had and when he had started doing so.  “Probably not killed.”

He grimaced and made a gesture of acknowledgment, knowing as well as she did that the two of them together were too valuable to Alexander Pierce to risk that.

“Nat,” he said hesitantly.  “The ops we ran for Pierce –”

He didn’t have to finish the question. “I don’t know for sure,” Natasha told him. “I can find out.  But for what it’s worth, most of what they’ve been doing at the Triskelion is what SHIELD – the real SHIELD – was doing four years ago.  I think the ops we were on were like that.  They’d – Sitwell and Pierce would have wanted to have you on softballs first, and push it up from there to see how far you’d go.  Not that they talked about it with me at all.”  She bit her lip.  Rumlow had said a few things that in retrospect made her think that he had known very well what Pierce was doing, whether or not Sitwell had ever told him.

Steve shut his eyes, breathing hard, and put his head in his hands.  Natasha had known what she was doing; Steve had just found out he had been running missions for Hydra since he had first gone into the field three months ago.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, not sure whether or not to reach for him.  She would have known what to do back at the Triskelion, when she knew they were under surveillance and that Steve had no idea what had been done to him, but now he did and Natasha didn’t know what to do.

Steve’s gaze cut sideways, then went up as the door opened and Nick Fury came in.  Natasha sat back, feeling self-conscious and obscurely guilty.

Fury considered her for a moment, then turned his attention to Steve.  “How are you feeling, Captain Rogers?”

“Like I’ve had a chunk of metal pried out of my spinal column,” Steve said, hesitating before he added, “Thank you.”

Fury nodded acknowledgment.  “I’ve got someone here who wants to talk to you.”

Steve looked wary, then his eyes widened as Fury stepped back so that Coulson could wheel in an elderly woman in a wheelchair.  She smiled a little tremulously and said, “Hello, Steve.”

“Peggy?”  He stood up like he meant to go to her, and then stopped, his expression uncertain.

“It’s all right,” Peggy Carter said. “I don’t bite.”  She held out a hand to him, smiling.

Despite the thinness of her face and the mass of wrinkles, her bones were still elegant; Natasha could see the beauty of the woman she had been seven decades earlier.  She had seen pictures of Peggy Carter before, some video footage from later in her life – there was none from the Second World War – but none of it compared to the woman herself.  There was a blazing aliveness to her despite the fact that she had to be, at Natasha’s quick estimation, ninety-six or ninety-seven.

Natasha eyed her a little warily.  She knew perfectly both who Peggy Carter was and who she was to Steve; she also knew that her great-niece Sharon was back at the Triskelion.  To the best of her knowledge, Sharon was part of Pierce’s inner circle, Sitwell’s second in command.  There was always the chance that she was another one of Fury’s loyalists, but Natasha wasn’t willing to bet money on it.

Steve went hesitantly to Peggy, his bare-footed passage near-silent.  He only touched her fingertips at first, like he was afraid she would vanish, then went slowly to his knees in front of her. “Hi.”

“You’re late,” she told him, reaching down to turn his face up to her.

“Traffic,” he said, trying to sound light, but his voice was trembling on the syllables.  Then he put his head down against her knee and started to cry.

Fury caught Natasha’s eye and moved his chin slightly in the direction of the door; Natasha nodded and got to her feet.  As Natasha passed her, Peggy reached out to touch her sleeve.  Natasha paused and looked down at her.

“Thank you,” Peggy said.

Natasha nodded in response and followed Fury and Coulson out.

“How’s he doing?” Fury asked after he had closed the door behind them.  Clint was waiting in the corridor; he nodded to Coulson as the other man left, presumably for the observation room that looked in on the hospital room.

Natasha thought the answer to that was fairly obvious, but said, “He’s scared.  He just found out about Hydra a few hours ago, remember?  He doesn’t know anyone here except for me – and Peggy Carter,” she added, glancing back over her shoulder at the door, “– and he doesn’t have any reason to believe that we’re any different than them.”

Clint scowled. “We didn’t put a fucking chip in his head.”

“You know he has no way of knowing that,” Natasha said. “It’s not the first time he’s woken up in a hospital bed after emergency surgency.  Though the last time it wasn’t to a stranger standing over him accusing him of rape.”

“That’s not –”

“That’s what he heard,” Natasha said, a little surprised at how angry she was.  “You had no right to say that about him.  Or about me.”

Clint shot a slightly panicked look at Fury, whose expression suggested that since he had gotten himself into this mess he was perfectly capable of getting himself out.  “You two need a minute?”

Natasha nodded, her mouth tight.

“Get this cleared up fast,” Fury advised. “Pierce isn’t going to give us much time.  Even if he doesn’t know for sure, by now he has to guess that we’ve got Rogers.”

He was already reaching for his earpiece as he left.

“You have no idea what it’s like there,” Natasha told Clint.  “You’ve been here for the past three and a half years.  You don’t know.”

Clint took a deep breath, then said, “So what’s it like?”

