Who: Hank Pym, Captain America When: Earlier in the week after this Where: One of Pym's warehouses What: Old friends hugging it out, I swear Warnings: Pym yells. A little violence
When the Captain arrived at the warehouse, the side door swung open for him and the temperature dropped with every step he took inside. What Hank Pym lacked in showmanship and extravagant speeches, he made up for in details. The warehouse was dark, freezing and quiet except for the occasional sigh of machinery. There were hints that behind the ancient boxes of old computer parts and beyond the broken assembly lines there laid a beating metallic heart, but it remained hidden for now. The truth behind Peggy’s captor wasn’t important yet. This was about Steve.
There was no need to go looking for Agent Carter anyway. She sat in the middle of the wet warehouse floor, a single lamp lighting up the chair she was tied to. Her head was slumped forward, hands and legs limp from either being knocked out or killed prematurely. She did not move, did not seem to breathe. When he approached her, something flickered on around him. Little tiny red, blue and white lights blinked from the corners of the warehouse as if a machine was slowly whirring awake and stirred Agent Carter. Suddenly, her head rose and she stood up as the ropes binding her gently slid down to the floor. Turning to face Captain America, he could see that she had no features at all. Just a metal shell in the shape of her face and eyes that glowed blue.
“Steve Rogers.” The old fashioned voice boomed from speakers above. “If there’s one thing I knew I could count on, it was your punctuality.” Ice started to snap across the warehouse floor and the robot Peggy Carter screeched something inhuman before vanishing into the darkness. The Captain could hear the warehouse lock up from all sides, forming a very literal trap. “Loki isn’t the only one who can start a snowball fight.”
The items in the warehouse were unfamiliar to Steve, but that didn’t faze him. Boxes of electronics and something else beneath, but he was expecting to be confused now. You got used to being a man out of time eventually, and he was starting to be surprised when he actually got something, instead of the reverse. He had his shield at his back, not wanting to tip his hand by holding onto it. Though, honestly, if it was Loki, there wasn’t much point in any of it. He’d already faced the trickster in a fight, and he knew he couldn’t take Loki down. He could hold Loki off, but he couldn’t take him down, and that was hard for a soldier like Steve to admit.
Steve wasn’t actually expecting Peggy. Maybe some part of him wanted her to be there, even if she was in danger, but he wasn’t expecting her. He wasn’t worried either. Peggy was as good a soldier as him. She wasn’t any damsel, and he had a gun tucked in his belt in case she was there. With a weapon in her hand, he knew she would be able to defend herself. She was a good shot, and he smiled when that thought passed through his mind, his all-American features going soft and fond for a moment, before slipping back into a soldier’s steely lack of emotion.
But there was a woman slumped in a chair, and Steve’s feet came to a stop as his heart started beating faster. He rushed forward, attentive to anything that might approach, fully expecting an attack from behind, given her placement in the room. But he couldn’t help it, he moved forward, and he was reaching for her when she looked up.
No. Not Peggy, and Steve wondered that he could feel that ache of loss all over again, like he had when he woke up in that fake hospital room, only to find everything he knew was gone. To find her gone.
Steve took a step back when the voice boomed from overhead. His shield was in his hand before he even managed to finishing looking upward. He reached for the robotic version of Peggy when she shrieked, still feeling the need to save her, even if she wasn’t real. But then she was gone, and there was ice beneath his feet. Ice.
Seventy years worth of ice. Steve heard the sounds of the warehouse going on lockdown, and he knew the trap was a different trap than he expected. He didn’t stop to try to figure out who. Instead, he just ran for the exit, gripping the warehouse door with hands that held more power than they should, hoping to get it pried away before it iced over.
Before Steve could break his way out of the warehouse, the robot Peggy reappeared behind him. Her blue eyes suddenly glowed brightly and then let out an ice blast that practically fused the wall and door together. Two other identical robots crawled from the shadows, indiscriminately covering vents, windows and walls with solid ice. Certainly Steve could break through eventually, but he’d have to destroy the robots first. Robots that were built specifically to keep him there.
