Family Matters

Agent Triplett drove down the street. The safe house was only a couple blocks away. Once he was there, he could grab a few things stored there that they weren't well stocked with at the Toybox and drive away. A simple mission. It shouldn't take him more than ten minutes once he got there, so long as whoever was tracking down SHIELD's safe houses and looting them hadn't gotten there first. Unfortunately, when he arrived, it was clear that someone had already gotten there. A large van was parked outside the safe house and two men were tampering with the lock.

"That should do it, Ethan." The dark skinned man said to his partner.

"Good," The other man said with a satisfied smile on his face. "Now let's get to it. SHIELD's taken enough from us over the years. It's time that we got something back."

Triplett decided that the mission was a bust. Grabbing a camera, he snapped a picture of the two men and then drove away. Hopefully the picture would help SHIELD figure out who was raiding their supply caches.

"Got it," Skye reported as her computer declared a match. "The man on the right in this picture is Ethan Hunt, one of the top operations men in the Impossible Missions Force."

"The IMF?" Coulson asked. "What do they have against SHIELD? If what Triplett reported was true, there's some sort of institutional grudge in play here. In any case, better send a message to Reese warning him about the raids. He might want to move the supplies in the safe house we gave him to some other location."

"Will do, AC. Hold on, Northern Lights is sending us a number." Skye looked up the Social Security Number. "Barney Collier. Former owner of Collier Electronics, then an engineer assigned to field work for the IMF, now retired. The man's old enough to be my grandfather. What does the Machine think we can do with him? Does it think he can replace Fitz?" There was a sober pause. "Does it think we're going to need to replace Fitz?"

Before they could contemplate that possibility for too long, Coulson's phone rang.

"Hello, Phil," Root said on the other end of the line, "I was told to let you know that the person she's brought to your attention has the answers to some questions that you had."

The two agents stared at the phone as Root hung up.

"That sort of thing is going to take a while to get used to." Coulson noted.

Barney Collier disengaged the complex electronic lock he had designed and installed on his rooms at the retirement home. It was a long way from his glory days, when he had built the world's first chess computer capable of matching a grandmaster, outwitted dozens of despots, spies and criminals and become the middleweight boxing champion of the world (A title he arguably still had more than forty-five years later - since only a handful of people knew who had really been in the ring that night, nobody had ever challenged him for it), but an old man had to find his amusements somewhere.

He was surprised to find that his home wasn't empty. A man was standing in the far corner of the room.

"Good evening, Mr. Collier." The man said.

Barney smiled at the long familiar phrasing "I think I'm a little old for missions nowadays. How did you get in here, anyway? I designed that lock myself."

"And it was a good one, too. It took my hacker nearly an hour to bypass it. Finding a place she could work on it without drawing attention to herself was quite a challenge." Barney turned and noticed a young woman working on a laptop, which he noted was not connected to his own computer in any way. "Let me introduce myself. I'm Phil Coulson, of SHIELD, and this is Agent Skye."

"SHIELD." Barney's eyes narrowed. "What would the world's most infamous secret agency want with an old man who's been out of the game for twenty years?"

"We had our bad eggs, just like everyone else. Didn't you once work directly for a traitor?" The girl asked.

"Don't talk that way about Jim!" Barney snapped.

"But he did try to sell out hundreds of agents throughout the world for money." Coulson pointed out. "I've been betrayed by friends in this business, too."

Barney forced himself to calm down. "So what do you want with me?"

"I'm sure you've noticed that ever since HYDRA's involvement in Project Insight was exposed, every government that used to back SHIELD has since disavowed us and are trying to annex all of our resources that they can get their hands on. One agency is definitely standing out in the fervor in which they are doing so: the IMF. It's clear that this is personal for them, not just for the agents involved, but the agency a whole.

"I came to ask you one question: Why does the IMF hate SHIELD so much? Given how limited our resources are at the moment, we can't afford to waste any of them dealing with a vendetta from another organization while we're trying to deal with HYDRA."

Barney laughed. "You mean to tell me that after everything SHIELD has done to us over the past fifty years you honestly don't know?"

"I've been searching our archives for weeks, and I haven't been able to find any evidence that SHIELD and the IMF have ever worked together." The hacker pointed out.

"That's because SHIELD never worked with anyone, they just threw their weight around and forced everyone else to go along with it." Barney closed his eyes as he recalled his first encounter with SHIELD. "When I was first recruited into the IMF, I was assigned to the team of a man named Dan Briggs. The five of us - Me, Dan, Rollin Hand, Cinnamon Carter, and Willy Armitage - were sent to handle situations all over the world. Extracting defectors, stopping biowarfare attacks, shutting down organized crime, just about any kind of crisis you can imagine. We saved the world more times in one year than James Bond did in his best decade of movies. We even stopped a few attempts to revive the Nazis." From the look Coulson's face, he'd been getting cracks of that nature all too often recently.

"Then, after about a year, Dan vanished from the IMF and was replaced by Jim Phelps. No explanation was given for what happened to Dan. Then two years later Rollin was pulled from the team and was replaced with Paris. After that, pretty much every year had the team losing a member that we'd have to replace. Willy and I were the only members of the original team who were still around eight years later.