Natasha thought for a moment before she said, “Everyone’s watching each other all the time, telling on each other to Sitwell or Carter or Rumlow.  They’re always looking for loyalists, people who didn’t buy Pierce’s story about Fury but weren’t involved in the sieges.  Sometimes people just disappear.  If you know about Hydra, then it’s worse.  You’d think it means they trust you, but it doesn’t; it just means they have more to lose if they’re wrong about you, so they watch.  All the time.  I know every inch of that apartment Steve and I had in the Triskelion was wired.  I’m pretty sure he did too, but we never talked about it.  You don’t talk about it.  No one does.  Everyone knows, but no one talks about it.  You go on ops, you don’t know why, you don’t ask; you just hope they’re one of the ones that SHIELD would have run anyway and not one of Pierce’s pet projects.  Steve and I weren’t the only ones with governor implants there; everyone has them, even Sitwell and Rumlow.”

“Nat…”

“I grew up like that, Clint,” Natasha said bluntly.  “It’s all I’ve ever known.  Even the six months I was at SHIELD, I know Fury had me under surveillance; I know you were reporting to him about me.”

“Nat –”

“Do you know the difference between being in the Red Room and being in Hydra?” Natasha asked him.

Clint shook his head.

“When I joined SHIELD, I thought I was going straight,” Natasha said.  “But I just traded in the SVR for Hydra.  The difference is that I knew whose lies I was telling and why I was telling them.  All that time I was under it was a chance to make up for all the pain and suffering I’d caused.”  She raised one shoulder. “That I was still causing.  That maybe I could wipe out some of the red in my ledger even while I was adding new lines.  I didn’t do it for SHIELD or for Fury or even for you.”  She swallowed hard, surprised to find her hands were shaking a little.  “You had no right to say that to me.”

Clint took a deep breath, clearly fighting back an assortment of automatic responses, then finally said, “You know I never liked the idea of you staying in.  I just want you to be safe.”

“What’s safe?” Natasha said, shaking her head.  They had been working together closely the six months she had been with SHIELD, but since Hydra had forced Fury out she had seen him perhaps a dozen times.  “You and I, we’re not the kind of people who get to have that.  I owe you for getting me out of the Red Room, but I don’t owe you that.”

“You got yourself out of the Red Room,” Clint said.  “I just threw you a rope, that’s all.”  He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” Natasha said.  She wasn’t sure if he actually meant it, but it was probably the best she was going to get.

Clint ran a hand back through his hair, looking tired.  “Are you in love with him?”

Natasha glanced up at him, startled by the blunt question.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “Maybe.  I don’t know.”

Sorry it took me so long to respond to you! @trollol360 and @tinypurplespacemoose 

I honestly lost track of what I’ve said/haven’t said before so chances are a lot of this stuff will be repeated from stuff I have in the past mixed in with some stuff I thought more about now. I should be more organized...But we’ll see how I go about that. 

If anyone thinks it’s worth me making a tab on my blog to organize my thoughts better and to better cite my thoughts then lemme know. Otherwise I’ll just keep my chaos lmao.

There’s a lot of stuff I am withholding because @cozymochi and I do have stuff we’ve worked on in private that we’ll hopefully show one day, for now I want to dive into headcanons and some lore I’ve still held onto- (Also note I do use a lot of stuff given to us by the IZ series for these headcanons, I’ll try to source them all)

Pre-PAK and biology Irken headcanons-

Irkens are herbivores. They have soft fleshy teeth that can’t cut into meat,  long tongues that could likely slip into a flower and drink nectar (I sometimes think of butterfly proboscis with them), and a known diet of snacks and sugars. 

Irkens were originally prey animals. There’s a creature called the Digestor that was deleted from The Nightmare beings. It is used for Irken gladiatorial battle and likely lives in captivity. Due to its name literally being ‘Digestor’ and it being used in gladiatorial battles with Irkens, I headcanon that the Digestor used to be a predator of early pre-PAK Irkens. The Irkens named it Digestor as it eats and digests them. Irkens have since developed to be the dominant species on Irk and have triumphed over their predator, but still keep it for cruel gladiatorial battles. This past experience of living in fear and being hunted by something plays a small role in Irk’s desire for strength and power (coupled with toxic consumerism and a need to have things)

Irkens were originally nocturnal and in some cases still are. The integration of PAKs has supplied them with regenerative energy that has decreased their need for sleep, but some aspects of their nocturnal nature still remain both in their appearance and behavior. Irkens have large eyes, this is typical with nocturnal animals as it helps them see through the dark. There are also many episodes that show Zim being more active at night (plotting schemes, enacting schemes, etc.) which to me seems like Zim is both more comfortable and better equipped to work at night, while in the day he could be slightly more lethargic (I have noticed some of his best plans occur during night time interestingly enough.) 

In The Trial, smeets are required to live underground for around 10 years or more. I headcanon this is also related to pre-PAK Irkens living in burrows, staying sheltered during the day and safe from predators, and then scavenging for food and resources during the night (This ties back to the nocturnal headcanon as well as their big eyes.) Smeets always had to stay in the burrows until they were old enough to scavenge too. Even though Irkens today don’t have to hide from predators, it is still in Irken nature to keep smeets underground.

