"Lyall? I removed the last bullet. Do you want to get up?"
…
"Okay. I'll pretend that you're dead."
[x]
I had been awake for some time, but I wasn't in any rush to announce it to the world, so after a few hours of zoning out, I come to my senses, only to find myself on another metal table. Yet, this time, there's no foul liquid in my stomach or intestines strung in loops over my body. Slowly, I sit up, thankful that there're no restraints.
A few steps away from the cluster of metal tables on wheels and shining medical tools a white coat sits hunched over stacks and stacks of dirty white sheets of paper, the scratch of a pen the only sign that he's alive.
"Do you even speak English?" Erskine drops his pen in surprise, turning around at lightning speed. At the sight of me awkwardly trying to make myself comfortable on the table, his shoulders relax, once again picking up the pen and fiddling with it.
"Yes, but I can only hold a conversation. If I want to talk about science, then it has to be in German. Why?" Gently I set my feet on the tiled floor, and shakily make my way over to his desk. Erskine deserts it, curiously watching over my shoulder as I observe the notes he had taken.
"I may not be able to understand most of this, but I know that this is incorrect and I'm guessing you've never heard of DNA?" Erskine leans forward to analyse the equation I pointed out, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. "No, of course not, it's the early 30s and it's discovered in the 70s or around about there."
Erskine follows the pen grasped in my hand and watches as I correct and scribble over countless of hours' work. He pauses, picking up one discarded piece of paper and hesitantly writes a few more words in German on the side.
"You…" he pauses, face screwing up with disbelief "can also see the future?"
"No, but let's just leave it at that." He pauses, questions hanging off his lips, but he thinks twice and simply flattens out a single page from a mountain of scrunched up paper.
"Could you help me with this?" he asks, drawing over a simple stool – but it wasn't like my chair was any better – and runs his hands over the surface to once again smooth out the wrinkles.
I open my mouth to say yes but a sudden thought snaps it shut again.
Just by glancing over the pages it's clear that Schmidt had demanded a biological upgrade. Some of the dates record from nearly five years ago so it's clear that Erskine has been working on this for a long time. This would be the work that unperfected, resulted in our ugly captor falling short of a perfect human, and in the longer run, Captain America.
In the movies – or comics, pick and choose – Erskine had no help with his serum. He probably had to kill several people, people who HYDRA had snatched up off the streets (and they were probably Jews with how the world socially stood today) and experiment with their cooling bodies.
With me as his test subject, he could confidently say that one result from me was A1 since the healing ability put me a few steps behind the would-be-Captain America. That would save Erskine some time as if he had random people off the streets he would have to repeat the test over and over until he was satisfied that the results he had gotten were typical and not outliers.
And, if I helped him with his theory knowledge, then that would be a boon to HYDRA. And who was to say that this would end up with Red Skull born earlier and Erskine escaping Germany, far too early to meet Steve Rogers, and the resulting domino effect.
What should I do?
Erskine seemed to sense the conflict inside my head, pausing and leaning away.
"Are you okay?" He asks, carefully placing his pen on the desk as quietly as he could as to not disturb me.
"There's a reason why I don't really like telling people I know what the future holds." I turn the chair to face him with my whole body. His eyes were wide, curious and held a little flame of fear. "I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept of time travel, but if I change the future too much then my knowledge will be useless. I only know of 2 futures, but one is already nullified by my presence."
Erskine doesn't dare to say anything.
"If I teach you future knowledge of science, then you must promise me that you will try to sabotage your work so Schmidt cannot get his hands on the serum until the last possible moment, and when he does, make sure you give him an incomplete form of the liquid.
"I understand," Erskine murmurs, but I'm not done yet.
"If you can do this, I will help you escape and you must go to America and create a soldier with the complete form. But only one. America is too arrogant – it will get drunk on the power. I don't care how you do it but only create one super soldier. And make sure to find a soldier that has known the struggles being weak and powerless and make sure you warn him about everything. And if you do live through the next war, do not use the knowledge I am about to give you to create anything. If you have to kill yourself, so be it. If you don't have the courage, then pretend that you've hit your head and you've forgotten everything." Erskine blinks at the barrage of words. He closes his eyes, and his shoulders sag as if the weight of what could happen presses down on his mind.
