fossilised | HYDRA world AU

HYDRA world AU

The world changed the day that Steve Rogers went into the ice.

Troops that had been following his exploits across the Allied Nations lost hope and lost morale, thinking that if even a super soldier could be defeated then what was the good of them fighting? Conversely, the Axis Powers grew more confident, hailing the defeat of Captain America, and that became a symbol for them to rally around. Technically, the Nazi Party won that war, but they were only in power for a year before HYDRA grew tired of being merely a part of a whole and decided to subsume their former masters.

They, after all, had no real interest in eugenics or genocide, that was the way to rule a single country. They wanted world domination, and they got there through careful promises, through underhand dealings, and by convincing the public that the freedoms they were giving over were for the greater good. After all, how could HYDRA protect them without knowledge, without obedience?

Years turned into decades and what had begun as a tentative regime had become all-powerful and tyrannical as technology boomed and citizens were born into this new world order. Children were taught from a young age, scared with stories of the Soldier. A boogieman to most, a whispered secret of its actual existence to others, the Weapon sent in when all else had failed. At least fifteen organised rebellions had been quelled by its deadly presence alone, and now most feared to even try.

The Soldier was an obedient tool.

Until the day it disappeared.

It had been a fairly routine mission, just reconnaissance on a boarding school down in Texas to make sure that nothing subversive was being taught on the curriculum after rumours to the contrary had reached powerful ears. It had sat and stared down a scope for 72 hours and seen nothing, heard nothing, and so it left as ordered, neither disappointed or elated at not having to kill that day. Its next mission was to take out a tanker of supplies on the Arctic ocean, kill all souls aboard, and make it look as though one of their enemies to the East had done it.

Simple.

The Soldier didn't like the cold. It wasn't supposed to like or dislike anything, and so it carefully guarded that secret, but it didn't like the cold. It was reminiscent of storage, and of a place coated in snow that was synonymous with pain. But that dislike didn't cause any hesitation, and the Soldier dived into the frigid waters from its dinghy to swim toward the ship. But something stopped that progress. Something sighted under the water, something inside frozen ice. A face that caused more pain than even the freezing water, that made the Soldier believe its heart was about to stop dead. Something in its head broke, a reset button to the orders given, and suddenly nothing seemed more important than to collect that someone frozen in ice and protect him. Keep him.

It took nearly 40 hours to drag the ice floe to the surface and chip away enough to retrieve the body inside, and another 24 to get to shore. Even the Soldier's enhanced body was pushed to its limits from the prolonged exposure to the cold, and the extreme physical effort it took. But eventually the Soldier and its captive (Ste--?) were ensconced in a small abandoned building.

Steve would wake up naked, on the floor, and being stared at by a man all in black leather with a mask hiding his face.

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For just a moment, Steve's shoulders slumped as he felt the weight of those words. Tony Stark wasn't wrong, the whole world was different and the war he had to fight now was far greater than the one he had left behind. How could one man, supposedly dead, combat something that ruled most of the world with technology he could never have dreamed of?

But it was just for that moment, because then Steve's shoulders squared and his back straightened, determination radiating off him. He had never backed down from an opponent bigger than him, and he wasn't about to start now.

"Maybe so, but I'm not dead. So I reckon other things maybe aren't so written in stone either, like the world being a mess for good."

He paused, voice growing softer and sadder. "And you're wrong, I do know him. I know him better than I've ever known anyone, and he still knows me somewhere inside. Whatever they did to him, and whatever you call him now, a part of him is still Bucky Barnes. He ran from them to save me, that means something, and I'm not giving up on him."

“Bucky Barnes?” Why did all the crazy people he knew have so much alliteration in their names? Tony rubbed the sand from one palm onto his jeans and sat back on his heels to cradle the device and begin to work again. “Huh. So brainwashed. Not a robot. Doesn’t explain the anti-aging, though,” he thought out loud, before glancing in Steve’s direction again. “I was a teenager the first time I met him. He wore a mask but his eyes... people age the most around their eyes.” And they were hard but young. The same eyes. Tony still had nightmares about it when he didn’t drink enough to have no dreams at all.

There was a spark in the box and then a voice crackled from inside of it. “What happened? Protocol Alpha initiated.” It was a demanding sort of voice, hard and angry.