“I just want to talk.” Pym’s voice returned, this time a little louder. “You don’t remember me, Steve. But, I know you. I know you too well.” There was rising bitterness like steam off a lake in the chill of an autumn morning. Anger, but the kind that had already made up its mind a long time ago. “You’re the reason why I’m not an Avenger anymore. Why my wife will never trust me again. Why I have to do this.”
The robot lunged at Steve, it’s gears clicking like insects. It wanted to wrap its limbs around the Captain. To pin him down so the freeze could take over.
Steve was slow in his response, his elbow connecting with the robot version of Peggy’s non-face after the wall and door had been fused. It wasn’t any fault in his reflexes, no fault of the serum. It was her, and the fact that at the right angle, when he couldn’t see her face, it made it impossible to hurt her. But he did, elbow to metal, hard, and no bruising or broken elbow like a regular person would endure from a hit like that.
Steve stepped away from the door, and he looked up at the nothingness that contained the voice. He heard the bitterness this time, and he realized Dr. Banner had left something important out of his files somewhere. Anger, that was an emotion he understood. He was supposed to be above it, anger, but he wasn’t, not since waking up. “If you know I don’t remember you, then you know I’m not the man that did any of those things,” he said, voice strong and sturdy, without even a hint of a warble or shake. “But even if I did do those things, I have to assume there was a reason. What did you do to cause me to make those recommendations?” he asked. “I’m not responsible for your actions, son. Now open the doors and let me leave.”
And Steve knew the voice wouldn’t, but maybe it would get angry enough to show its hand. That anger didn’t scare Steve, because Steve knew he was already as stuck as he could be. And he was pretty sure that was whatever was coming was already coming. Honesty wasn’t going to prevent it, and Steve wasn’t going to grovel. And then the robot came at him, and he held those metallic arms and felt the chill for a few seconds before he ran with it, full force, and slammed the robot into the frozen wall, impact after unforgiving impact, waiting for it to shatter.
The robot woman snapped back against the wall, her metallic shoulders cracking and her head bouncing off as it spat nonsense electronic gibberish and a strange colored chemical. “Don’t call me son.” The voice warned. If Pym had his particles, he’d go down into that warehouse and hold the Captain to the ground until he was frozen under. For now he’d have to rely on the robots to at least give the man a good scare.
Pym nearly turned the microphone back on to lecture Steve about his grandfathering of the Avengers, of the way he acted as if his backdated beliefs actually did anybody any good. It wasn’t time for that yet. “You can’t fool me. We might be from different places, but it’s still you Steve. You’d never show mercy, so neither will I.” The two robots stalking through the darkness shrieked on command from a higher power and blasted ice at Steve’s feet and arms. The temperature was dropping rapidly, threatening to entomb the Captain once more.
Steve could handle the cold better than most, and he was ready for the other two robots, despite the voice overhead. He was listening, and he wanted whoever it was to keeping talking, so he took the ice blast for a second before propelling himself over the robots with a run and a flip that, while inelegant, got the job done. Behind the robots now, he tossed his shield to slice across both of them, before coming back at him so that he could catch it.
“The son thing really bothers people, huh?” Steve quipped, intentionally annoying. It was an old military habit, something learned from older soldiers and young recruits, but he had already realized it didn’t survive the test of time well. “Mercy? What mercy are you talking about? And I can’t believe I have the power to remove anyone from the Avengers team in the future, not without everyone agreeing with me. Did anyone come to your defense for what you did?” he asked, hoping he could handle the cold long enough to get answers.
As for getting out, Steve figured he’d concentrate on that when he didn’t have any other choice.