Post-PAK and other headcanons-

There is a delicate relationship between an Irken’s organic brain and their PAK brain. Both are very much the same person, but the PAK self is more inclined to align itself with what the Empire expects of an Irken, the organic mind is just slightly more emotionally driven because of its freedom to exist outside of what is programmed into the PAK. Should there be discord between the two, a duality can appear. This falls under the definition of ‘Defective’

‘Defective’ is an all-encompassing and loose term within Irk. It is basically the word used to describe someone that doesn’t ‘fit in.’ This includes Irkens who struggle with any form of disability but mental or physical, Irkens who disagree with the Empire’s ideals, Irkens who revolt against the Empire, etc. Because ‘Defective’ means so much and is meant to discriminate against anyone different, many Irkens live in fear of being identified as ‘Defective’ for any reason while others use it as a weapon against others they don’t like. 

Irken ‘slushies’ and human equivalents of it are Irken alcoholic drinks. That High-fructose corn syrup hits hard.

If one were to eat an Irken, they would taste stupidly sweet, like candy apples. I know this is weird to say, but going back to prey animal headcanon, Irkens are really damn tasty (Which is why Zim was so terrified of the halloween monsters drinking his sweet blood in Spooky Doom)

Escape

A/N: Actually started this last year for Steve’s birthday and ran out of steam, so I’ve literally had half of this in my drafts for a year. Thought it was time to finish it up. Because I wrote I started it last year post-Civil War, that’s when it would take place (if that’s something you need to know haha).

-

“Anything else you need before I leave?” you ask, scanning the office.  “More clearances or paperwork?”

“It should be fine,” General Ross says.  “I’m sorry you had to leap so many hurdles.  We just don’t want any more Avengers dropping off the grid.  Or defecting.”

“It was a bit excessive,” you reply curtly.

“Where is it you’re heading again?” Ross asks.

It’s an innocent enough question, but you’re acutely aware of the chill that runs through your veins.  You turn to face him, making sure the smile on your face is perfect––not too fake, but not quite warm.

“Visiting some friends in London, Spain,” you say.  “Then I’m going to backpack around Europe for a little bit, I think.  We’ll see.”

“Got it,” Ross replies.  “And I hear you’re missing Tony’s Fourth of July barbecue?  Won’t be the same without you.”

“Won’t be the same without a lot of people,” you reply, unable to warm the ice in your voice.  “The day means something different for the two of us, I think.”

Ross looks taken aback and you have to look away, unable to soften your flinty, accusatory gaze.

“Right,” he says.  “When will you be back?”

“July 8,” you lie.  The two of you stare at each other for a few seconds and you can almost hear the gears in his head working, as if trying to calculate his next move.  After a while, he nods and you do your best not to let out a sight of relief.

“All right,” he says.  “Travel safe.  We can’t afford to lose any more of the team.”

His words are pointed, a warning and a reminder.  

You breeze your way through the trip, enjoying the time you spend with your friends.  You’re constantly aware of Ross’s people following you, watching your every move, but you do your best not to let that on.

On July 3, you check into a remote, secluded resort in Spain. The owner owes you a favor, and is all too happy to leave your phone in an empty room, turning the lights on and off every night for a couple days. Leaving you free to slip thorugh the woods and escape Ross’s scrutiny and reach.

As soon as you reach the coast, the aircraft materializes and you can’t help but marvel at the beauty of Wakandan technology. The door slides open and you can’t help but smile.

“King T’Challa,” you say.

“Agent (Y/L/N),” he replies, shaking your hand.

“As promised, here’s the intel you asked for,” you say, handing him a small flashdrive. “And also, Ross is an idiot, so Wakanda’s still off his radar. Hasn’t even thought to look.”

“Thank you,” he says, ushering you onto the plane. “Shall we?”

You touch down mere hours later. It’s still dark out, but the sky is slowly growing lighter. Almost sunrise. T’Challa escorts you through the palace, stopping before a door.

“Through here,” he says, offering you a small smile.

“Thank you,” you say, your heart pounding in your chest.  He nods and walks away down the hallway. You take a deep breath, knocking softly on the door before pushing it open.

And there he is.

Standing on the balcony, looking out as the sun creeps over the horizon. His hair is longer than you remember, and he’s sporting a beard, but you don’t really care as he turns and spots you.

“(Y/N),” Steve breathes out and you stifle a sob.

“Steve,” you say, and you take off across the room, tumbling into his arms. You breathe him in as the familiar smell of his aftershave tumbles over you. You’re home.

The two of you stand like that for a while. You don’t dare to breathe or blink, still half afraid that it’s all a dream and you’ll wake up alone.

“How did you get here?” Steve finally asks.

“Slipped away,” you reply.  “For good.”

“For good?” he asks and you can see the hope in his eyes.

“I’m done,” you say.  “I stole a shitload of Ross’s intel, deleted files and left.  It’ll be a few days before he realizes I’m not coming back, but my trail will go cold in Spain.”

“And you’re going to stay?” he asks, his hands reaching up to hold your face as if he too is scared you’ll disappear before him.

“I’m not going anywhere,” you whisper, resting your forehead against his.  “Happy birthday.”

