EVENING, 25TH JULY, 1990, THE ASTRAL PLANE
JASMINE'S EYES LINGERED on the emblems stamped across the vast, echoing foyer of the Oldest House as she followed close behind Mordred. "The Federal Bureau of Control… who are they?"
"Just some government outfit trying to put a leash on gods and ghosts," Mordred said lazily. "Nothing you need to wrinkle that pretty little forehead over."
Jasmine let out a soft, frustrated huff. "You seem to know your way around."
Mordred's mirthless chuckle rippled through the emptiness. "You'd expect I'd be familiar with my own coffin."
Jasmine froze at that. "Coffin?"
Mordred merely shrugged, as if she was talking about something as trivial as the weather. "Some government lot dug up my grave by mistake — and promptly looted it."
The Potter scion looked at her with surprise. "But… you died in Camelot. That's all the way out in the British Isles."
The older woman let out a sigh. "Geography's a lot more fluid than you think, kiddo. Now come on — I haven't got all day."
Jasmine's jaw tightened as irritation prickled beneath her skin. She swallowed a sharp retort, opting for a pointed eye-roll instead.
In silence, the two of them threaded through a maze of spare offices and twisting corridors. Emerging from a dark passage, they found themselves on a broad minimally decorated veranda bathed in soft, fluorescent light.
To the right, evenly spaced columns framed open spaces that offered views of other areas of the building. Along the left wall gleamed a lone service elevator, flanked by two portraits, each a small distance from it.
A deep red carpet ribbon ran underfoot, its plush warmth contrasting with the cool, polished concrete flanking its edges. The older woman reached for the call button, then paused, her hand just brushing against it.
Jasmine's brow furrowed, irritation rising again like a tide. "What is it now?" she muttered, her voice edged with exasperation.
Without turning to face the Potter scion, Mordred spoke, her tone impassive. "You're powerful, kiddo, and you've seen how people are around you because of the gap between you and them. This encounter is going to widen that gap. That means that there's only going to be more restrictions on you."
Jasmine frowned, the question catching her off guard. She hesitated, eyes narrowing as she studied her escort. "Your point?" she asked, even though she had already understood what Mordred was getting at.
The older woman turned to Jasmine at last, eyes hollow, face blank. "When they come to bind you, how many of them are you willing to kill to stay free?"
A million Galleon question, it was. One that she had asked herself ever since she became old enough to understand the hidden brutality of the politics that came with her heritage and power.
Jasmine's expression smoothed into the same impassive mask as Mordred. "I'll know when I get there, won't I?"
The pair stared at each other, silence stretching between them. Without looking away, Mordred pressed the call button. There was a brief pause, followed by a soft chime, and the doors slid open to reveal a sterile interior bathed in a cold clinical glow.
"Shall we?" Mordred asked dryly, dipping into a theatrical, mocking bow as she swept an arm toward the lift. Jasmine released a quiet breath as she stepped in. Her chaperon followed suit, the elevator doors shutting in front of them.
The ascent was silent — and rather uncomfortable, at least for Jasmine. A clammy sensation of phantom sweat prickled her skin. Beside her, Mordred stood as still and composed as ever, hands casually tucked into her pockets — something which rather irked the Potter heir.
Moments later, the doors finally parted, revealing a small antechamber that gave way to a passage with more rooms on either side. The passage further unfurled into another chamber with a massive pair of bronze-coloured doors looming at its far end.
Without so much as a glance at her escortee, Mordred quickly stepped out and resumed her brisk pace, offering Jasmine no pause to comfortably take in her new surroundings — not that there was anything particularly of note.
After all, the area was pretty much what one would expect from a government building — generic, functional furniture, sterile lighting, minimalist furnishings, decorative plants, and, of course, an American flag tucked in one corner.
Perhaps the only thing of note was a modest plaque mounted in one of the walls — a simple green sign with white lettering that read "Director's Office", with an arrow pointing upwards drawn next to the words.
Casting only cursory glances around to see whether there was anything else that warranted attention, Jasmine followed Mordred to the double doors at the end of the hallway. The older woman came to a halt just before them with derisive flair.
With a mocking half-bow and a flourish of one hand, she gestured toward the entrance. "After you, milady."
EVENING, 25TH JULY, 1990, THE OLDEST HOUSE
BRODERICK NORTHMOOR HAD long devoted himself to the quiet, deliberate accumulation of power. Not prestige, not recognition — power. The unyielding, gravitational force to which all things in the universe, living or not, inevitably bent. Politics obeyed it. Physics imitated it. Men died for it.
His ambition only sharpened once he joined the Federal Bureau of Control, that clandestine U.S. agency charged with containing, studying, and weaponizing paranatural phenomena. He clawed his way up the hierarchy, ultimately capping his ascent as Director of the Bureau.
To remind himself of how far he'd climbed, he often pored over the Bureau's most secret documentations. Now, reclining in his chair, he held one small nondescript journal within which lay a terse, unvarnished chronicle of his own career.
Though he'd penned the contents himself and read through them many times before, the familiar recounting still drew a self-satisfied smile as he perused it once more. It was not sentimentality that brought him back to these pages, but ritual. Control demanded memory. Memory demanded discipline.
Northmoor, for all his sins, possessed both in abundance.
The entries were clinical. Bullet-pointed operations. Redacted names. Leverage acquired, deployed, and discarded like old masks. The journal was less autobiography than autopsy — dissecting the choices he had made that shaped the man he had become.
As his eyes traced the ink, reverie crept in.
His career had started off without fanfare — just another faceless Washington functionary, diligent and dull in equal measure. But while others jockeyed for visibility, he climbed through deliberate obscurity, using red tape like camouflage.
