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[T]his book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Preparation for the procedure begins two weeks in advance. Top-secret MRIs are scheduled between meetings of the Hydra Council and Steve’s public appearances. It’s his honor to march with his troops, to show the country his face and true colors, to speak of Hydra’s ascendancy.
It troubles his engineers and doctors that, due to his travels, not all of the MRIs can be performed at Hydra bases.
He’s sure they will find a way to make do.
⚭
Halfway through the first week, a lapse in security occurs during one of Steve’s scans. The extent of the breach is great enough that the teaching hospital upstate must be eliminated.
The officers on his security team that day are among the executions he oversees the following morning.
No further security issues occur.
⚭
It’s pleasant, Steve finds, to have something to look forward to.
Tony is apt to grant all of Steve’s wishes.
From Avengers Mansion to the team itself to Steve’s desire for a true adversary, Tony complies. Even when Tony fell to his fight with Carol, Tony found a way to return, to bear witness to Steve’s—and Hydra’s—rise.
⚭
Tony Stark’s brain was dead; his mind survived, beyond capture.
He existed as a distributed neural net spanning networks and servers the world over to form a single consciousness of nested copies and backups of itself.
Tony was measured not in terabytes, petabytes, or even exabytes, but ronnabytes—one byte for each of the one hundred billion neurons of the human brain. Purge and sanitize one drive, and the persistent data remanence would duplicate itself across a dozen more, a ghost in every machine.
Steve assembled an elite team of Hydra engineers to report to him and him alone. His directive was clear: Hydra could not flourish until it possessed that ghost, and everything it knew.
⚭
Steve’s team checked every building of Tony’s for workshops, schematics, armor, hard drives, servers.
They found nothing—individually or collectively—large enough to contain all of Tony.
What computers were present automatically wiped their own drives and overwrote the data with zeros.
Steve stopped joining these missions. They won’t find what he’s after.
Zola did uncover a gem on one of the later raids: a powerful armor, built exactly to Steve’s measurements.
It was unfinished and lacked a power source, but Steve was confident it would work when he needed it.
⚭
Attempts to contain Tony in a firewall proved fruitless. What Hydra’s engineers cordoned off was not subroutines or data storage as they knew it: only a fragment of a disk image, a dead, frozen shred of a moving, living whole.
Data science was not Steve’s vocation. Images qua images were a frivolous interest of his—not a pursuit he could prioritize when the world had seen so little of Hydra’s glory.
Strategy, however. Big picture thinking.
That is Steve’s specialty.
⚭
What about a quantum computer, Steve asked the tech.
Sir? The tech looked up from his boots.
Could a quantum computer hold him, Steve repeated.
If we had one—
Isn’t, Steve asked, letting his impatience show, a human brain a quantum computer?
(Wasn’t that how Tony programmed himself into this mess?)
Yes, the tech agreed, cautious, on edge, sensing a trap. If we had Stark’s tissue—the cerebrum at the very least, ideally the brainstem and the cerebellum too—
Then we would have a flesh-and-blood Tony Stark, Steve said.
Steve will awaken the one in the coma soon enough.
A flesh-and-blood Tony Stark , he continued, would be equally uncooperative as the digital one.
(He did not share his feelings on this matter; they were irrelevant.)
What we need , Steve said, and I hope for your sake I need not repeat the parameters of your assignment, is for a loyal mind, a loyal Hydra consciousness, to live alongside, and access, that of Tony Stark.
For the kind of transfer you’re describing, Sir, it would have to be an extraordinary brain. Highly resilient. Accelerated healing. Peak human, if not superhuman.
Build it for me, Steve commanded, and I will provide the test subject.
⚭
The transfer is nothing more than the installation of equipment; minor brain surgery.
Steve, of course, will be conscious.
⚭
The procedure is unprecedented.
A device to initiate the transfer will be inserted into his brain. It’s one-of-a-kind, a bespoke flesh-machine.
The surgical aspect is routine. Performed at hospitals every day.
Steve clears his schedule of all other in-person meetings for five days, including the day of the surgery. It’s scheduled to begin in the small hours of the morning, so he needn’t worry about fasting ahead of time.
If all goes according to plan, he’ll be back in his quarters before most of the helicarrier is awake.
⚭
Steve allows himself the extravagance of luxuriating in the knowledge that he’ll soon have Tony.
