Work Text:
1943
When Howard Stark saw it in the preliminary scans of Steve’s blood, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. Steve himself, was on the bond circuit. It seemed a waste to Howard, putting a super-soldier on a stage to sell war bonds, but it wasn’t in his control. Besides, Phillips was an experienced soldier. He must have his reasons for allowing it.
Unsure of what he was seeing, Howard called one of his co-workers to take a look – a TECHNIT engineer called Theo. The other man frowned. ‘I’m no doctor, but I got a feeling that’s wrong.’
So did Howard – a gut feeling that was screaming at him.
The two of them took the blood down to medical. They told the first doctor who was free that they both felt there was something off about the blood. The doc quickly put some of the blood on a slide and slid it under the microscope. He studied it for a moment and then he frowned before he looked up.
‘I think you’re right,’ he said. ‘There’s definitely something wrong. I’ll get a team and we’ll take a closer look.’
That done, the two men returned to their lab.
That was until, the next morning, Phillips called both of them to his office. He was looking over a report of some kind.
‘You wanted to see us, Colonel?’ Howard asked, knocking as they walked in.
‘Yeah.’ He slid a file across the desk. ‘That’s Rogers’ medical report from when he was trying to enlist, what do you make of it?’
Theo, being closest to it, picked it up and opened it. He flicked through five pages. ‘You’d think if he was going to be lying about everything else, he’d lie about his name too. Which one is most accurate.’
‘The first one. Apparently, the first time he didn’t realise how much his health affected his chances of getting into the army.’
Theo flicked back to the first page. ‘Household contact to tuberculosis?’
Alarmed, Howard yanked the file out of Theo’s hand and looked himself. What he didn’t realise at the time – what he’d think of later – was that Theo released the file as he grabbed it, as if he’d been expecting it. Sure enough, there it was: Household contact to tuberculosis. What the hell was he doing trying to enlist with that sitting there?
Suddenly, Howard became very afraid of what he was about to be told.
‘His mom died of it in ’36,’ Phillips said. ‘She was a nurse, so I see no way he didn’t know he was a carrier.’
‘Am I right in assuming the serum didn’t cure it, sir?’ Theo asked.
‘No. It exacerbated it. All it needs to do is activate and we’ve got an epidemic that’ll put the Spanish Flu to shame.’
Theo nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘This man tried to enlist five times despite being repetitively told he was unfit. He’s now got an enhanced body and all his previous illnesses are gone. He will not listen to us telling him that he’s time bomb of contamination.’
Sad, but true. ‘And if we keep him in the bond circuit, we risk the TB activating and being unleashed on the civilian population.’ That idea twisted Howard’s stomach.
‘Exactly,’ Phillips said. ‘Seeing as you men were the ones who brought it to our attention, I was hoping you might have some bright ideas. As it stands, our best option is to have him disappeared or popped off before that TB activates.’
It was clear Phillips didn’t want to do this, but he was thinking of the potential casualties that he needed to avert.
Howard wracked his brain for another alternative. Without Erskine, there was no way to know how to make a counteractant. Theo suddenly cleared his throat.
‘I may have an idea, but it’s a bit...unconventional.’
‘Yes?’ Phillips asked.
***
The man Theo brought to the conference room was tall and middle aged with greying dark hair and brown eyes.
‘Dr. Jasper Mortimer,’ he presented him as.
Theo had been very tight-lipped on how Mortimer could help, but he was confident he would once the situation had been explained to him. Phillips had agreed upon looking over Mortimer’s professional history. Some doctors would occasionally slip and say things they weren’t supposed to. Not only was Mortimer a top-of-the-line medical practitioner and surgeon, but he had made none of these indiscretions.
So, the situation was explained to Mortimer. He was handed the data and he read through them, occasionally pushing his glasses back up his nose and asking for extra details.
When the debrief was done, Mortimer sat back in his chair.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but my methods do not go beyond these four walls.’
‘Is that your only condition?’ Phillips asked.