He became indispensable not because he demanded notice, but because he ensured everything continued to function — smoothly, invisibly. When operations faltered, he realigned them. When scandals threatened, he buried them beneath red tape and irrelevance.
Eventually, Theodore Ash Sr., then Director of the FBC, took notice. Not for Northmoor's charisma — he had none to speak of — but for his silence, his precision, and his terrifying efficiency. Ash saw in him something rare: not just a bureaucrat, but a weapon sheathed in protocol.
When the Director's health began to decline, and succession loomed on the horizon like a slow-moving storm, he named Northmoor his heir. There was no ceremony, no applause — just a sealed directive, filed and locked in a cabinet that only one man would ever open.
It was an appointment made not out of romanticism, but inevitability. Northmoor didn't celebrate. He didn't blink. He simply stepped into the role, as if he'd always been there. Yet, Northmoor's career did not become easier with the new title.
If anything, it became more complicated, for at that time, the Bureau found itself embroiled in a Cold War within the Cold War — a conflict where the enemy was not beyond the Iron Curtain, but right down the street, in the gleaming marble halls of SHIELD.
The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. A name that rang like a bell through every government office, its agents lionized by the media, its budget unfathomably large, and its influence ever-expanding.
SHIELD's banners flew brighter than the Bureau's, magnified by the magnetic idealism of Peggy Carter, the genius of Howard Stark, and the iron will of Chester Phillips. The operatives of SHIELD were hailed as heroes who would forever safeguard the world.
Perhaps, in another reality, the Bureau and SHIELD could have found a way to collaborate — even merge into a singular, dominant force. Not in this one, though. Bureaucracy, ideology, and limited resources resulted in brutal rivalry between the two.
Every budget hearing, every congressional subcommittee became a battlefield where FBC briefs tangled with SHIELD's prospectuses, each agency vying for the same finite pool of funding and political favour.
Sadly, the Bureau was losing. The Bureau's obscurity worked against it, as SHIELD's media-friendly campaigns painted the Bureau as a cold, bureaucratic entity ill-equipped to deal with the threats the world faced.
Everything changed the day he led a Bureau team into the New York City subway system, investigating a reliably reported anomaly in the area. What they expected was a minor Altered World Event (AWE) — some echo of a psychic trauma or latent Object of Power.
The discovery was kept secret, scrubbed from records, silenced from intelligence chatter, erased even from internal Bureau documentation.
Only a select few knew, and none of them would ever speak. The Bureau funneled resources into the House through dead drops and shell accounts. Scientists, agents, and theorists were brought in through rituals and spatial thresholds that defied physics.
After that discovery, Northmoor abandoned frontal assaults on SHIELD's budget and image.
No more memos to the Senate Intelligence Committee, no more classified briefings arguing for parity. He let SHIELD have its golden hour — the headlines, the parades, the President's ear. If SHIELD wanted to pose for the cameras, let them.
SHIELD's spotlight cast long shadows, and it was within those shadows that Northmoor made his move.
He called in quiet debts from embedded allies — people who mistrusted SHIELD's unchecked autonomy, people who feared its mythmaking. Legislation was subtly altered. Funding streams quietly rechanneled. Oversight committees misinformed and misled. On paper, the Bureau diminished.
By 1965, the FBC was officially disbanded.
SHIELD believed they had won. The Bureau was gone, its operations shuttered, its agents scattered to the wind. But what SHIELD couldn't see, what no one outside of Northmoor's inner circle could comprehend, was that the Bureau had not been destroyed. It had ascended.
No longer bound by the constraints of bureaucracy or geography, the Bureau had transcended the tangible world. In the endless corridors of the Oldest House, it became something far greater.
Its operatives — ordinary analysts, agents, and researchers — were embedded across government agencies, their true purpose erased from memory. They lived unremarkable lives, unaware of the training and missions concealed within their minds. In short, they were sleeper agents.
When needed, a hidden trigger would awaken them, unlocking their skills and memories. They would carry out their assignments, then revert back to their amnesia, unaware of their true role. These operatives were scattered in key positions, waiting for the call to action, always hidden, always ready.
The Bureau's hidden eye never faltered. When HYDRA seeped into SHIELD, Northmoor monitored every move — yet intervened only enough to prevent a total coup, which would have been counterproductive. All the same, it was vindictive, karmic justice to watch SHIELD splinter bit by bit.
His smug smile widening, Northmoor snapped the journal shut and slipped it into his coat. From another pocket he produced a peculiar gun — the Bureau Director's Service Weapon. He cradled it in his hands, turning it over slowly, eyes alight with admiration for the power it contained.
The Service Weapon, or the Director's Gun as the Bureau operatives had taken to calling it, was a shifting, angular, protean weapon of unnatural design. It responded only to one who had been recognised as worthy by the Board — and Northmoor had.
He reclined in his seat once more, stroking the Weapon's barrel with his thumb — a gesture equal parts reverence and ownership. The metal thrummed faintly under his touch with latent power. Then, the hum deepened.
Without warning, the Service Weapon discharged a pulse — not a sound, not a flash, but a wave of invisible energy that rippled outward like a shock from reality itself. It struck Northmoor square in the chest, launching him backward with a grunt of surprise.
His chair toppled, slamming against the floor with a metallic crash as he skidded a few feet across the office floor. He coughed, then groaned, slowly pushing himself upright. His eyes darted toward the Service Weapon.
"What the hell…" he muttered, voice hoarse with disbelief.
It was hovering mid-air, its barrel trained directly on him. The last thing he saw was a blinding flash before everything went black.