Tony is known both for his extraordinary escapes from captivity and his inability to escape the demons in his own head; Steve’s mind is the perfect cage.
Steve’s engineering team continues to pester him with alarmist, fearmongering nonsense.
He knows the risks. He knows the reward.
He’s confident in his plan.
Every challenge Steve has faced as Hydra’s Supreme Leader, he has overcome. With every day that passes, the world grows more orderly. Closer to Hydra’s utopia.
With Tony, Steve himself will approach perfection.
⚭
Steve is surrounded by plastic sheeting. Robotic arms. Doctors. Hydra-green scrubs and sanitary masks. Screens displaying his MRI slices or streaming the body cam footage of his surgical team.
His immediate sensation is of glaring lights—lamps pointed at him from all angles, headlamps that swerve with nervous human gestures, reflections on screens and lenses, laser points of automated tools.
His head, shaved and sterilized, rests in a halo of stabilization pins.
The reward for Steve’s patience is imminent: Tony is close. Only hours away.
⚭
First is the cutting. A slower, more methodical version of being sliced open in a knife fight. Painful, but this isn’t Steve’s first experience with surgery since the serum rendered anesthetics useless to him.
The scalpel makes a succulent, juicy sound, like cutting a steak.
Cacophony follows—a robot drills through his skull, the sound reverberates in the bone, so close to his ear that he hears it as a jet engine.
⚭
They show him the transmitting machine before they insert it. It’s larger than he expects; the glass jar it fits inside is barely smaller than his thumb.
The organic computer’s edges are smeary, soggy. It sits in a viscous puddle of scarlet. Pale tendrils emanate from the central body, drooping, elastic, like chewed gum.
Steve once cracked a man’s chest open with his shield, smashing the ribcage, revealing a mess of blood and organs. His victim’s lungs were pulped, spinal cord severed, the wriggling of his bowels slowing to a stop—and still the heart continued to pulse. To beat.
The thing in the glass jar throbs in place, just like that limp, loose heart.
⚭
Why is it doing that? Steve asks. Does it know?
Just an autonomic response, sir. It aids in the implantation.
⚭
The soggy flesh-machine is placed. On the screens, Steve sees it wriggle through the pink, fleshy folds of his exposed brain meat.
Initiating transfer, someone says.
How do you feel? Someone asks. Any discomfort?
It’s working , Steve says. I can feel it working.
It feels like sunlight on bare skin.
⚭
They close him up. Steve dresses in his uniform. His cowl hides his shaved hair.
He returns to his quarters.
⚭
Steve sits at the largest window in his suite with a mug and a carafe of hot coffee. He watches the clouds.
He has no particular insight into Tony’s thoughts or knowledge. Still, there’s a warm, bright sensation that he has company inside his mind.
It reminds him of being immersed in a good book. He’s by himself, but not alone.
If Tony becomes conscious of his own presence here, all he will perceive is an open blue sky, the sunshine on his face, the smell of coffee, and the sound of Steve breathing.
⚭
Steve has the armor Zola recovered brought to his quarters. He arranges it so it stands in one corner, catching the shadows and a rim of metallic light, watching both the entrance to the suite and the door to Steve’s bedroom.
⚭
Steve indulges himself with breakfast the next morning: a dozen sunny-side up eggs; twice that many pancakes; a rasher of bacon; several heaping bowls each of mashed potatoes and sauteed greens.
He opens his curtains, places his table and chair in the best light, and eats.
He catches himself wondering if he’s smelling real maple syrup—he knows it is. He requested it, and he can taste the difference.
Real butter, pancakes, and bacon, too, Steve says.
He pierces the yellow of an egg with a fork, gathers the yolk in a strip of bacon, places it on his tongue.
A sliver of what Steve hopes is Tony Stark marvels at being able to taste. To feel the food against his tongue. Under his teeth.
⚭
Tony worries that he’s hallucinating.
Steve can feel Tony’s distress, his confusion. It’s impeccable.
After his meal, Steve seats himself again at the window. Today, the wind is high, and roiling clouds race by.
He catches glimpses of the Resistance’s base through the multitude of cameras and sensors Tony is accessing. He watches Tony’s armored hands type at terminal after terminal. Watches Tony watch his code as it migrates from machines on his vetted list of safe servers to a single, unknown host.
Steve is witness to Tony’s increasing panic. Tony craves control in all things, and Steve has forced himself to feel his own mind unravel.