Tony rolled his eyes. “One-two-three-four-five. World’s worst password,” he muttered as an aside to Steve. “I had to blow everything up. The Soldier came. He dropped off a baby on the doorstep, rang the bell and left. Tell me where to go next.”

“What?!” There was some crackling that seemed to happen conveniently over the cursing. “Don’t have time for— Stay put. Tomorrow we’ll drop new coordinates.”

“Tomorrow? No. I’m not sleeping on the beach without supplies—“

“Too dangerous, Stark. Hold for further instructions.”

Tony cursed without the radio to bleep over it and threw the tethered box into the sand. “Great. You’re a ray of sunshine. So glad you came to visit with your old war buddy, Captain. No one is gonna want to hear that Captain America and the Winter Soldier used to be butt buddies. I’d keep that to yourself.”

The lack of ageing was something that Steve didn't understand either. But Bucky had been different after Azzano, maybe the torture that HYDRA had put him through had been more than just torture. Maybe... maybe he had some form of the serum too, it would explain how he had survived such a fall from that train.

But it was just a theory and he didn't feel particularly compelled to share it with Stark, who was proving to have properly inherited Howard's tendency to be irritating with apparently no effort.

"No, I won't. Maybe the more people hear about the atrocities that HYDRA are committing, the more they'll see something has to be done. And what's more atrocious than brainwashing someone? Now-- are you gonna tell me who you called or not? I'm getting kind of tired of being the last to know everything."

“You’re... what? Ninety years old? You might look good for your age but I’m going to guess you’ve never heard of WiFi or fiber optic cables.” Steve’s annoyed face more than made up for Tony’s frustration and it let the engineer release some of that into a smirk as he stood up.

Tony was not a man of impressive height. He was handsome, but no more so than other people. He was rich, but that didn’t do much for him now. It was the wit that he relied on, more than as just a mask. It was his status symbol. And making people feel small, intellectually, was how he proceeded through a frankly miserable and lonely life.

Steve’s stupid, handsome face and it’s stupid side eye expression, however, caused Tony to roll his eyes and step away from the sass.

“I called a helpline. Think Underground Railroad. The Resistance is made up of pockets of people who don’t know enough about the rest to keep everyone safe. I called for a pick up. They’re going to do a fly by of the island and monitor us to make sure we aren’t compromised before we move on. So sit tight, Cowboy. We’re stuck here until they think we aren’t a threat. And I mean what I said about the Soldier. No one in the Resistance is going to care. Most people lost a lot because of your friend. Maybe someone somewhere will decide he’s worth bringing in, but I’m pretty sure he’d kill all of us before that ever happened. It’s bad enough he knew to come to me. So I’m going to made pretend I still have a company and a house over there and tuck myself in.”

Steve knew all about underground railroads and resistances, he had helped a few out during the war that seemed like it was yesterday to him, and he had learned about them in school from during the days of slavery. He had never expected to be in need of one himself, though it was heartening to know that there were still people in this world who were trying to fight back.

"If you're so sure he'd kill us all, then explain to me why he saved me. Explain why he didn't hurt you even though he knew you had ties to the resistance. Explain why he let us go."

Steve was never going to give up on Bucky. Never.

"--And I need to know more about the people who might be coming to get us."

How is he ever supposed to get things sorted if he is always two steps behind?

“I don’t know. You tripped his program or something. For all I know, you’re actually bait and I’m about to get a whole lot of people killed. He says he’s on a mission, right? Getting you snuggled into the Resistance might be the mission. That’s why they have these protocols in place. They’re going to do their research and if one little thing seems off, they’ll probably kill us too. Better us then everyone else.”

Tony snorted again because, God, he hated the Soldier. The guy just bent him over a barrel and fucked him every which way. All he could do was throw his hands up and turn away, hands on narrow hips. At least he didn’t walk away from Steve. He just didn’t think he wanted to tell the guy much.

Then again, he didn’t know much either.

“I don’t know how most of it works for a reason. I’m just a connection to the HYDRA world. I’m not part of them. I just help out sometimes when the price is right.” Not true, but listening HYDRA operatives might not outright rip his skin off when they captured them both. “I’m sure if you don’t end up being a plague blanket, you’ll be their poster boy.”

It was disconcerting to think that they might be gunned down in their sleep if the resistance decided that they were too big of a risk, but Steve wasn't a coward so he just shrugged and finally deigned to sit himself down on the sand.