Finn’s disobedience and defection: Parallels to real-life resistance against Nazi Germany

Finn's resistance against the First Order, both from within as a Stormtrooper and later as a Resistance fighter, reflect and parallel real-life dissent and resistance against fascism. This post will discuss some of those parallels.

I will confine my discussion of historical precedents to Europe in World War 2, partly because the First Order itself draws from Nazi imagery and history and, as @attackfish has pointed out, The Force Awakens uses Holocaust motifs quite effectively in depicting the First Order’s crimes. Another reason is that Finn’s actions in combination have the distinctive characteristics of resistance both from within and outside of Germany during World War 2.

The three main parallels in Finn’s actions to historical resistance are as follow: Conscientious objection to a criminal order, the rescue of a pilot from enemy territory, and direct action to rescue a prisoner. Below I will discuss each of these categories in more detail and end with a coda on parallels to German defectors who took up arms against the Nazis.

1. I wasn’t going to kill for them: Conscientious disobedience

Finn’s resistance (small “r”) to the First Order began the moment he refused to, or could not bring himself to, participate in the murder of civilian prisoners. This one act of conscience was the spark that would lit the fire of open defiance.

While there have always been courageous individuals who refused to go along with the crimes of an unjust regime, Finn’s choice here has particular resonance with a few German soldiers’ refusal to carry out atrocities. For one thing, as attackfish discussed, the extermination of the village is a direct parallel to the actions of the SS paramilitary death squads who committed mass murders of Jewish and Rromani populations.

Secondly, Finn did not give a reason for his refusal, but this fits the profile for a sizable number of documented refusals in Nazi Germany. Our first vision of a brave objector may be someone who gives an impassioned speech about the immorality of killing, and the lack of such a speech may be a contributing factor in accusations that Finn is a coward or a traitor rather than an principled objector. However, this image of the articulate speechmaker actually fits the profile of less than half of documented German objectors during WW2.

This finding appears in a 1988 case study of 85 documented objectors by David Kitterman (”Those Who Said ‘No!’: Germans Who Refused to Execute Civilians during World War II”), which discusses the circumstances of these refusals and their consequences. According to this study fewer than half (44.7%) of the objectors gave reasons of conscience (humanistic, religious, moral) or said they regarded the order as illegal. A greater number, around half the total (48.2%), gave no reason at all.

Finn clearly falls into the non-demonstrative camp of objectors. Given his heavily traumatized state at the time, I don’t think he could have put his reasons in words if asked. This silence does not render his decision not to kill for the First Order any less valid or real. Can anyone say that his hesitant lowering of the rifle is any less eloquent than an impassioned speech?

Speaking of trauma, a third parallel between Finn and the German objectors is that there were heavy mental health consequences for committing atrocities on civilians and prisoners, and some objectors cited these consequences for their refusal to participate or to let their men participate: 8.2% of the objectors Kitterman studied, or 7 out of 85, cited emotional disturbance in themselves or the men in their command as a reason for their refusal.

They had good grounds for their concerns. The Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads who carried out these village-by-village mass killings in person, had noticeably higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, and desertion compared to other SS units. The use of poisonous gas to murder large numbers of people was pioneered in part to take the psychological burden of face-to-face killing off the soldiers.

I suspect that a significant number of the silent objectors in Kitterman’s study who gave no reason for their refusal were also motivated by the desire to avoid such trauma. I believe Finn, similarly, refused to murder the prisoners in large part because of his trauma. He had just watched a man he knew die, and could not bear to re-traumatize himself by participating in an atrocity.

Finn’s possible desire to protect his psyche is not mutually exclusive with morality, in fact it is our morality that makes us suffer for the wrongs we commit. Finn, in refusing to be a murderer, was also sparing his wounded mind. If you want to see someone who took the opposite path look no further than Kylo Ren, who likely suffers from perpetration-induced traumatic stress (PITS).

A fourth parallel is the method used to refuse the unlawful order. Over half (56.4%) of the people Kitterman studied simply refused with no other method in the record, while others used creative tactics including complaining up the chain of command, requesting a written judgment, and, my favorite, “feign[ing] madness.” Class and rank play a role, with the officers by and large using the more successful tactics of appealing to bureaucratic and legal mechanisms. Kitterman himself notes that officers represented 67.1% of successful objectors.

Finn’s act of refusal shown in the final theatrical release falls under outright refusal with no tactics to protect himself with, which in part reflects his status as part of the rank-and-file instead of an officer with knowledge of and power within the hierarchy. It may also be reflective of his shaken state, since if there is one thing we know about Finn it’s that he is not lacking in tactical skill.