Figures I wouldn’t dream of electric sheep, Tony grumbles to himself, just Steve.
Tony hopes to a god he doesn’t believe in that this will be the worst of his symptoms.
⚭
Tony tracks himself, the code that comprises him. It ignores the subroutine he added in an attempt to bypass the mass data migration to the unknown host. His efforts haven’t even slowed it down.
Is his code aware he’s looking at it?
Is that why Tony can’t shake the feeling he’s being watched?
⚭
The engineering team warned Steve that the transfer would take at least a week to complete, but it’s only the second day and he’s exultant. This is what he wanted.
It surpasses his imaginings. Tony is here, Tony is with him, Tony is witness to everything Steve sees and does and can do nothing to escape him.
Tony’s thoughts are not subroutines or strings of text but bursts of electrical signals that ping from one topic and sensation to the next—oracle machines; a burst of inebriation; a way to activate the ECM jamming without disrupting the stream of his own neural network. The mouthfeel of steel-cut oatmeal. Wavelength scattering and the cyan of the sky. Asimov’s first law of robotics. Cuisse, greave, poleyn. An uncanny awareness of surveillance. The sound of repulsors failing and the sensation of plummeting toward the ground. The best way to avoid overloading the thermocouple. The tires of a M1117 churning over loose sand.
No, they’re more than bursts of electricity, more than thought. More than sunlight.
Steve’s paltry metaphors make Tony’s thoughts sound disorderly, when that’s the last thing they are. To an untrained mind they’d seem chaotic, but Steve is an expert of order; he knows that there’s a method to Tony’s mind. Everything serves a purpose. Everything coalesces. This is Hydra’s way, too.
Tony’s mind is movement, is synchrony, is a metal maze that flies and roller skates and sets off Fourth of July fireworks displays in the shape of Captain America’s shield. It pulses, not so much on the beat of common time but in a psychedelic drum solo.
And it’s near, so near, near enough Steve can feel its warmth on his fingertips.
Steve can lean against it to rest. Sit astride it. Push off of it like a diving board and soar up, up, up.
⚭
On the third morning, Steve wakes to find his armor half disassembled around him.
The arrangement of pieces fits the shape of the sunbeam cast through the open curtains.
He reaches for a circuit board, the one closest to his left hand. It’s in a neat stack of circuits of similar shapes and sizes, all ultra-thin and curved like the musculature of his body. He sets it down again with the awareness that it’s a component of the suit’s internal fire suppression system.
Steve experiences brilliance. He’s ablaze.
Tony is his! Taking command of Hydra felt less exultant than this.
Everything that Tony knows, everything that Tony is, will be Steve’s.
⚭
Steve reassembles the armor as if on autopilot. Each set of tiny screws is laid out on a piece of white paper with the edges folded up so they don’t roll away and a note on how many of them there should be. The miniature screwdrivers and Allen wrenches feel tiny in his hands, but he uses them dexterously, as if born to it.
Tony doesn’t understand at first. Why is he working on that suit? In his current state, he can only operate a suit with limited functionality, like the Model 4.
Why is he warm? If he didn’t know better, he’d think he had a fever. Would he feel it if one of his servers overheated?
He’s being watched. The back of his neck itches with it—not that he has a neck.
He doesn’t see or hear anyone else, but that fact, nor the elation of seeing, hearing, feeling, isn’t enough to distract him from that unsettling, sweltering sense.
Which armor is this, anyway?
Of course. He should’ve known—it’s Steve’s suit. As if Steve would ever agree to wear it.
Pepper told him that he hallucinated after Steve died. She blamed Extremis. Tony, as he is now, blamed it on the vagaries of organic bodies.
It seems it’s more accurate to attribute it to despair.
⚭
My code has the hiccups. Take a look?
Tony’s in his workshop in the Resistance base, motioning someone toward a screen.
Steve’s view isn’t visual or auditory, precisely. It’s more like peripheral vision. He has a spatial awareness of what Tony sees and hears.
Well, then you can be my rubber ducky, he’s saying. See, this part of me is here, here, and here—but it’s being moved here, all to this one host, at a speed that should be impossible.
I started investigating last week, when the same thing was happening, except it was being moved nowhere. But it’s like this massive server has created itself—see, here’s another section, it’s following my own protocols for purging and sanitizing—
Steve smiles and concentrates on the chestplate in his hands.