"It took a while, but I eventually found out what happened to all my teammates. SHIELD decided they could use them, and strong-armed our superiors into transferring them. We were hardly the only team you were poaching from, but we were the one that got hit the most often. Sometimes I think that the only reason I never got grabbed was because back then you had Howard Stark on call - there was no reason to annex the world's second best engineer when you already had the best. You did try to grab my son in the early nineties, but Grant flat out told them that if he wasn't left alone he'd resign from the IMF and then raise a huge stink in the press about SHIELD trying to coerce private citizens into working for them."

"I remember a Dan Briggs. He was an instructor back when I was a trainee at the Operations Academy." Coulson noted. "So the start of the dispute was SHIELD habitually hiring your best people away from you?"

"You weren't just taking people away! We were more than teams, we were family. Even if there wasn't an official mission, if one of us needed help, everyone else would come, no questions asked. We once traveled to South America to run an off-the-books mission to help a friend of Jim's that the rest of us had never met just because he asked us to. When Cinnamon was captured during a mission, we all knew that our superiors would disavow her and order us to leave her behind, but we worked out a way to get her back before they had the opportunity to do so. SHIELD wasn't just forcing us to continually rebuild our teams if we wanted to get anything done, it was shattering our families over and over again, forcing us to pick up the pieces and try to recover before it happened to us again.

"Sometimes I wonder: If Rollin and Cinnamon hadn't been taken away, along with their replacements, could we have stopped the downward spiral that caused Jim to go rogue? Maybe he felt that he had no reason to be loyal to people who couldn't even protect his team from their so-called allies.

"Tell me, have you ever had a team be that close, Agent Coulson?"

The two SHIELD agents exchanged a glance. "We were trying on our last team," Coulson admitted. "Then one of us turned out to be HYDRA. We're still picking up the pieces.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Collier. I will be adding the process of how we requisition aid from other agencies to the list of thing we're going to overhaul as we rebuild."

"And you think you can get your superiors to listen?"

Coulson smiled slightly. "Yes."

Skye looked up from her laptop. "I just looked into the names you mentioned. Agent Briggs is dead - he was visiting the Academy to give a guest lecture when HYDRA attacked, and was killed while executing a plan he came up with to get the trainees clear. Nearly three-quarters of the students made it out because of him. Agents Hand and Carter are retired.

"I've sent the location of Briggs' grave and the contact information for your other colleagues to your computer. I can't give you back the time you lost, sir, but I can give you an opportunity to see your family one last time. It's a good thing that your friend had such an unusual first name - there have been lots of Agent Carters in SHIELD, dating all the way back to the SSR in World War Two, but only one Cinnamon."

If true, it was a simple gesture of good faith, but it touched Barney nonetheless. "Thank you, miss."

Coulson added one more item. "If your friend Rollin is related to the late Agent Victoria Hand, please let him know that her killer is in custody, and won't be going anywhere for quite some time."

Rollin had never mentioned a relative named Victoria to Barney, but since it had been more than forty years since they'd last spoken, it was possible that she simply hadn't existed at the time. "I'll do that, Agent Coulson."

After the two had left, Barney powered up his computer, and found an email containing the information he was promised. After spending a couple days verifying the information, he called up an old friend.

"Willy? It's Barney. I just got some news about Dan, Rollin and Cinnamon. Are you up to attending a family reunion?"

A month after Agent Coulson met with Barney Collier, a package was left on the grave of Daniel Briggs, former agent of SHIELD and the IMF. Suspecting that it was a dead drop, Colonel Talbot of the US Air Force ordered the package seized the moment he learned of it. After the package was carefully scanned to ensure it could be opened safely, it was found to contain an envelope and an old tape recorder. As the forensics team opened the envelope to find a picture of three men and a woman, all of whom were easily in their seventies or eighties, the tape was played and copied.

"Good morning, Mr. Briggs," A man's voice said. "The people you are looking at are your old teammates, reunited one last time to say farewell to a friend and colleague."

"Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to rest in peace," A second man joined in, "Others will take on the duties you so ably performed in life."

"Though your country has disavowed you, know that we never will." A woman added.

"This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." A fourth voice said. "Good-bye, Dan."

Before anyone could stop the tape, it started to smoke. Within seconds, it was nothing but ash.

Talbot's men wasted over a hundred man hours looking into the copy of the tape and the photograph, convinced that there had to be something more to them than a rather unusual way of paying one's respect to a fallen comrade. They never found anything.

A/N: The idea for this came while working on my other Recruitment Drive fic. SHIELD was at the top of the intelligence community and knew it, so they probably did run roughshod over the others at time, which would generate resentment. This story also explains why virtually every season of Mission: Impossible has a major character be replaced with no in-universe explanation for this.

I was halfway through this before I remembered that SHIELD really does have agents with the last names of Hand and Carter, though their methods of operation have nothing in common with how the MI Hand and Carter worked.