Interestingly, another of Finn’s actions in a deleted scene parallels a refusal tactic successfully used by enlisted men in the field, namely evasion. Objectors “hid behind wagons or trucks which had brought Jews and others to places of execution in order not to be detailed to the firing squads. Some threw away or ‘lost’ their weapons, or continually shot wild, deliberately missing an old man in a ditch for instance, or overlooked women and children hiding from the search details.” (Emphasis added)

[Image description: At the village on Jakku, Finn lowers his gun and lets a woman (possibly holding a child?) run away]

The fifth parallel has to do with the consequence suffered, or not suffered, for refusing unlawful orders. Contrary to popular wisdom, there is no documented case of Germans who refused illegal orders being executed. In Kitterman’s study over half, 57.6%, of objectors suffered no negative consequences at all and some were later promoted. The most common negative consequence, at 17.6%, were threats of negative consequences such as being sent to the front or a concentration camp, which were never carried out. The next most common negative consequence (16.5%), if it can be called that, was transfer to another unit or back to Germany, which in some cases led to promotions. Other consequences including demotion, removal from position, transfer to combat units, or being compelled to aid the murders in some less central way such as being a driver or digging graves, were all in the single digit percentages.

Only one person out of the 85 studied by Kitterman was sent to concentration camp. This was Dr. jur. Nikolaus Hornig, a jurist, police officer, and Wehrmacht officer, and the records indicate his true crime was not refusing to execute 780 Russian prisoners. Rather, the trial focused on his act of calling together his officers and men to share his reasons for refusing and giving them the legal knowledge to refuse as well. As a result, his men also declined to participate in the execution. Educating his men, Kitterman writes, was the true offense that sent Dr. Hornig to concentration camp. (Don’t feel too sorry for him, by the way. He was treated with the respect due to an officer while in captivity and was even paid until the end of the war.)

From these contrasts you can see that individual refusals were not that great a threat to the Nazi extermination machine, since replacements could always be found. Education and organization against these state crimes , on the other hand, were deadly offenses that could bring down the whole apparatus, not to mention the regime.

Also, it bears repeating, there is not one documented and verified case of a German being killed for refusing an order to commit murder. (I am not including non-Germans in the German occupied territories, who were treated considerably more harshly.) The case of Josef Schulz, allegedly killed for refusing to participate in a partisan execution, was debunked as a myth. And this was in the context of the German legal system during World War 2 which handed down execution sentence for almost 40,000 of its citizens, up to 15,000 of them soldiers, for offenses as minor as making jokes.

In keeping with those who refused unlawful orders, Finn’s planned punishment was not death but reeducation, as stated by Phasma.

[Image description: Phasma informs Hux who is reviewing Finn’s files, “FN-2187 reported to my division, was evaluated and sent to reconditioning.”]

This is an apt parallel to the way German military objectors were treated under the Nazi regime. Finn, while he certainly did not enjoy full freedom nor even have the dubious protections of German citizens under a fascist government, was nevertheless a valuable tool and a considerable investment in the First Order’s eyes. The tie-in materials make it clear he was an exemplary cadet other than his troublesome empathy. If he could be “convinced” to be suitably ruthless and obedient there was no need to liquidate him for a first offense.

This also means that Finn was not running for his life when he defected from the organization that had kidnapped and enslaved him. In fact he was willingly risking his life to get away from the First Order. It would not in any way reflect poorly on him if he feared for his safety, but in truth he was running into physical danger rather than away from it. He was following through on his decision, as later confessed to Rey, not to kill for the First Order.

This brings us to the next historical parallel in Finn’s story, this time to capital-R Resistance.

2. Because it’s the right thing to do: A pilot takes flight

By Resistance in the historical sense, not in the Star Wars sense, I mean organized struggle against the German occupation in German-held territories during World War 2. You may know that a significant portion of historical Resistance activity involved the rescue of Allied pilots, who were often shot down in enemy territory and were extremely valuable, highly-trained personnel, and were at risk of capture, torture, and execution.

We see two of these three consequences, capture and torture, already befall Poe Dameron by the time Finn sets his rescue in motion. Poe was on an information gathering mission outside Resistance and Republic territory and was captured when it was overrun by First Order forces. He was then tortured for information. According to the novelization Poe fully expected that the third and final consequence, execution, was in order for him when Finn marched him out of his cell, and I can’t be the only one who had the same harrowing thought when watching that scene.

There is one major contrast between Finn’s rescue of Poe and the historical Resistance’s rescue of pilots: Poe was already captured when Finn got a hold of him, while the Resistance in Europe generally helped pilots evade capture. This fact also gives the rescue plot the characteristics of direct action to rescue prisoners and of prison escapes, as discussed below,

There is also one crucial similarity to the WWII Resistance’s rescue of pilots in that Finn had to guide Poe across unfamiliar and hostile territory--the First Order’s star destroyer, in this case--using his local knowledge and affiliation. This was similar to the way the Allied pilots rescued by the real-world Resistance relied on the Resistance operatives’ linguistic, cultural, geographical,  social, and other knowledge in order to pass safely through German-held territory.

It is unlikely that Poe, short of stealing a uniform like Luke and Han did in A New Hope, could have made it to the hangar. He would have been instantly recognized as a prisoner. Even if he had managed to steal a uniform he would have had to know how to respond to Stormtroopers who hailed him, or he would have had to evade detection while trying to find the hangar bay.

This parallels the way most American and British pilots on their own in occupied France would have been noticeable for their inability to speak the local language and their lack of identification documents. Like them, Poe was at a serious disadvantage and likely would not have made it to the hangar bay without Finn posing as his jailer and giving him cover in plain sight.