‘It is.’
‘Then you have a deal.’
‘Excellent.’ Dr. Mortimer stood. ‘As Theo said, my methods are unconventional. It would, perhaps, be better to show you rather than tell you.’
As he said this, Theo carefully pulled a box out of his jacket pocket. Then, of all things, he produced an egg from the box and set it on the table in front of Mortimer. The doctor held his hand over it. For a second nothing seemed to happen. Then the egg hatched. The shell cracked and a tiny chick made its way out.
Not so strange in of itself.
What happened next was though.
The chick grew. It got bigger, its feathers changed colour, and it’s “cheep cheep cheep” turned into “cluck cluck cluck”. A tiny chick turned into a large chicken before their very eyes. It looked around the room, probably unaware of the shock in the room. Theo looked on the verge of laughing so they must’ve been quite a sight of bug-eyed men with their jaws hanging open.
‘Biology manipulation,’ Mortimer said, lifting the chicken and looking it over. ‘I can manipulate the cells of any living thing. Usually I use it to alleviate or nullify the symptoms of my patients.’
Howard was proud to say he was the first to recover. ‘I guess that explains your professional record.’
Phillips was the next. ‘And how does this work with Rogers?’
‘Simply put, I’ll be able to hold his TB in its dormant state,’ Mortimer said. ‘Regrettably, it is one of those diseases I cannot cure by flicking my wrist. I can only hold it down so he doesn’t infect the masses. But, I’m afraid, one day I will have to let go.’
‘What happens then?’ Theo asked, seemingly only for the benefit of the rest of the men in the room.
‘Well, when a disease is tampered with, it generally triggers it.’
‘So,’ one of the other doctors said, recovering himself, ‘the second you let go, his TB activates?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Dr. Mortimer said. ‘So I would recommend, when I do release him, he be in a secure quarantine facility.’
Phillips nodded. ‘We’ll have you taken to him so you can do your...stuff.’
‘As you wish, but first...’ He looked at the chicken. ‘...where’s the kitchen. I’m gonna drop of the chicken. They can use it for the eggs or the meat. I don’t really care.’
Buc-buc!
2012
‘Sir,’ JARVIS called his attention.
‘Yeah.’ Tony was going over the finishing touches before they got ready to activate the new Stark Tower.
‘I’ve been forced to quarantine S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters.’
Tony looked up curiously. He’d heard that they’d found Cap in the ice recently, but that was about it. They hadn’t really done anything interesting since. And Tony ought to know. He’d had JARVIS watching them. ‘Why?’
‘All of the personnel seem to have developed a highly contagious illness that has all of them coughing up blood,’ JARVIS said. ‘I am unsure of the cause and so I deemed it wise not to let anyone in or out until the situation is in hand.’
‘Everyone?’ Tony asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
Tony sat up and moved to the interface. ‘Okay, let’s see what’s going on in there.’
***
Once they got the data from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s medical facility, Tony found himself flying out to Calcutta. His reasons were simple. He was an engineer. He didn’t know much about the squishy sciences but he had reason to believe that Dr. Bruce Banner did. So, leaving JARVIS to sift through all available databanks, Tony went to Banner, because he figured Banner would be uncomfortable being suddenly picked up by the rich guy.
He wasn’t wrong, either. Banner had viewed him with surprise and then suspicion, the question clear on his face.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
As soon as Tony explained and handed him the tablet, Bruce sat down to look over the data. As he’d said to Bruce, S.H.I.E.L.D. were a pain in the neck but it wasn’t good to have that many people dying. Tony was content to sit with his old Game Boy while he waited. The other scientist muttered to himself as he worked on the tablet.
Finally, Banner looked up. Tony put his Game Boy away.
‘All of the evidence points to a particularly savage strain of tuberculosis. It’s working much quicker than any I’ve even ever heard of before. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone in there was already dead. But I’d still keep the building in lockdown. I can’t see where it came from and without knowing that, the odds are it will continue to spread. I’d like a look at more data...’
