Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 67

This chapter is a bunch of tying up of loose ends. All those little plot bunnies hopping around, breeding discontent and digging rabbit holes. Don't want our war horses to step in a plot hole and break their legs when we get to the action! And before everyone lynches me … the last scene at the end of Avengers revealed Thanos (an Eternal/Titan who worships Time/Death, brother of Eternity) was the one pulling the strings to get the Chitauri/Other (aka Mr. Hart) to invade Earth now that Loki failed.

Thanks everyone for reading!

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Chapter 67

The clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk of the MRI made it feel as though the inside of Steve's skull was going to burst. If the rabbit hole they had shoved him into to take the brain scan got any smaller, he swore to god he was going to suffocate! Perhaps he should have allowed them to sedate him, as they'd ended up having to do to Thor to get him to lay still. Of course, to affect the metabolism of either an Asgardian or a super-soldier, you needed enough sedative to put a small, third-world country to sleep. Breathe. Just breathe. This would have been so much easier if he were still a ninety pound weakling. At least then his body would not have touched the sides of the narrow tube, cutting off what little fresh air could get inside. Breathe! If he had survived Doctor Erskine's super soldier machine, he could survive this!

The clamoring stopped. Oh thank god!

"We're all done here," Bruce Banner's voice came over the small speaker embedded in the machine. The narrow bed slid out, giving him his first glimpse of light. He sat up and self-consciously pulled shut the hospital johnny. There was nothing like having a bunch of strangers look into your noggin … or your uncovered backside … to make you feel exposed.

"Well?"

"Count Rugen was right," Bruce said. "You have the same brain physiology as Thor."

Steve glanced at the wall, hiding the rush of emotions that made him choke with joy, until he was able to compose himself. She was still alive! His wife was still alive! And somehow she had found a way to communicate with him. He took a deep breath, his hand over mouth to capture the exhalation that threatened to turn into tears. Joy had no place in his life until she was safe.

"Speakest thee in English, please?" Thor said.

"It means he did it!" Doctor Nyi's stout form jiggled with excitement. "Doctor Erskine replicated whatever happened when your species evolved from ours."

"We are brothers!" Thor clasped his forearm and pulled him in for a hefty bear hug, slapping him on the back. With the All Father now out of his Odinsleep, ancient questions the Asgardians had always had about their own origins were beginning to seep from Asgard to Midgard. The long-lived Asgardians had evolved here. On Earth. 'Licked out of the ice by a primordial cow.' Whatever that meant. The Asgardians didn't know, either.

"Great," Steve said. "So how does this help me get my wife back?"

A series of images came into his mind. Thanos. A purple-faced creature who worshipped Death. Time. Destroyer of worlds. The Other was a minion of Thanos. It had been Thanos, operating through the Other,aka Mr. Hart, who had recruited Loki to invade Earth.

Steve glanced up at his grey-skinned alien friend, now freed from the bowels of the Triskelion and looking very much like any other scientist in his white lab coat and slacks. He had been instinctively communicating with the creature all along, mistaking the subconscious images the creature sent to communicate it was not a threat for his own intuition. What Doctor Erskine's serum had coaxed his brain to do naturally, to strengthen an untapped genetic potential most humans possessed to communicate telepathically, the Chitauri were doing via their nanovirus, selectively rewriting part of the genetic code of any species with lingering genetic traces of Eternal DNA.