Something snapped in Pym, the intercom switching on and off without anything save for maybe a hint of heavy breathing. Steve was right, of course. No one wanted Hank Pym in the Avengers and only tolerated him because of his lovely wife. When he turned on her, when he turned on them, they didn’t seem interested in helping him. The only friends Pym ever had weren’t friends at all. “No.” Pym finally said, his superior super villain act falling quickly. He was a different man now, but he wasn’t Loki or Doom either.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m stopping the cycle before it starts up again. Before Janet shows up.” Pym told himself that he was doing the right thing here. That the Captain had to be killed to make a point. To scare the other Avengers from being an effective team. “You know what the difference is between me and you, Steve? I’m still a person. You’re a science project gone wrong. In a couple decades, I’ll be dead. But, you’ll still be fighting crime and chasing ghosts. Do you even remember the person you were before they put you in that gaudy suit?”
Steve wasn’t surprised with the response. Men with backing didn’t end up like the disembodied voice in the icy warehouse. But he got what he wanted. He got names, and he got a reason, and maybe that would be enough for Bruce to pinpoint who this was, the man with the robots. If not, maybe Tony would know something about the machines themselves. “If it’s a cycle you caused, then you need to stop yourself, not me,” Steve said, certainty in the telling, and his shield flying at the two robots again. As for what Steve was, that actually earned the disembodied voice a laugh. “You aren’t telling me anything about myself that I don’t already know, son.” And that son was intentional. But the words were true. Steve knew exactly what he was. Normal people weren’t alive after seventy years in a freezer, no matter what anyone said. “And you might be a person, but I don’t think you’re a very decent one, or I wouldn’t be here. But I think you know that.”
“I WAS A DECENT PERSON.” Pym couldn’t stop himself from screaming. All those buried memories of being a pacifist, of believing that violence was the last resort bloomed in his mind. The last thing he needed was to be reminded of the person he was before the Avengers. With a screech, Steve could hear the intercom shatter from the other end as Pym’s fist goes right through his soundboard.
The robots paused for a moment as if processing orders to go into full attack mode. The first took the shield to its shoulder while the other sent an ice beam directed towards Steve’s arms. It seemed as though the now gone voice from above didn’t care if Steve escaped or not. He made his impression, proved that this wasn’t over and (most importantly) convinced himself that this Captain America was exactly like the one he knew back in his world.
Steve didn’t think the voice in the intercom was a decent person, even if it insisted it was. He listened to the scream, to the shattering intercom, to the sound of fisting meeting wood and metal, and he realized the time for talking was done.
The robot the shield sliced at crackled at the shoulder, and it was the crackling that gave him the idea, even as he ducked the ice beam it pointed at him. Steve ripped the robot’s arm off, metal and sparks and the chemicals inside dripping onto the live wires. the fire might have scared someone else, but Cap had been on too many fields of battle, and he was a better thinker in the heat of battle than he ever was outside of it it.
Steve grabbed the severed robot arm, flames engulfing the animatronic sleeve, and he took just enough time to stomp on the other arm and sever it - a gift for Tony.
The door that had been fused together earlier was an easy sprint, and despite the fact that the robot’s arm was burning down to Steve’s fingers, he held it firm against that ice, against that seam, watching the ice melt away as he spoke loudly, knowing his antagonist was there somewhere.
“You aren’t getting away with this,” Steve calmly assure the voice overhead. “I’ll find you, and I’ll take you to SHIELD, and we’ll deal with you as a team.” It felt good, being able to make that threat. Maybe Bruce was right about the power that came from being part of something. Maybe Steve had just forgotten, after seventy years on the ice.
Pym watched on his monitors as Captain America made quick work of his robots. Not surprising. If he wanted the Captain dead he would have tried harder. Still, it was unsettling how easily Steve could get under his skin. It shouldn’t have been that much of a shock, but he thought he was passed that. That he was some kind of cold blooded killer like Loki or Magneto who could easily navigate passed simple accusations against their character. Loki was proud to be evil. Pym hated every second of it.