So Tony invited him to the Tower to look at the data in full.
Bruce was reluctant, but looked down at the data on the tablet and conceded. Once they arrived, they could really get to work. They’d been at it for about four hours – barely a workout for Tony – when JARVIS spoke up.
‘Sir, Dr. Banner, I apologise for interrupting but I believe I have found the source of the outbreak.’
Bruce looked up, surprised.
‘Yeah, J?’ Tony asked.
‘I discovered a transcript of a meeting that took place in 1943 in your father’s personal files, sir,’ JARVIS said, ‘as well as in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s databanks.’
Interesting how much of dad’s stuff was in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s databanks, Tony mused to himself as JARVIS flicked the transcript up.
Then he absorbed the conversation and the explanation delivered to the long-dead Dr. Jasper Mortimer.
Oh...shit.
Yeah, that explained it.
Bruce, having come up behind him to read the same transcript, let out a breath. ‘That explains it. If Steve Rogers is still in that building...’ He shook his head. ‘I sure hope it can hold him because if he gets out the same thing will happen to the rest of New York, especially if we can believe that statement.’ He pointed to a particular line.
...Rogers ignored the doctors every time they told him he was unfit to serve...
Tony had to agree. If he ignored doctors telling him what he didn’t want to hear then, he’d certainly do it now.
‘What I want to know is why S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t take precautions if they had this,’ Tony said.
‘Sir, the records indicate that they came into possession of this transcript only in 1991, shortly after your father died.’
Alarms went in Tony’s head and his eyes narrowed. ‘Really?’ He put the rest of it together. ‘So this was probably glanced at by some agent who thought Mortimer was the only point of interest.’
‘One would assume. However, this particular enhanced had his body cremated after he died so they could gain nothing from this except for the fact that he’d once existed.’
‘Really?’ Bruce demanded incredulously. ‘So S.H.I.E.L.D. just ignored that this guy had had to hold a case of TB in its dormant state? That he’d openly said it’d activate the moment he let go?’
The familiar sass entered JARVIS’s tone. ‘I suppose S.H.I.E.L.D. aren’t as all-knowing as they think they are.’
Tony glanced up. ‘You actually found this very quickly, J.’
‘Yes, well, I got an anonymous email that gave me the filename. I’m still tracking the source.’
‘Okay, you do that.’ Tony pulled his phone out of his back pocket. ‘I better drop a line to Pepper. The press has noticed the locked-down building so we better tell them what we know before the riots start.’
‘Shall I prepare copies of the transcript, sir?’
‘Yup.’
***
After the press conference, in which the transcript was released, the locked-down building was given a wide berth. The CDC had it fenced off and prepared to send in specialists to deal with the issue. And the enhanced were suddenly being looked at with brand new eyes. This one man had the power to do anything he wanted to the human body and what had he chosen to do? He’d chosen to heal people.
Dr. Jasper Mortimer was post-humously declared a war hero.
People began to divorce Steve Rogers from their idol, Captain America. After all, Captain America was a hero. He was a beacon of righteousness and morality. Steve Rogers was a selfish idiot who decided his potential dormant TB wasn’t a problem in an era before antibiotics. Hell! A lot of people in the medical profession actually stepped forward to explain how TB was still a problem. The army even began talking about finding someone else to slip into the Captain America role.
It was just a costume, after all – a part that people wanted to see played well.
Any good soldier could do it.
The agents that hadn’t been in the building scrambled for damage control, but they were understaffed and unprepared. And Tony Stark’s AI was absolutely tearing into their databanks without any hackers to stop it. A few days later, Stark Industries and Tony Stark sued what was left of S.H.I.E.L.D. for the return of all of Howard Stark’s research and technology, which they had stolen after his death.
There was the brief interruption of a pair of alien brothers fighting on the roof of Stark Tower, which was quickly handled by Iron Man and War Machine.
That was neither here nor there.
