Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 64

Chapter 64

Steve glowered through the one-way glass of the holding area. Slow. Too slow. At the rate they were going, they wouldn't ever find Bernice. The sound of the doorway opening and shutting behind him did little to divert his intense concentration on every nuance of body language of the man responsible for kidnapping his wife.

"He's told us everything he knows," Nick Fury said.

Steve noted the frown on Fury's face. It was about as close as the fierce SHIELD director got to expressing sympathy.

"He knows more." Steve clamped down on the butterfly of fear which fluttered in his chest. "He has to know more."

The words were little more than wishful thinking and he knew it. Although Mike had vague recollections of his time as a human drone, he was even less aware of what his body had been doing while somebody else had been in the driver's seat than Jacquie had been. The only lead he had been able to give them was a secret room in a previously unknown sub-basement of the American Radiator building. They had found eight more 'beds' similar to the ones found in the cave in Ambryn and what appeared to be cryogenic freezers. All empty. Whoever had been detained there had been moved long before they had stormed the building. Decades ago they estimated by the amount of dust in the room.

"What about the old man?" Steve asked.

"It was the same technology we found in the Melanesian Island children," Fury said. "Only older. Whatever was done to the old man, it was done a very long time ago."

"Who was he? Really?"

"Jonathan Hart," Fury said. "Just like the name on the law firm said. Only, get this. Jonathan Hart was born in 1809. He was a fur trader in Sacramento in the 1830's and 1840's. When the California started an uprising to throw off the Mexican governors, he bought up land and made a killing when they found gold in 1845."

"So you're telling me the guy was over two hundred years old?"

"Do you find that so hard to believe?"

Cryo-chambers. For some reason, the Chitauri had kept the old guy on ice and pulled him out just in time to have Steve kill him. A drone who had outlived his usefulness now that the law firm the aliens had been using as a cover had been exposed. It both gave him hope … hope that Bernice was still alive … and despair … because the Chitauri had a history of killing off drones once they were done using them. Bernice would stay alive only so long as she could be used as a tool. He had to find out more.

"If I let you in the same room with him," Nick Fury asked. "Do you promise not to kill him?" By the raised eyebrow, Fury was serious.

Steve shut his eyes and took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm the frantic clamoring of his heart to do something. Mike had been set up. A fall guy to push his buttons so the shape shifter could get close enough to jab him in the brain with the nanovirus. The aliens hadn't anticipated it would be the Hulk's alter-ego who would poke and prod the shape shifter impersonating Bernice, or that the other Avengers would stick around to babysit him once the raid had been completed. Where a normal medic would have simply given Bernice a perfunctory medical checkup and sent her home, Banner had started poking around her DNA. It was a level of scrutiny the shape shifters had not anticipated.

All because Jacquie had survived … and finally gotten them asking the right questions. He remembered the surprise in the shape shifters voice when he'd told her Jacquie was still alive … and how obsessed the creature had been about having him kill Mike. Both drones were supposed to die. They had survived because both had cast off control of the nanovirus which enabled the Chitauri to pull their strings. He remembered the way the other human drones had turned on the boy who'd been burned in the fire and suddenly woken up. Herr Kleiser's attempts, disguised as Natasha, to kill Count Rugen. The raid on the Triskelion to do the same thing. There was something the aliens didn't want them to find out. Something that would not be obvious during an autopsy by the way they left dead drones strewn in their wake, but might give them a way to counteract the alien invasion plans.