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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"No."

There was nobody else there but him, no "friends" as Tony put it, nobody setting up a gallows further down the beach. He released his grip on the other man to let him turn around, for there was no threat to him even if he wasn't held. The thin light of the moon showed that the Soldier was coated head to toe in blood and gore, bits of bone and brain matter between the plates of his metal arm, and his hair slicked down by blood. It was impossible to tell if any was his.

"I can find anyone," he said, which was all the explanation he would give as to how he got there.

His brow furrowed in mild confusion before he continued, still speaking in the same very soft and mild voice, incongruous to the statements provided. "I killed my handlers when they tried to condition me. I don't know why."

The confession caused Tony's breath to quicken, his heart pounding in his chest. He could smell death, sickening in it's cloying sweetness. The Soldier looked utterly mad, streaked in muck and brown bits. If Tony had been hungry earlier, he'd be vomiting.

What he did, however, was back up in the sand, the wet grit sticking to the soles of bare feet as the cold waves licked at his toes.

Tony wasn't cut out of the same cloth as Steve and there was no pleasant, gentle coddling to come. "You killed your handlers because you're brainwashed. And you don't want to be brainwashed anymore." Shit, he hoped he was right about that. He hoped that this broken weapon wasn't going to self destruct. "I get it. Rogers is going to get it too. But you can't look like a massacre when you tell him. You have uh...." He wriggled his fingers. "You have bits of handler in your hair."

There was no reaction to having the gore painting his skin called out. The Asset had been covered in worse, and felt no discomfort from the sticking of the drying blood over his skin. The few wounds he had would heal, he had assessed them himself and none would prove ultimately fatal.

Why would his appearance matter to Rogers?

That tiny frown intensified, giving the Soldier a simultaneously dangerous and innocently bewildered expression.

"I brought something to assist in the mission."

Remember? The mission that was protect Steve Rogers, somehow given to himself and then buried too deeply to refuse. The Soldier drew a small set of wires and circuit boards and other electricals from his pocket, something Tony might intimately recognise as the heart of JARVIS. It was coated in rubble dust where the Asset had dug it out of the ruins of the tower, and had specks of blood down one side.

Tony's mouth hung open for a moment, his head tilting, before he reached out to gently take the device from the Soldier. He even clucked his tongue in his mouth, huffing a little in a way that might sound more like a coo or a sigh. JARVIS. He didn't mean to find any of this touching, but he was touched.

His work wasn't dead. JARVIS was alive and not in the hands of HYDRA. It meant more to him than he could actually express, if the way his face kept contorting proved it.

"This... This might just save us," Tony told the Soldier, holding the device to his chest like a child. "But you still need to wash that crud off of you."

He relinquished the prize without hesitation, even though everything JARVIS was would be of great interest to his owners-- former owners. He hated this new mission vehemently, it caused vertigo and feelings of fierce confusion, nothing like any mission before it. And even worse, he was incapable of finding the end, the way to stop it. And so he was helpless to merely hand this over and take a half step back.

Again, he didn't address exactly what Stark had said. Why did blood matter? Why was it so important he be clean?

"Don't tell him where you got it."

"He won't even know what it is," Tony said at first before he realized what the Soldier meant. "You can't just leave." He'd put his foot down about that. "You're the key to safe passage. And you can't kill anyone that comes to talk to us either."

Trying to give orders to a stoic man-child covered in gore was insanity. Tony was half expecting puppies to come running out of the bushes or a giant Statue of Liberty to come wading over for a tea party, it was just that crazy right now.

"This is part of the damned mission, got it?"

There was an obvious few moments where the Soldier digested the order from Stark, weighing it against his inner mission and determining if the other man held rank to give him orders, before his expression shut down. The bare flickers of humanity, of confusion and pain, were gone behind shuttered stoicism.

"I'll be watching."

Which is definitely not at all worrying and nightmare inducing.

"He's not to know."

It was part of the confusion, but something about seeing Rogers' stupid giant face on top of his stupid giant body just made everything that much more fractured.

"You're the worst," Tony said, basically to the wind, as the Soldier disappeared into the shadows. He didn't even know how he did it when the moon was so bright and reflected on the water. It took just one glance towards the tent on Stark's behalf for him to leave and there was no getting him back.

Tony was absolutely not going to be calling him either.

Hell. No. He hissed against the wind and then stalked his way back towards the tent. He was surprised Rogers slept through all of that, but there that damned blond was, still passed out, breathing evenly, blankets bunched over one leg and dragging in the sand. Tony bent to cover him better and then dropped on his own cot, slipping JARVIS under his lumpy pillow.