"How can you stand it? Saluting to them, toeing their line? They're evil."

How could the world have not fought back against it? How could they have let such an awful thing happen here, where it used to be the Land of the Free?

"This is-- this is everything I was fighting to keep from happening."

For Tony, there was never a before HYDRA. He couldn’t help but quirk an eyebrow at the blond, bending to dump the sand from his shoes. “If you’re asking for a history lesson, I can only give you the standard stuff we were taught in school. After the glorious defeat of Captain America, the world succumbed country by country to the many heads of HYDRA and a new prosperity came to all those who accepted HYDRA rule.”

It felt like a quote, especially with Tony using a sort of hifalutin bravado to his words.

“Mostly we memorized a whole lot of laws and the years they were passed. I didn’t learn a lot about the pre-war until I found some books in Dad’s bedroom. I grew up thinking HYDRA built the pyramids.”

Kill enough adults and raise enough kids as HYDRA and it’s all they knew, Steve.

He should know this, he'd seen it before with the Hitler Youth and how kids raised in the Nazi regime had literally been raised with those ideals, how some had even turned over parents or friends because their ideology was that strong. But he didn't want to know it, it was sickening.

"...so what changed?"

His voice was softer, some of the rage and sorrow from earlier finally draining out of him. He might be annoying, but Stark wasn't his enemy in this, he had to remember that and try not to jump down his throat so much.

"If you believe everything they taught you, how come you're helping the resistance out?"

Tony could shrug. He could play it off as not really helping anyone but himself. He was lining his pockets, a great capitalist ideal. But that wasn’t true. Wholesome Steve Rogers could and would very likely see right through that. With both of his shoes off, Tony laid back on the sand and tried not to think about the things living in there. He just knew he’d wake up covered in bites tomorrow.

“Dad and Mom helped to start it. They decided to live in HYDRA controlled society and they were siphoning off money and resources to the group until the Soldier tortured and killed them.” Steve probably wouldn’t want to hear this and if it was true that the Soldier was a live human being brainwashed into being a weapon, then Tony could feel for him. A little.

But he still hated and feared the Soldier.

“He and I had a very long chat, during which he convinced me to keep my nose clean. But I was always pretty bad at following rules.”

"I know."

His voice was as heavy as his heart. It still stunned him to think of Bucky as a killer, stone cold assassin. Sure, he had killed for his country in the army, but he had been a hero. The greatest hero Steve had ever known, one of the best fellas at the heart of himself.

How could he have been reduced to this?

"He told me that he killed Howard, I'm-- I'm so sorry for your loss. And I'm sorry for what happened to you, but you have to know that isn't who he really is. He's a victim in this, just as much as anyone."

“I don’t know what you want me to do about it.” Tony wasn’t a hero. He had no intention of trying to ‘save’ anyone but himself at this point. And he didn’t think he had much of a shot at it. If he could keep Steve alive, there might be a little hope there but Tony didn’t believe he was doing something marked clearly right from wrong. And he stood by his assumption of the possibility that delivering Rogers to the Resistance would wipe them out. “He probably is back with them already. He’s probably telling them what he did. They haven’t found us yet. Or they’re letting us get you to safety first.”

He didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“If your friend used to be like you before he turned into this... then he’s gone. Scooped out like ice cream. You just have some drippings left. But he’s not yours anymore. He’s theirs. If you want to do anything, just hope that when he comes back, he kills you quickly.”

A part of Steve, tiny and traitorous, was terrified that Tony was right. The blankness on Bucky's face drove spikes through his heart, and to think that HYDRA might have permanently scooped away the wonderful, brave, charismatic man his best friend had been was an ache in his very soul.

But the rest of him refused to believe it. He still believed in the soul, in God, and Bucky's soul was there. The essence of him. Steve would find a way to help him remember, help him get to safety.

"Real ray of sunshine you are, huh?" He remarked, sardonically. "Maybe you should look for the hope of something better, rather than the darkness of now."

“Hope?” Tony propped himself up in the sand on his elbows. “Hope for what? That we aren’t found out? That we survive another day or two? And then what? Plan A worked fine. We got here. There’s no Plan B though. There had never been a Plan B. Plan Bs don’t work.” Steve was acting like he had all the answers. Like he knew a better way to live—

—because he did. Tony rolled his eyes to cover any sign of revelation on his face.