"If I find that you've gone outside my rules then so god help you, I will hunt you the fuck down." Erskine opens his eyes again, only to stare a hole through the stacks of papers resting on his desk.
"My family is probably dead; I saw them being snatched away to live in the concentration camps." Erskine seems to be talking to himself. He slips back into his mother language, muttering too softly and too fast for me to comprehend.
"I understand what you're saying." He grimaces. No, he doesn't, he hasn't grasped the true weight of the situation, but it will have to do.
"Good. I'll go over the plan later but for now, let's return back to the papers. You'll have to explain a few of the German terms to me, and then I'll start correcting it. If you don't understand a minor detail, ask. I have knowledge of science that shouldn't be fully discovered until over a hundred years later."
"Right," Erskine nods, listening intently. "What words don't you know?"
[x]
That night, around 9pm, some HYDRA hunks come storming in, grab my neck, hair and arms and shove a pole through my heart. It takes a few seconds of struggling before the healing ability realises that it cannot repair my heart with an iron bar through it, so it sends me into unconsciousness. This aggressive behaviour from HYDRA was uncalled for; I would've gone willingly without spilling a drop of blood until they shove me into the usual metal-shelled box and nail me to a wall with the spikes again.
Erskine would later tell me that they would drag me into his workshop at 8:05am on the dot and I would wake up 2 minutes after he removed whatever was hindering my mutation. From there we would either teach me new German vocab or I would explain, to my best ability, how exactly the human body works. Although Amy had been a teacher, this was science, not a language.
There was nothing to disrupt the continuous dull days, excluding the occasional visit from nosy HYDRA scientists (who couldn't understand a thing we did, as I had taught Erskine a few words in the strange language) and Schmidt himself. There was even a visit from Hitler himself, although I had to play dead on the table as Erskine was testing something on me and had cut my chest wide open.
Although it didn't stop me from turning my head to wherever he was standing and following him with my eyes (he didn't return after that).
[x]
"Your healing ability is amazing," Erskine comments as he cleans my blood from his tools. The experiment had not gone as planned, so we were kind of in a slump, unsure what to do without sending the experiment into a further unwelcome phase. "It's at a constant move, searching through your body, at the beck and call of nerves and completely destroys anything alien. And even though a normal human needs excessive energy to come even close to healing a broken leg at your speed, you don't even need to eat for a year."
I smile, a little confused. This was the first time anyone had really complimented my healing ability. In the past, there was more of a sarcasm touch to their words.
"But I'm curious about the infestation on your chest. The healing ability is countering it with ease, but it seems like it can't fully remove it." Erskine circles a little area of skin on my back, before returning to his cleaning. Then what he says dawns on me.
"Whoa whoa whoa, wait a mo, what infection?" Erskine pauses and gives me a strange look.
"It looks like it's been there since early birth." He continues, idly picking up another sharp item. "It looks like, with today's medical technology, it would've been easily destroyed, but you've told me that you met Queen Victoria several times. Victorian so-called techniques were basically praying to a god and giving medicines that made you sicker than before."
"No fucking wonder I was so sick as a child," I grumble, picking up a knife that still had blood on it, driving it deep into the area Erskine had previously pointed out. "I'm actually a Georgian, although it was only a few years after my birth before Queen Victoria took the crown. And besides, I was born in Canada so technically I'm not even a Georgian."
Erskine pauses to leave his cleaned tools and walks over to carefully remove the knife. He looked amused – as much as one could have looked amused in this dreary place. "You are just a mess of contradictions and surprises, aren't you? Anyway, I'm sure I could heal it, although with the old medicines may have damaged it beyond normal human standards."
"Bah, we can just say this is another investigation of the human body so our knowledge of biology will increase." I lie back down on the metal table, my back exposed to Erskine's tender mercies.