He wouldn't be sleeping any more tonight, that was for sure.

Steve's dreams were of Bucky. Of a time long ago, when they had been little kids sitting on a fire escape and passing a cigarette between them. He had coughed so much that blood had flecked his lips, but he had wanted so much to look as cool as Bucky had, with one of his Pa's cigarettes hanging from his lips effortlessly. He still didn't know that cigarettes were supposedly bad for people now.

When he woke with the dawn, yawning and stretching, he looked over at Tony in concern. The man looked godawful, pale with dark smudges under his eyes as if he hadn't slept a wink.

"...hey, you okay?"

‘I’m watching you.’ No more frightening phrase had ever been said to him and now he couldn’t get it out of his head. Everyone was watching. The Soldier. The Resistance. There was no where for him to go, still under constant watch even if his whole world was gone. Just his luck.

“We are stuck on an island?” Thankfully there really was something wrong here for Tony to draw on so that he didn’t come right out and tell Steve that he had been visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. “And we don’t have any prosecco for mimosas with brunch.”

Speaking up about the device he had been given would alert both watching parties so Tony could not even hint to Steve about it.

“Other than that, and the gnats in the sand biting me all night, I’m fine.”

Steve didn't quite believe that was all there was to it, but there were a lot of reasons why Stark might have had a bad night that were too personal to talk about, and all of them started with him and Bucky showing up to the Tower.

He sat up properly and scrubbed his hands through his hair, brow furrowing as super soldier senses kicked in.

"Uh, are you hurt?"

He can smell blood and the faintest tinge of gunpowder in the air.

“Yeah I’m hurt,” Tony snapped, before trying to dial it back. “We’re stuck here with MREs and a tent and pretty soon, we are going to lose their interest or HYDRA will find us.” He didn’t sound hysterical, but that could change at any moment, he knew that. He could feel that. His voice was rising a little too high in his throat. It wasn’t Steve’s fault, not on paper, but Tony needed someone to blame.

He left the tent to head towards the fire Steve made the night before and knelt down next to it to add more provided kindling and set up a pot of coffee. For a rich kid, he thankfully knew how to improvise. It helped that he was a genius and that was pretty much his life’s work of course.

Trying to avoid answering questions was a fool’s errand. Twice in as many days, the Soldier had come along to fuck him without lube or a reach around and he was getting tired of it.

"Tony..."

Steve looked utterly unimpressed. He did feel for the other man, he could recognise that the fear in his voice and the hysteria in his eyes were real. But Tony wasn't a dumb man, he knew that wasn't what Steve was asking.

"I can smell the blood."

He was aware how creepy that could sound, but he couldn't help his super soldier senses and it was better that all the cards were on the table.

"It wasn't there last night."

Smell the blood? Tony's reaction was to hug himself, situating himself as far against the curve of the tent as possible. Was Steve like a shark? Was the Soldier? Did they splice fish DNA into their genomes? Tony tried to imagine Rogers with a shark fin but it wasn't as funny a thought as he would have hoped.

"I had a bad night so that's to be expected," Tony said, teeth clenched together so tightly that he could feel his jaw ache. "How about this...you don't ask me questions that aren't relevant to our situation and I don't have to be cute with you?"

And he was pretty cute. Of that he was certain.

"I'm pretty sure it's relevant when I wake up and smell gunpowder and blood."

In fact, he was fairly sure that literally everything was relevant right now, when all they had was each other on this tiny spit of beach, not knowing if they were going to be rescued or left to die.

"A bad night doesn't usually equal that, in my experience. Not unless there was someone else involved."

"You don't know what people are like in the future," Tony snapped. He was being unreasonable but Steve wasn't backing down. It was starting to get to him, enough that he was on the verge of having an epic melt down/storm out fest.

He was a big man baby. He'd be able to do that. Steve p[robably realized that by now too and wouldn't be too surprised.

"How about I let you know if I see anything that ends up being your business and I'll fill you in then?" Drop it Steve. Please.

Steve wasn't an idiot, the serum had enhanced his ability for reasoning and strategy as well, and he hadn't exactly been a moron before he met Erskine, no matter what Bucky had liked to tell people. And wasn't that a sharp ache in his chest, thinking of Bucky and how he was still alive out there somewhere.

"Someone came in the night."

It wasn't a question.

