WINTER SOLDIER

Kobik was not a weapon S.H.I.E.L.D. built so much as one it raised: a sentient Cosmic Cube fused from shattered Cube fragments, given the form and personality of a four-year-old girl, and used to run Pleasant Hill, the secret prison-town where villains were brainwashed into harmless neighbours. When that town tore itself apart in the Avengers: Standoff crossover, the person who took the child in was Bucky Barnes — a man with professional experience of being used as somebody else's weapon.

In Thunderbolts Vol. 3 #1 (2016), by Jim Zub and Jon Malin, Bucky put a new Thunderbolts roster around her: original members Atlas, Moonstone, the Fixer and MACH-X, most of them freshly escaped villains, run as a fugitive team under his command. Their first missions were pure housekeeping with world-ending stakes — raiding S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities to delete every file on the Kobik Project, on Pleasant Hill and on themselves, before anyone could come and reclaim the little girl at the centre of it all.

Kobik adored her protectors and helped the way a toddler with unlimited power helps: she redecorated the team's grim hideout into a state-of-the-art home because she thought it looked sad. Bucky, who had spent decades as a brainwashed assassin, recognised the pattern underneath the playdates — a powerful being handled by institutions that called their control kindness. His answer was to become the thing standing between her and every agency on Earth, one deleted database at a time.