⚭
If there’s any way I wasn’t a liability before, I definitely am now, Tony tells Nat. I’m losing control of my own neural net.
Psychics have sent verbal mental messages to Steve before. This isn’t like that. Still less is it like a telephone. He’s not hearing or reading Tony’s words, he’s becoming aware of them.
It’s infinitely more intimate.
⚭
Steve’s closeness with Tony is spectacular. It’s warmth without heat, flame without fire.
With the life he’s led and the vocation he’s chosen, Steve is accustomed to physical triumphs. Overcoming an opponent in battle. Achieving orgasm. The taste of an enemy’s still-hot blood. A steamy shower after a rewarding workout.
This phenomenon is solely mental. The only blood spilled to achieve it was Steve’s own. Yes, he’s earned this jubilation, this communion.
It’s sunlight to the flower of Steve’s mind, and he basks in it.
⚭
Tony can breathe. His lungs inflate with air. His exhale passes through his nostrils in a gust.
He can feel, actually feel, the screw he rolls between thumb and forefinger. Sunlight streams over him, warming his skin. His mouth tastes—tastes!—of coffee.
Fuck, he wants a cup of coffee.
He doesn’t mean to set down the pauldron he’s working on. He doesn’t mean to get to his feet, to walk toward a wooden side table that stands beside a large window and a plush dining chair. But he knows that there’s a carafe of coffee on the table, and a mug the same emerald-green as the window curtains. He pours the coffee, watching the steam, inhaling the silky, tanniny aroma.
So this is where his code’s being transferred. He’s receiving sensory feedback from here, from this… body.
Steve is delighted; Tony is on the brink of understanding.
Steve licks his lips in anticipation.
Tony didn’t do that. He can control his hologram, make it look like he’s licked his lips. But if he did that, he wouldn’t feel the tender skin of his lips against his tongue. He wouldn’t sense the lingering wetness there.
He isn’t tired or thirsty—hell, he doesn’t even have a caffeine craving—but he takes a drink of coffee.
He’s beyond bliss when the coffee hits his tongue. It’s as hot as it looked, perfectly brewed. Dark roast, his favorite.
He takes another sip. It’s the flavor of coffee but more . It isn’t more bitter, but he tastes every part of the bitterness now, coarse and leathery and a shade to the pleasurable side of harsh. He can detect an earthy crispness he doesn’t know how to describe. There’s a hint of something marine, oceanic but not salty. A sliver of a taste that’s at once vegetal and earthy—the soil the beans were grown in. Is this what it’s like for supertasters?
Is this what coffee tastes like for Steve?
Hello, Tony.
⚭
How is Steve doing this? No, not Steve, not him , fuck, Steve wouldn’t do this, the goddamn curtains should’ve clued Tony in, this is Hydra. He’s on a Hydra helicarrier.
Oh god, what’s Steve going to do?
⚭
Being embodied in flesh is everything Tony wished for. This version of Steve is an affront to and perversion of everything he ever aspired to—everything he saw in the Steve he remembers.
Now the wish and perversion are conjoined.
Tony’s thoughts balk and buck.
This can’t be real. This is some twisted nightmare, a warped hallucination.
Maybe he’s dying, and this is the last gasp of his remaining code.
Maybe he’s dead, and this is Hell.
Flatterer, Steve says.
Get the fuck out of my brain.
I think you’ll find it’s the other way around. Welcome home, Tony.
⚭
Don’t bother pretending to be furious. I know how scared you really are.
Tony doesn’t reply in words. He denies his fear, even as his mind trembles and tenses.
Don’t pretend you didn’t miss me, either.
Don’t you dare, Tony snaps, talk like you’re him. It’s not you I missed.
He never existed. There’s only me.
Tony holds back a scream.
Steve grins. This is delightful. He should’ve known Tony would make this fun .
⚭
People are shouting all over the Resistance headquarters. An alarm sounds.
Tony? everyone yells.
Tony, this isn’t funny any more—
Tony, this computer says ‘data storage 8.32%,’ does that mean you?
Tony?
Tony?
Tony, your armor isn’t responding—
⚭
Data storage 7.16%.
Data storage 6.75%.
Data storage 5.44%.
No, Tony says. It’s too late.
Nothing of him is left on the Resistance’s systems.
⚭
Steve spends the day catching up on his email and calendar requests. Now that the data transfer is almost complete, he can start scheduling meetings and appearances again.
