Frail heart

Ontogenesis

Chapter three

Underground bunker, Italy

"What do you mean they took him?!"

The Hydra agents all cower in fear at their commander's booming voice, fumbling over their words trying to explain the situation and keep him calm. "Avengers, sir, they just took him.", the commander pinches the bridge of his noise, taking a deep breath.

"How did those incompetent fools take my best soldier? HOW?!", the commander grabs one of the soldiers by his collar, staring into his eyes with a deadly glare, and when the agent claims to not know how they did it, the commander pushes him away, reaching behind his back to pull out a gun and shoot the guy. The other agents step back in fear, eyes drawn to the unmoving man on the ground as the commander speaks.

"Every single one of you will suffer the same fate if you do not find me my soldier, GO!"

Avengers Tower, New York

"His vitals are stable, but he shouldn't wake for at least another day.", Doctor Cho states as she removes her gloves, turning to Steve and Natasha as they watch the soldier, his hands and legs securely restrained to a medical bed. Steve wishes they didn't have to go to such extreme measures, but the guy could wake any minute and start attacking them all, so it needed to be done.

"Did you find anything... irregular about his blood? Any sign of a serum like mine?", Steve questions.

"Nothing yet but we can't really do anything other than draw blood and take a few skin samples right now."

Natasha frowns, "Why not?"

"Well, besides it being illegal because we don't have consent, if we were going to actually find anything, we'd have to do a full body scan and draw a lot more blood but with his current condition, it wouldn't be safe. We wouldn't know what was hurting him or if he was losing too much blood, he appears to heal rather quickly also, and this prevents us from knowing any true damage that's been done to him in the past. Personally, I think our best bet would be to take a psychological approach first, break down the wall hydra put in his mind and get him to admit what they did."

Steve nods slowly, thanking the doctor, "I'll talk to Stark and Banner, see what tests they can run for the mean time but in terms of getting him to talk... I think that might be out of our hands."

//

Upstairs in the living area, the remaining Avengers converse about their super soldier sized issue, pitching in ideas on what to do when he wakes up. Clint has taken to staying silent, claiming he was 'on a break' much to the other's displeasure considering he always saw what they failed to.

"He's going to wake up wanting to kill us all, even more than he did before, considering we strapped him to a bed.", Sam adds.

"You never know, he might like that sort of thing.", Tony smirks, twirling a pen between his fingers.

Everybody throws him unamused glances and he laughs, sitting up, "Lighten up guys, we have him now and there's no way he'll escape those restraints, I know because I made them myself."

Bruce sighs at Tony's confidence, placing his head in his hands as he thinks, "I wouldn't be so confident about that, Tony."

Tony chuckles, frowning, "Why's that?"

"He hasn't even woken up yet, for all we know he could tear those cuffs apart like they're nothing."

"That's a fair observation Brucie, but he won't. Jarvis will alert us of any movement from him and any jumps in his heart rate and if he gets too rowdy, we'll sedate him."