"So either the resistance told you not to tell me, or you've been passing information along to someone else. There can't have been a fight, I wouldn't have slept through that. So-- someone wounded? Damn it, Stark, talk to me."

“It’s more fun to watch you try to puzzle it out,” Tony replied. “There’s nothing to be concerned about. We are being monitored. If they thought I was passing information—. Hey. If you’re so enhanced and last night didn’t wake you up, that’s not on me.”

His grimace was telling, dark and tired.

“Drop it. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. “

For a brief heartstopping minute, he considered that it might have been Bucky come back. But he discarded that as an idea almost at once, because surely Bucky would have woken him and not Tony Stark. If he had come as himself, if he had remembered, then he would have wanted Steve. And if he had come as the Soldier, then neither would be alive to be having this conversation now.

Besides, surely not even glowering and petulant Tony Stark would be enough of a jerk to hide the fact his best friend had come calling.

"Gee, thanks," he grumbled sarcastically. "I'll just sit over here and hope that happens before danger drops on my head."

“That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth.” Tony has some work to do but he couldn’t do it with Steve there. Have to explain everything would alert the resistance and give away trade secrets. Alienating Steve, though, wasn’t the wisest move either.

He needed Steve to talk, not about Tony but about himself. Steve was just being a piece of shit about it.

Standing up carefully, JARVIS hidden under his pillow, Tony sighed and tapped the faint glow in the center of his chest.

“Arc reactor. Not getting into it. Sorry it sometimes smells. Gives me a faint coconut taste in my mouth to be honest. Can you stop now?”

Fortunately for Tony's deceptions, Steve had so little idea of what an arc reactor really was and how it worked, that for all he knew it could have been causing the smell of blood and gunpowder. Though that didn't explain why Stark had been so reticent about sharing that information, unless he was simply being contrary for the sake of it.

He sighed and shrugged his shoulders, though there was a stubborn set to his jaw that said he might stop talking about it for now but he wouldn't forget.

"Fine. So how long do you think they plan to keep us here? Because if it's longer than another day, we should just move ourselves, it's not safe to stay in one place too long."

“Where do you want to go?” A pair of dark eyes scan the beach from one end to the other. “Do you want to drag the tent a few hundred feet and see if the sunset is better over there?”

There had to be a way off of the island, however. Unless the Soldier was a vampire or could turn into mist, there had to be an explanation for how he was coming and going. A motorboat they would have heard. It didn’t dawn on him that super soldiers could likely swim for vast distances and even if it did, he’d have to picture James punching sharks that came up on him in the water. And that would bring this nonsense full circle.

“This island isn’t on a map, Captain. Purposefully.” He’d kept it free of HYDRA for decades. “We’re safe here. Probably. Except from boredom.”

"Fine, then even if we're safe, what then?"

Steve stood up, restless energy thrumming under his skin. He wasn't the sort of man who was built for inaction, for waiting around on other people's pleasure. He was the sort of man who needed to take action against injustice when he saw it, and the whole damn world was injustice now.

"We can't just sit here for the rest of our lives, safe on our little spit of beach while HYDRA keep control of the world."

As much as storming across the beach to no where would be, dramatically kicking up sand in his wake, Tony couldn’t just let that little bit of misplaced patriotism go.

“Woah, hang on, Encino Man. You think you can change sixty plus years of the way the fucking world is...? Before your little war, there was segregation and poverty... now there isn’t. We can’t go back anywhere, Rogers. You can take down HYDRA. Even the Resistance knows that. It’s too good for too many people. All we can do is carve out a place for ourselves to be different.”

Tony was under no disillusions here. He grew up in this world. He didn’t always like it but from what he gathered, that was pretty normal throughout history. Toppling HYDRA was impossible. They were too big. Too strong. HYDRA would always be in control until something bigger and badder and stronger took over.

And he didn’t care if the Resistance heard that. They needed sense knocked into them too.

It seemed to Steve as though there was something deeply and inherently wrong about HYDRA being good for the world in any way. But if there truly wasn't any segregation, if there wasn't any poverty, then how could he deny those were good things? He knew poverty, knew it intimately in the way that only someone who had lived through the Depression with no money could know it.

He would never want anyone to live that way.

For a moment he just sat, shoulders slumped, before shaking his head with determination. "That doesn't mean the world doesn't need to be changed. I bet some people said the same when there were slaves, that the country was prosperous and life was good. But things can change, whole establishments can change, and the few good things can be carved out and taken along for the ride. I'm not going to give up."

HYDRA world AU

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