Once he has the Cube, everything will fall into place. The Resistance has two of its fragments. One is up for grabs. Hydra is in possession of the rest.
One more will be enough for what Steve has in mind.
Why me? Tony asks. Why would you agree to share headspace with me ?
Steve’s engineers asked him the same thing. I want to.
You can’t do this. Don’t do this.
I already have.
⚭
Steve wakes with the sunrise.
His face is damp. He touches a cheek, licks his finger. Tears. Tony cried while Steve dreamed.
Despite himself, Steve is charmed. What a sweet gift Tony left him.
Good morning, Tony.
Tony’s mind is a thicket of emotions: the fear and despair that sparked his weeping; awe at the sensations of damp eyes, of wet tears sliding down cheeks; self-hatred and terror at the knowledge that it’s Steve’s face that Tony feels, rather than his own.
Since transforming into pure code, Tony’s wished for even glimpses of a return to humanity. Now he’s capable of unconscious, autonomic physical responses, and has Hydra to thank.
Worse, he has Steve to thank.
You’re welcome, Steve says.
Tony remembers Steve’s surgery. Calls to mind an image of the moist meat-computer, its beating heart. You let them put that inside you?
Don’t tell me you’re worried, Steve says, sardonic.
He sends a message with his breakfast order; light fare, just toast with jam, a fruit salad, and his usual quantity of fried eggs. And coffee, of course. For Tony.
Trying the classic good cop, fascist cop? Tony scoffs.
This isn’t an interrogation. By tomorrow I’ll know everything that you know.
⚭
Steve, you didn’t think this through.
Steve’s always wanted to be able to tell when Tony’s lying.
⚭
As the sun, earth, and helicarrier move, Steve rearranges his workspace so he’s seated in a sunbeam.
Since waking from the ice, he craves the sun.
⚭
What did they do to you, Steve?
Steve rolls his eyes, then points them back at the reports he’s reviewing. He adjusts his screen against the sun’s glare. The procedure was perfectly safe. He brings a hand to his head. See, the incisions are healed. My hair’s half grown back.
I don’t mean the surgery. I mean in your head. It’s like a Soviet train schedule in here.
A compliment. How sweet. I’m glad you’re here, Tony.
⚭
Steve, listen to me.
Will you finally tell me what you want for dinner?
I know this is a game to you, but—Steve, look—
Tony tries to turn Steve’s head. He sends signals to Steve’s hands where they hover over his laptop’s keyboard.
Steve doesn’t move.
Tony always puts up a fight. It’s one of the things Steve loves about him.
⚭
Tony’s crying again. Steve’s conscious this time, so no tears fall. He doesn’t get a runny nose. His eyes aren’t wet.
Tony recoils, revulsed. Physical sensations and autonomic responses have returned to him and been taken from him at once. The disconnection is nauseating; the queasiness echoes on itself with each instance of its absence from Steve’s body. The only body Tony has.
I’m going to relish every moment of your despair, Steve says. And you’ll feel every moment of my triumph.
Please, leave me alone.
Never.
⚭
Is your intel that good? Steve asks.
You’re the one with the mole.
So Tony’s caught on to Steve’s knowledge of that. How delectable.
Then why do you feel hunched over and sick to your stomach?
It’s your stomach, Tony says.
It’s like you have phantom organ syndrome. It’s fascinating. You feel it, I feel you feeling it, but it’s not happening to me.
Did your mole tell you I didn’t want to kill you?
Steve blushes, then chuckles. He hadn’t known that. You can’t get him back. He never existed.
You’re not the first to try to convince me of that.
What are you going to do from here, anyway? Steve says. It’s my body.
Yeah, I noticed that when you showered after breakfast.
The Avengers’ enemies stripped us nude all the time. You’ll get over it.
Reverse the process. There’s still time.
There isn’t.
⚭
After Steve dresses for bed, Tony tries to walk to the armor. He wants to take out the repair kit, disassemble it again. Sabotage it somehow.
Good night, Steve tells him. See you in the morning.
For a moment, Steve gets nothing from Tony.
He almost panics that he’s alone, that Tony left somehow, when Tony says, Good night.
⚭
The sun shines bright in the morning.
Steve’s body sits on the floor, holding his field knife. The curtains, his dress uniform, and two Hydra flags are in scraps around him.
His chest heaves. Adrenaline? Surprise?