It was cured, but not before Erskine administered dose after dose of concentrated medicine that would've killed a normal person with one drop. The stuff that was my healing ability (we haven't even tried to examine it or even name it in hopes to sabotage the experiment) seemed to be a little confused when the infection was gone, so to test it I shot myself in the hand and timed it.
Before, it took thirty seconds for my hand to completely heal. Now it only took five to ten seconds.
Erskine looked at my hand in shock.
"Thanks, mate," I say, grinning. Now it would be even harder for HYDRA to hold me down. True to my suspicions, I could stay awake when stabbed in the heart and retained a little strength in my arms. My next goal was to see what happened if I cut my hand off.
[x]
Despite the value of my presence in Erskine's experiment, there were several times where I had been carted off to a concentration camp for several months, years, and I would not like to repeat my experience there, thank you. It was through these day trips I had uncovered the harsh truth that Erskine's family had long died in the gas chambers on one small execution camp.
(The funny thing was that Amy had visited Dachau, one of the camps, in her life hood. Her mother had said that the pictures were a little shocking, but it didn't even come close to capturing the true bloodiness of the camps.)
Nearly 5 years into our capture – Erskine and I had grown very good at sabotage – World War II was announced, and Schmidt was getting more and more demanding. Two more years into the bloody worldwide massacre Schmidt finally snapped, constantly appearing in the room, so more often than not we couldn't do the weekly event of burning a few of the papers with critical research data.
It was in 1943 that we completed the incomplete form of the serum – shockingly, it turned out to be vibrant red, almost like the colour his skull would turn out to be. While Schmidt was off with the incomplete serum, probably drugging himself up and resulting with the residential Most Hideous Person of the Century, he left the stronghold leaving a rather startling lack of guards.
Although getting rid of the infection from my childhood had accelerated my healing ability, I also had learnt how to slow down my healing ability due to all the experiments Erskine had to perform inside my body (and he couldn't do that while my body constantly healed itself), so as far as HYDRA was concerned, I couldn't be awake whenever they impale a spike through my heart, I couldn't gather enough energy to tear out the poles cleverly shoved through the spaces between my ribs and I certainly did not know the weakness in the armour the guards wore.
Needless to say, I stealthily made my way from my cage to Erskine's room, silently killing each guard I came across.
Erskine was waiting, although I had not said a peep to him about my plan. His belongings only extended to a photo of his family and a little drawing from his youngest child, even though he knew that they had departed this world years ago. Behind his person, a wild raging fire burnt through everything, thick clouds of smoke pouring out from the doorway.
"Are you okay?" he says, as I get up off the floor. To forcibly open his door, I had to throw myself at it after jamming my claws at the lock and hinges. "You look… kind of tired."
"I haven't had much exercise lately. And I just threw myself at a metal door." Already the bruises of doing such act had long disappeared. From down the hall, voices gathered, footsteps slapping the grey floor. They had finally noticed; it was time for us to leave.
"After you?" I smirk, opening the doorway. Erskine launches out, immediately turning left, opposite from the voices. I grasp his collar and lead him down the path to the voices. "Not that way, that goes deeper. After all, that's where my cage is."
"Found the escapees! Open fire! Make sure you aim for the female!" I shove Erskine into an alcove at the sound of the German, covering his hiding place with the remains of the door.
The hallway floods with men. It takes a few seconds for my claws to appear, shocking the guards; they had never seen them before. The few seconds of pausing is everything I need. It doesn't take long for the back to realise that I knew of every weakness the guards had, and once I had picked up several guns to aid my deadly attack, they knew they were no match for a beast like me.
Nearly every second brought along another bullet biting into my skin, the accelerated healing ability pushing the bullets out one after another, smoothly healing until it was like nothing happened. And although I was far superior to any of them, they had strength in numbers. It took 30 minutes to nearly completely clear the attack, and halfway through the first 10 minutes, some guards had come from the opposite direction. By the 25th minute, it had degraded to a sniper war.
