Ward 10
Howard always figured that if he drowned, it would be metaphorically and at the bottom of a bottle. He hadn't given much thought to the possibility of drowning in a glass tank in a foot of water. He knew it was possible - you only needed a few inches to drown. But it was usually children who needed to worry about that sort of thing. And despite his years of dabbling with life extending technologies that bordered on the alchemical, Howard was no child.
There was probably a sort of poetic justice in all this. The parallels weren't lost on him. Howard had presided over the kinds of experience that he was now being subjected to. His organization, SHIELD (and HYDRA), had kept soldiers suspended in fluid-filled tanks just like this one. Ordered shellings and assassinations, funded foreign wars, put guns in the hands of insurgents as well as oppressive governments. He'd been a chess master for many years, desperate to maintain a stranglehold on every aspect of his life, and now he was a piece on someone else's board.
Jews conceptualized the afterlife in a number of different ways, though there wasn't the same sense of certainty as there was in some faiths. Howard had never paid very close attention. His parents were devout, but as a boy, he'd found his heritage to be a liability, and as an adult, he'd never put much stock in things like belief and tradition. Certainly not when those beliefs and traditions might have prescribed a change in his behavior. But he remembered Gehenna, a place where his parents believed that the souls of the dead were sent for reflection and punishment. Their families would mourn and pray for up to a year, and then their souls would ascend to Olam Ha-Ba. Except, some believed, for the truly wicked and unrepentant, whose ultimate fates may be far worse.
A year was about how long he'd been there, wasn't it?
Had he learned?
He thought of his parents when he opened the door of his pod, wondering if the same world was waiting for him.