“You are the real deal, aren’t you?” His face lost some of its stress lines as he laid back down, arms behind his head to gaze at the stars you couldn’t see in the city from all of the light pollution. “I see how you got so many people to follow you. Here’s some hope for you. I hope you do what it says on the tin.”

Other people might be offended at the doubt Tony had before, or puffed up at being recognised as some kind of hero. Steve just shouldered the responsibility that put on him like it was a duty; because it was, in his eyes. Erskine had given him this body to do good with, to protect and fight the good fight. What kind of man would he be if he didn't give his all to that?

"I will."

It was quiet and assured, determination rolling off him in waves.

"This might not be the America I remember, but this is still the country I signed up to protect and it seems to me that the people here need freedom and liberty even more than back in my day."

Evidently it was possible to admire and hate a person at the same time. Tony had never felt strongly about much in his life before that moment, but there was a simultaneous swelling of pride and loathing that he couldn’t quite get a grip on. He tried. As he laid in that sand and thought about the lives he had destroyed (because HYDRA would be all over his former employees tracking down whatever information they could) and about how much he missed having the rarely taken option of sleeping in his own bed, the cold air of night yanked him to sleep.

When he woke up again, it was to a nudge of his shoulder and Tony gravitated towards that touch in a way that made the other person pull back. Tony made some sort of annoyed sound but drifted partially back off until he heard a voice with a soft, not quite British twang at the edges. “Mr. Stark? Could you wake up now please?” Male. Now that wasn’t right....

Eyes opened immediately, Tony startled himself and the other man, sand kicked up by his quick reaction.

“Mohinder Suresh. I believe you called us?” He’d already met the Captain. Steve Rogers. It was a miracle to have done so but Mohinder didn’t believe his eyes or most of what he heard. He was here for a reason. He was here to be a scientist.

“Hail HYDRA?” Tony offered and Mohinder chuckled, white teeth flashing across caramel colored lips. He was a short man, Indian or Middle Eastern. He wore glasses. He seemed so non-threatening.

“Let’s hope not. I’ll need blood samples from you both.”

Steve had woken up as soon as Mohinder had arrived. The man had come on a boat, much more silent than a helicopter or plane, though Steve surmised that they had likely left a sea-to-water light aircraft off the coast ready to shuttle them back out again. The softly spoken Indian man was accompanied by another man wearing glasses and dressed in a purple shirt. He had introduced himself as "Bruce", but other than that he had said very little.

It was odd to him that they hadn't seemed to have brought any muscle with them. He would have expected a bodyguard, but both of these men seemed non-combat ready, and Bruce seemed downright shy.

He shook his head as Mohinder approached him, apologetic but firm. "I'm sorry, son, but I can't do that. My blood is something a lot of people want to get their hands on, and I made a promise a long time since that I wouldn't let that happen. You'll have to take me at my word."

Bruce frowned thoughtfully, but he didn't intervene yet. He was honestly hoping he wouldn't have to. Because no matter what Steve thought, they had brought muscle, and it was him. He had been a proud HYDRA scientist only a decade or so ago, trying to develop serums and investigate gamma radiation to advance the nation, but then things had gone a bit wrong. And along with the addition of the Other Guy, he had also got a good look at the seedy truth of HYDRA's world. He honestly thought that the resistance would have killed him if they could, but since that wasn't possible, they had embraced him as a useful tool.

Mohinder had been prepared for Steve to be a bit difficult. They had no idea if he was whom he said he was, but giving everyone the initial benefit of the doubt was the plan here. The situation was delicate. It was why Mohinder had been sent. He was nonthreatening. His ideas could be devastating, but no one here knew him. He’d been some small time scientist in a black lab coat working alongside Bruce until his accident. He’d left his cushy job not long after that for reasons it had taken the Resistance a lot longer than he liked to think about to accept.

It didn’t matter. He was here now, part of Team Alpha. This was certainly the highest profile intake he’d ever done, even without the mythical Steve Rogers as part of the deal, but he wasn’t nervous in the slightest.

“I believe you’re in luck then. We can work with a cheek scraping if you’d rather?” There hadn’t even been DNA testing in Steve’s time, let alone the cheek swab method. He probably didn’t even know that he could prove who he said he was with a few cells.

Steve looked a bit mystified at what scraping his cheek was supposed to do, but he didn't see the harm in it. He had always been told that it was his blood that contained the serum now, so that was what he had to keep safe from people who wanted to recreate it in a dangerous manner.