I sat waiting for a few more minutes until I dragged Erskine from his cover. His face was white as a sheet and he was blinking rapidly as if he had squeezed his eyes shut the whole time.
"Quick, they're gonna come back. They always seem to have an infinite number of guards."
The trek was long and hard. Erskine had no fighting ability beyond holding out a gun and hoping that it would hit the correct target. Luckily, the news of the numerous guns in my hand had not reached their ears so several had rounded a corner and suddenly find themselves lying on the floor, about to meet death in seconds. I had a very good shot after living through so many wars.
By luck, we stumbled across the transport docks. As I ran through the trucks, murdering the occasional unlucky guard stowed away in the mess of cars, Erskine quickly ducked outside to observe the outside world.
He quickly returned to find that I had warmed up a truck for us. His grim face was everything I needed to know.
"They've surrounded the exit. There're several machine guns just waiting out there, not to count the hundreds of lackeys. How can we get out?" A touch of despair entered his voice as he sagged against the truck. I look around, nodding to myself as I spot several missile launches and other big machinery.
"Not to worry friend. It only means that we will have to split. I probably will be captured again." Erskine lowered his head and murmured something in a language that I could not understand or identify.
"I do not care. You are the important piece of the chess board with Red Skull as our enemy. First, find out where you are. Get to Switzerland, and find the nearest Stark. Say I sent you and I ask that you will get to America as soon as possible. When you get there, contact the government, although I suspect that Stark would figure out why and do it for you."
"When I get to America, make one super soldier and never do another. Once that is done, forget everything you've taught me." Erskine gives my shoulder a pat. "This may be the last time we see each other." I keep the fact that I know it would be to myself.
"I suggest scouting out people at the enlisting things. Maybe do the one at the Stark Con, or whatever it's called." I throw open the door and lift my legs out of the compartment.
"I'll make a distraction. When I wave with both arms, go. I'll make sure to open the gates."
And I drop out of the truck, running towards the closest machine that looked like it had the most power. With several launches from the machine, the roof was destroyed. Now, it was time to launch the real machines against the mini army outside.
The explosions from breaking open the roof drew more to gather. They understood that only numbers could defeat me, and even though I can easily turn their weapons against them, I am only one person.
I leave several machine guns on auto, leaving it to vomit bullets to the front lines. Next, I take one of the tanks and fire shells after shell onto the gathered patches through the open roof. By then, the nearby walls had been nearly completely obliterated, so there was nothing between me and the guards.
I set up more machine guns as the other ones fail or run out of bullets.
It's constant. I lose track of what I do. With every second gone, more and more guards die. Once the number had been reduced to under a hundred, I throw a shell from a tank at the gate and wave at Erskine. He had been sitting in the truck for an hour. Who was to say that escaping was quick?
I run out to take on the left over guards. They crowd around me like primary school students playing football, bullets hitting each other more than they hit me. Some of the guards had done on-the-spot upgrade to their armour, covering some of the weak spots I had used previously. But they still can't protect the back of the neck. Damn shame, huh?
Erskine's departure isn't unnoticed; I have to attack the guards who try to attack the leaving truck rather than the ones closest to me. With the added movement of tracking down those who turned their gun on the truck, a creeping feeling weighs down my arms, leaving my attacks sluggish and tired.
It brings me back to my childhood. It takes a few seconds for me to identify it as exhaustion.
But – I've never felt exhaustion before! I panic, trying to run away from the guards rather attacking them.
Without me constantly weaving between the mass of men, they easily take aim and three bullets are emptied into my brain, five more slicing my heart into ribbons. I stumble, collapsing on the spot. A lucky man jumps on my back, driving a knife as long as my forearm into my heart and into the ground. Other people pin my arms and legs down with the same technique.
I struggle, but I'm just so tired.
I'm scared. The last time I felt so tired was when Mary had given me the liquid that momentarily halted my healing factor to a degree. However, I could feel my healing ability repairing the tears and wounds. Everything was fine – except I was slipping. Darkness falls over my eyes, and my thoughts become loose and disconnected.
I drop all struggles, knocked unconscious.