Due to the difficulties involved in getting Allied personnel through hostile territory, cooperation was crucial to the effort. A functional Resistance required a network of people to provide safe houses, act as go-betweens, procure forged documents, and more. This was also frequently how the occupation authorities brought down Resistance cells, by inserting moles into the operations or turning individual members.

We see this precarious dynamic on a small scale between Finn and Poe. Both of them desperately need each other to escape, but Poe is unsure at first if he can trust Finn. Why would a Stormtrooper put everything on the line to help him? I have analyzed Finn and Poe’s first interactions and won’t repeat that post here, but Poe does in fact gain a measure of trust in Finn and treat him as a comrade, explaining his mission and giving crucial information about BB-8. Their mutual trust and friendship in the face of the First Order’s terror is a great parallel to the way members of the historical Resistance worked together despite the risks.

This development, incidentally, is fully in keeping with the kind of character Poe Dameron is. Poe’s strength and vulnerability lie in his willingness to put his trust in others, something that his comic book series explores in depth. He is remarkable for not being the lone hero type, going in guns blazing; his style is to talk to people, gain their trust, and rely on his team. That’s what makes him so effective as an intelligence officer and as a leader. His interaction with Finn is consistent with the emphasis his story puts on trust, camaraderie, and teamwork.

That teamwork was about to be put to the test, of course, because Finn and Poe still had a First Order star destroyer to break out of. That brings us to the third historical parallel.

3. This is a rescue: Prison break by combat and flight

Due to the nature of where he was, a star destroyer in space, Finn needed the services of a pilot and there just happened to be one on hand. This made his defection a rescue mission and prison break as well.

This aspect of his resistance also has plenty of historical precedence. The rescue of captured combatants and civilians is a staple in situations of occupation and war, and World War 2 is no exception, with events ranging from mass escapes from POW camps to the rescue of, and uprisings by, Jewish and Rromani civilians.

One act of prisoner rescue from this era that closely parallels Poe’s rescue by Finn is Operation Arsenal (1943) in German-occupied Poland, a mission conducted by Polish paramilitary scouts Szare Szeregi (Grey Ranks)--their first mission, in fact. A troop leader, Jan Bytnar, was arrested by the Gestapo on March 23. Three days later, 28 scouts attacked a German convoy in front of the Warsaw Arsenal, rescuing Bytnar and 24 other prisoners.

Unfortunately Bytnar died four days after his rescue on March 30 due to injuries sustained from the extremely brutal torture he had been subjected to while in Nazi custody. His torturers were both assassinated within two months by the scouts. Poe’s rescue had a much happier ending, but if he had stayed any longer or a different Stormtrooper had taken him out of his cell who knows what might have happened.

Another World War 2 era prison break that has similarities to Finn and Poe’s escape is the so-called Delousing Break, where British and U.S. POWs attempted to flee the Stalag Luft III Camp in Germany where they were imprisoned. It gets its memorable name from its plan: 24 prisoners, escorted by two fake guards who were actually prisoners dressed as guards, left the camp for another facility to be deloused and then made a run for it.

The escape attempt failed and all 26 prisoners were recaptured, but the fake guard who is secretly helping the prisoner is a situation similar to Finn’s, though the difference is that Finn was a defecting Stormtrooper rather than a prisoner dressed as one. Given that he was an abductee, of course, you could argue that he was actually a prisoner as well.

There is more to the Delousing Break that parallels Finn and Poe’s story. Two of the recaptured prisoners, Flight Lieutenant Lorne Welch and Pilot Officer Walter Morison, were sent to a different prison, Oflag IV-C at Colditz, because they had attempted while on the lam to steal a German aircraft in their fake German uniforms. Welch, who was an engineer as well as a pilot, would go on to build a glider while at Colditz to try and escape. (He couldn’t make it fly, though.)

Finn and Poe’s aerial escape also has a more successful precedent. The American pilot Bob Hoover, shot down over Southern France, was taken prisoner and spent 16 months as a POW at Stalag Luft I. He ran across an unguarded airfield, which was holding planes being stripped for parts, while a staged fight among prisoners distracted the guards. He found the one plane in flying condition and successfully escaped by flying to the Netherlands. Which was a much better plan than flying to Jakku, incidentally.

4. I’m with the Resistance: The fight and Finn’s continuing story

After Finn was separated from Poe on Jakku his path would gravitate toward the Resistance despite his desire to leave the fight altogether. In becoming more active in his resistance he parallels the many Germans who actively resisted the Nazis instead of quietly complying with, or even passively resisting, unlawful orders.

As discussed above in Section 1, the Nazi regime did not consider a simple refusal to obey an unlawful order to be an existential threat, and neither did the First Order. Educating, organizing, and taking up arms, on the other hand? That was another story. According to one estimate the Nazis killed some 77,000 German citizens for some form of resistance, from civil to religious to military.

There was also armed resistance from Germans from outside Germany, defectors who volunteered to fight with Allied forces. In the British armed forces alone there were over 10,000 Germans and Austrians, some of them former concentration camp inmates who had escaped, who joined to fight Hitler’s Germany and liberate Europe.