He nodded and obediently opened his mouth to let Mohinder draw the cotton swab on the inside of his cheek.

Bruce moved a little closer to Tony Stark. He was smaller in person than Bruce had imagined, given the intel they had on him and the work he did with weapons for HYDRA, but no less arrogant in his bearing. He smiled, short and quick. "We're going to have to ask you to leave your suit here, it's possible that its electronic signal could be traced."

Tony was staring. He wasn’t even trying to play it cool at the moment, just outright staring. It hadn’t been Mohinder that had gotten to him so much as Bruce fucking Banner, in the flesh, telling him to do something in a voice deceptively deep. He hadn’t expected that.

Despite his usual no touch rule, Tony couldn’t help himself. He thrust out a hand, covered in yellow and black specks of sand, and grinned almost moronically.

“I’ve always wanted to meet you,” he said. It was the first time he could genuinely say that about anyone. “Your papers on thermodynamics changed my life. Really a fan of the way you turn into a giant green rage monster, too.”

Bruce was highly unnerved by this, as he had never met Stark before and he shouldn't be aware of the Hulk. How had he got this knowledge? It had been kept very under wraps within HYDRA, as they were embarrassed at not being able to contain or control the beast they had accidentally helped create, and the underground resistance was silent about pretty much everything as a necessity for survival.

As a consequence he didn't take that hand, he merely blinked furiously for a second or two and then swallowed hard.

"Some things are best kept quiet, Mr. Stark."

“I know,” Tony replied, obviously put out. Mohinder wasn’t listening to any of this, he tended to get wrapped up in his work, but Steve was curious enough to tilt his head as he tried to figure out what it was everyone was so invested in when it came to one of the shiest men he’d ever met. “Why do you think they never found you?”

Tony turned a thumb towards himself and then dropped his hand all together. He was disappointed. Evidently the Resistance didn’t share with Bruce the fact that Tony managed to keep his location hidden and private all while ‘actively’ tasked with hunting Banner down.

He’d really thought that they could be good friends.

Mohinder put Steve’s sample in a small vial with liquid that turned from red to bright blue almost instantly and he exclaimed something in Hindi that Tony didn’t follow. “It is him!”

Alas for Tony's hopes, nobody had ever told Bruce how he had managed to stay so well hidden. Most people in the resistance, Mohinder excluded, tended to see him as just the container for the Hulk. They rarely utilised his scientific background, hardly trusted him with information, and never socialised with him when they weren't on missions.

Tony's words did make him frown in confusion and thought, but he would have to take that up with them later, since Mohinder had just made a very startling discovery. That it actually was Steve Rogers.

Steve looked around the three other men, totally nonplussed. "Is something wrong?"

Was that an excited exclamation, or a sign they were about to be shot?

“You ought to be dead!” Mohinder was too excited to revert back to English. He was used to speaking his native tongue with Bruce. He’d always thought the other man enjoyed hiding his words since Hindi was one of the cultural languages that HYDRA tolerated but it wasn’t one that was offered in their global universities for study like English, German, Italian, Russian and Japanese were. Bruce was an outcast. Mohinder, despite his associations, was less so, but he managed to alienate himself anyway with his die hard work ethic.

He showed Bruce the results, the physical vial in the readout on his scanner. There were artifacts of Steve Rogers cast all about, his drawings and his uniforms and so on. There had been a lock of hair found in Howard Stark’s possession (labeled neatly and included with before and after but long corrupted blood samples from the Project Rebirth kit that HYDRA had taken control from not long after the war). It had afforded Mohinder a complete look at Captain America from the inside out.

He was utterly unique. The markers had mutated towards an almost inhumanity. And now he was looking at the same sequence here in the palm of his hand.

Tony rolled his eyes. “I think you check out.”

Steve didn't speak Hindi, he was only really fluent in English with a few words of French and a smattering of German from the war. He supposed, with a sick sensation in his stomach, that he should get more used to German in this twisted future that had befallen the world.

But Mohinder's tone was easy enough to decipher, even if the words weren't, so he didn't need Tony's acerbic translation.

"Seems so."

Bruce touched Mohinder on the arm briefly, gently, to try and recall him back to the task at hand. They needed to be cautious and diligent, excitement wouldn't help anyone here.

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