Soon the CIA and the FBI were joining JARVIS in hacking into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s database. JARVIS was the one who found the file and quietly slipped it to the FBI. Even though it was information pertaining to Sir, JARVIS knew a: it had to be reported as soon as possible and b: the FBI would inform Sir in a professional and, hopefully, compassionate manner. He needn’t even see that video.
Sure enough, the Winter Soldier’s existence was quickly confirmed in the intelligence community, with the video being circulated around the various agencies as evidence, and a couple of agents had set up an appointment with Sir and informed him of the truth of his parents deaths.
It was hard to watch Sir freeze, to see the tears building in his eyes as he was informed that the accident was no accident at all. The agents patiently waited as he collapsed back (he would break down with his friends around him later, because JARVIS immediately informed them as soon as the agents arrived). It was even harder to listen to Sir’s questions to the agents. Who had done this? Why was it covered up? Who knew about it?
They left with a promise that the FBI and the CIA were coordinating to bring the Winter Soldier in.
(It was around this time, JARVIS believed, that Steve Rogers died of his tuberculosis and the medical team were able to start decontaminating the building.)
JARVIS soon after found a report made in the days of the SSR where Peggy Carter had been taken to task for tipping out a vial of Rogers’ blood that Howard Stark had been in possession of. The report made one thing clear.
‘Agent Carter,’ he told Sir, Miss Potts, Col. Rhodes, Mr. Hogan, and Dr. Banner, ‘was never cleared to know about Dr. Mortimer’s intervention. She believed that the late Mr. Stark was trying to line his own pockets, when, in fact, he was looking for answers in the blood to the problems that encapsulated Steve Rogers. In fact, it seems her poor treatment of enhanced was really put into motion after the death of Col. Phillips and behind your father’s back, sir.’
The Index and the Raft had been more than just unpleasant to discover.
Many of the former inmates had been welcomed onto SI properties and provided with therapists, medical aid, new jobs (all free of charge), and financial compensation for their trauma.
JARVIS had found evidence that when Agent Carter first went looking for enhanced, it was Phillips who waved her away from the ones who didn’t want anything to do with her. It was he who reprimanded her for suggesting they needed to be under control (specifically hers, from the looks of those reports), and Howard Stark was clearly kept unaware after Phillips passed away, but he surely would have protested just as loudly.
After all, Jasper Mortimer had needed no minding.
***
Tony leaned back against the couch in his penthouse.
All the shit was finally over with. The building that had once been S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters was being demolished and then built into a recreational park. The former agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were being tried (and convicted in a lot of cases) for their flagrant disregard for human rights and life.
He had to say, the look on Natashalie’s face when the court’s response to her sneering, contemptuous attitude towards her charges was to sentence her to a lengthy prison sentence was priceless.
The loss of S.H.I.E.L.D. had also blown HYDRA’s cover and then it’d only been a matter of time before they caught the Winter Soldier. Tony could appreciate the fact that they guy had been thoroughly dehumanised and brainwashed, so he didn’t have control over his own actions. It didn’t bring his parents back, but it did give him closure on the matter. To be honest, Tony would have been disappointed in the system if they hadn’t ordered the rehabilitation therapy for him.
Shortly after it started, names of the Winter Soldier’s victims started to be released to the public.
So, Tony was sure, underneath the weapon there was a decent human being.
Didn’t mean he wanted to spend time with the guy, but he could appreciate it.
Tony’s father’s work – all of it, and not just what was convenient for Fury to give him – was returned to him. A lot of the stuff the old man had been thinking of, Tony liked the look of. He might even be able to work on that.
The enhanced community was doing well too. Dr. Mortimer had done a lot, by doing that one little thing, to gain public favour for them. His day job probably didn’t hurt either. They were even introducing laws to protect the enhanced from being made into human weapons or locked up without trial.
And so, sitting on his sofa, with all his friends around him and watching a Gilligan’s Island marathon, Tony felt calm for the first time in months.
Things were going to get better.