Finn's defection from the First Order and affiliation--formal or not--with the Resistance, of course, bear strong similarities to these defectors who escaped Nazi Germany and joined the regime’s enemies as combatants. Given that the vast majority, some 85-90%, of  these German and Austrian volunteers were Jewish, Finn’s story resonates with @luminousfinn‘s thoughts on Finn as a Jewish hero as well.

These German and Austrian volunteers were in grave danger of torture and execution if caught by the Nazis; similarly, the tagret the First Order painted on Finn’s back must be bigger than ever now that Finn not only escaped in a spectacular fashion but went back into the very heart of their power to defeat them in a humiliating way. He is now a bigger threat to them than he ever was as a Stormtrooper who could not bring himself to shoot unarmed prisoners.

If the original refusal to commit an inhumane act was the seed of Finn’s defiance, it since grew and flowered into open confrontation. According to comments by John Boyega he will have some internal conflict whether to stay and fight or leave the fight altogether, which is entirely reasonable.

Whatever ultimately motivates Finn to take the final leap and fully commit himself to fighting the First Order, his journey would have begun with the simple yet not at all easy decision not to participate in evil, as began the journey of the many courageous people in our own world who gave themselves to the fight for freedom and humanity.

Reblogged version with links to external sources (because tunglr is ridiculous)

Reddit user Throwaway7289333 claims to have the plot of season 5. Since the account was deleted, here's all of the posts together:

I created this account just to share this with you all. I will not answer questions or reveal my source, but this sub will know I'm real as Season 5 progresses. I was made aware of a few things that will be happening and some of it really excites me as a new fan of the show, some other parts not so much. Please do not ask me my source or ask for more details, I'm telling everything I can that won't give away my source, and I don't want them to get in trouble after the convincing it took for them to tell me I could post this. I apologise if my descriptions isn't as accurate as a much bigger fan's of the show would be. i do not know the order a lot of these plotpoints occur. I was going to post this on the main reddit but I saw that there was one just for spoilers. Please take this with small grains of salt because a lot of this show is new to me and confusing. -Lapis has a major fight with the Crystal Gems and leaves. Garnet tries to prevent Lapis from leaving and is nearly poofed until she backed up. Lapis fly's through space until she finds a planet colonised by homeworld and blends in with other gems of her kind to build a world. -Steven/Connie visit Lars and the off-colours in space. After stealing a ship, Steven and company is found by a new squadron of Moonstones sent by a group of upperclass gems. Moonstones are scout gems, and are able to tell where any cut of any gem is at anytime if shown an image of the gem. The moonstones are led by a gem that the moonstones call "Cat." The gem named Cat has the power to override any homeworld technology and uses this power to shut down the ship. Lars's, Rhodonite, and Flourite try to fox the ship, while Stevonnie senses danger and fuses. The fusion of Connie and Steven somehow get on a smaller ship that gets shot down by a bigger one. Steven and Connie crashland on a planet that I am not going to bother to try and spell. -Steven and Connie meet Lapis in this world and she helps them hide. Throughout the world are statues and morals of a gem called Pink Diamond, no Kindergardners are in site. It is revealed that the race of this world has another galactic empire that rivals the gem empire. A White Diamond owns this world and has found out the planet is not good for making gems. Because of this, she has had Lapis Lazuli's putting water on this world for centuries, and forcing the enslaved race to build towers of the Pink Diamond. Other gems that do not talk are seen painting and carving big pictures of Pink Diamond, Yellow Diamond, Blue Diamond, and the White Diamond. After being captured in the ship, Rhodonite and Flourite are destabilized for being fusions and are put in bubbles by the White Diamond. -A gem called Emerald is given a weapon and is put in charge of the breaking of Steven and a pink sapphire. Connie/Lars are to be taken to the homeworld for research purposes. Steven's Lapis creates a diversion to stop the shattering of Steven. The next few parts I have tried to erase from my memory and I feel is a little too dark for a cartoon network show. During Lapis's diversion, Lars uses all of the power he possesses to create a portal back to Earth. Steven, Pink Sapphire, and Connie escape through this portal. Steven sees Lars collapse as he runs through and it is implied that Lars is no longer going to be with us. Lapis is poofed by the Emerald. -Upon returning home, Lars's parents and Peridot are heartbroken by the fate of Lars and Lapis. -To put this in a better note, Steven's Sapphire defuses from Garnet, angering Ruby. After seeing Pink Sapphire's defect, she wants to fuse with her. The 2 Sapphires fuse, and Ruby is really angry (in a comical way). After seeing the murals on the gem colony, Steven/Connie have even more questions about Pink Diamond. Due to the fear of homeworld, Steven/Connie fuse back to Stevonnie and it is implied they intend to stay as Stevonnie for a while. With the help of Steven's Sapphire, the Sapphire fusion is able to combine her powers with the other Sapphire. The Sapphire is overwhelmed with emotion and makes sculptures of ice. This sculptures lead the viewer into a flashback where we see Pink Sapphire serving the Pink Diamond. -A lot of the flashback is hard for me to explain, but it is revealed that Pink Diamond on the surface cared about all life, but that was because of her fascination with manipulating it. The Pink Diamond started the creating of Forced Gem Fusions. She would borrow races from the other diamond's colonies and have them kept in Zoo's and try to study their interactions together. Stevonnie is overwhelmed by emotion as well, and the sapphires create a sculpture of a fusion between the Pink and Blue Diamonds. It is implied that Pink would keep Blue forcefully fused in this fusion for varying periods of time. When Yellow Diamond found out, she told the White Diamond the viewer is shown through a sculpture. The Sapphire fusion breaks apart. Peridot is overwhelmed and runs and it is unknown to where she is going. Sapphire and Garnet reform. This is what I gathered from what I was told and please don't ask anymore, mostly because it would make my source obvious and also because a lot of things I do not understand. We get to see that Steven's Sapphire are Ice Spike things, to end on a positive note. I did not plan on logging back onto this account after I logged off. Not saying How I knew this was rude, I'll give you that. My father is very good friends with a translator of Steven Universe and other animated shows. He has read and shown me parts of scripts of upcoming Steven Universe Episodes. The reason I didn't post pictures of the scripts is one: security reasons for the company, two not wanting the firation of him, and three, in general a lack of motivation to go through the effort of proving the reality of myself when I know in around a month I will be proven real. My native language is not english, but I know with the intelligence of my main language revealed, it would be obvious who my source was, that is a main reason why i have hesitance. Rereading my post, I noticed some mistakes I would like to fix: I did not know who Rutile was but I looked again and she is friends with Flourite and is and bubbled by the White Diamond. Expect another song of Lapis and of Peridot I mistaked in the last sentence, Sapphire's weapon are Ice Spikes, and the pink sapphire is named Padparadscha. Her weapon is her eye but Steven is teaching her how to use it. The best proof I can offer are pictures of parts of the scripts, but with heavily cropped out names and numbers of production Hi guys, it is a little late in my country. Earlier today, I sent pages of the reading of two episodes of season 5 to the moderators. I have more and I'm going to try to get physical copies to take pictures of and send. Earlier today, a reddit user sent me a message and correctly came to the situation of the country I am from. He convinced me to send him the scripts of three of the episodes and he summed up for me what happened. I even added him on snapchat jajajaja -A song is being written featuring White and Pink Diamonds. -White Diamond has every single gem power and weapon in her arsenal. She created Yellow Diamond for war, and Blue Diamond for diplomacy. Blue Diamond was the first resort, to use powers of emotion to convince other aliens to surrender to homeward. Yellow Diamond, second resort, to take empires by force if they didn't comply. White Diamond's jobs were colonisation and running homework.d -Pink Diamond was an accident. She was born with no powers. White Diamond did not want to shatter her because she had a vision of a new power of the empire. She planned on taking her strongest 20 gems and abandoning homeworld to spread the gem empire thousands of places away. She had the intending of leaving her homeward to Pink Diamond eventually. -White Diamond created every gem under Yellow and Blue Diamond. Pink Diamond robbed White Diamond secretly and stole these plans. Pink Diamond designed all of the Earth gems to rebel against homeworld. When she was first birthed, yellow diamond was disgusted and wanted to shatter her. She grew on Yellow Diamond eventually. Blue Diamond thought she was beautiful. -Pink Diamond created the powers of healing and dreaming with others. Rose Quartz was her main experiment, a gem designed to rebel against homeworld. Pink Diamond's plans of destrificaiton were to learn how to use Rose's dream powers, take control of the body of the White, and make her do something to turn everything against her. -At the highest hight, of pink diamond, almost every gem, regardless of court had their main loyalty to her. She had Blue Diamond obsessed with her, and she had the intention of assumption that Yellow does what Blue wants, and that Yellow and Blue would help her take down homeward. -When Yellow Diamond found out the power of keeping Blue forced in fusion, she told the White Diamond. -No single gem is responsible for her shattering. There are multiple episodes dedicating to why Rose's Pearl, Pearl, Rose Quartz, each diamond, and all pink's subjects are responsible for her demise. -I do not know who killed Pink Diamond or who shattered her, and the episodes seem all over the place with the hinting of the guilty. -White Diamond has around a hundred pearls just for her. Every Pearl is a different color, but they all have one aspect of white clothing on them. One of these Pearl's was given to Rose as a gift by White, another was given to sabotage Pink. -Homeworld was a lot more open and less discrimination against fusing before Blue and Yelloe Diamonds revealed to the White Diamond what pink was doing to EDIT: blue not yellow, sorry, was double checking to see if my editor missed anything and found that all by me I am hoping this makes sense, I sent it to another user earlier and he fixed it for me, i do not believe there are mistakes now. One of the final episodes of the season (My helper from here said he thinks it was early Season 6 but I have no reason to believe any of my episodes are from season 6) ends with White Diamond sending Steven a dream and telling him "Alright, I'll finish this myself." Steven then sees her sleeping getting into a bodysuit and flying off of homeward. EDIT: Pink Diamond also created a lot of gem technology to give herself a fighting chance. She created the blueprints for a lot of the planet we see in our series.