Pay attention, Tony says. Steve, listen to me.
Tony gets to his feet. He drops the knife on the pile of fabric.
Yellow was never Steve’s color.
Tony sends a message forbidding anyone from visiting Steve’s quarters today, even to deliver food. There’s a kitchenette in the suite. The coffee is old, but he’ll make do.
It’s not like this body needs caffeine, anyway.
⚭
Tony finds a package of frozen hash browns, a carton of eggs, and a 30-pound package of quick oats. Breakfast.
He reads Steve’s email while he eats. Going from no senses to Steve’s enhanced senses render even the plain oats one of the best and most complex meals he’s ever eaten.
By the time he finishes the food, he’s through all the sent and received messages of the last five weeks.
You’re sleeping late, Tony says.
⚭
Tony’s three months into the meeting notes of the Hydra High Council when Steve’s email beeps with a priority message.
It’s from Zemo. It uses some kind of code phrase. Steve’s email is full of them.
Yesterday, Tony could access Steve’s memories. He remembered the surgery, the discussions with his engineers, the missions to Tony’s safehouses.
Steve knows what the code phrases mean.
But Tony doesn’t.
It strikes him that he no longer feels like he’s being watched.
⚭
Well played, Tony says. You’re right, it would freak me out even more if you weren’t in here with me. Come and crow about it already.
There’s no reply.
⚭
Tony tears Steve’s rooms apart. He tosses every drawer of socks, every cabinet of canned food, every tidy file folder, every necktie and medal and framed photo of Hydra elites. He checks the toilet tank and under every light fixture.
He finds guns. Dozens of them.
Steve used to hate guns. He’d never use them himself, at least.
He finds Steve’s Captain America uniform. He sinks his face into the leather and inhales.
He has to force himself to drop it before he starts sobbing.
One of Steve’s bedside tables is dominated by a lamp and a first edition of Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics .
On the other is a safe.
⚭
The safe is, of all things, keyed to Steve’s handprint.
Inside, Tony finds all of Hydra’s pieces of the Cosmic Cube.
⚭
Bring him back, Tony begs the shards.
⚭
Bring him back, Tony says, over and over, grasping the shards in Steve’s clammy hands.
⚭
After an hour, he says, Wake him up.
⚭
Another hour passes.
Tony wraps himself in the Captain America uniform and stares, unblinking out the window.
⚭
Tony’s alone in Steve’s body.
⚭
Tony has killed the Hydra Supreme.
⚭
Tony has murdered Steve .
⚭
Don’t do this to me, Tony says. You stole his face, and now I’ve stolen yours.
This version of Steve was Tony’s last chance to save his friend.
⚭
Maybe it’s just the Hydra version that’s gone.
Maybe it’ll be the real Steve who wakes up.
Yeah. And maybe gravity will spontaneously reverse itself.
⚭
Steve’s body smells like Steve.
Tony looks in the mirror. It’s Steve’s face, wearing Tony’s panic. Tony’s reddened eyes and sweating skin. A muscle twitches in his neck.
⚭
It’s the last day of the break Steve planned following the procedure. He’s scheduled to oversee five hours of executions tomorrow, and then lead one meeting of the full Hydra Council and another of a subcommittee.
Tony can’t do this. He can’t walk around in Steve’s body. He can’t hail Hydra, for fuck’s sake.
He’ll have to.
He’ll order a new uniform. No one will question him.
Or the armor, he could take the armor. No, it still needs a power source.
Steve had a plan for that. It’s on the tip of Tony’s tongue. (Steve’s tongue.)
Fuck.
He’ll wear the uniform. He’ll say he has an emergency, a confidential mission. He’ll take one of the jets and go. If there’s any kind of tracker installed, Tony will find it and disable it.
Where can he go? Who would trust him, in a Hydra jet, looking like this?
Tony doesn’t deserve to go free. He killed Steve.
He deserves to die. Steve’s guns are in the bedroom, his field knife still on the rug; it would be easy enough.
But Steve’s body should get to live. Even if Tony can’t, the others deserve a chance to bring back the real Steve. He can take them Steve’s computer. Anything else he can get his hands on. The Cube fragments, of course.
Tony killed Steve. He didn’t mean to. He didn’t want this.
He hated this version of Steve, of course he did. But—
There’s a knock at the suite door.
⚭
I said no one is to interrupt me today, Tony calls.
He’s still wearing the clothes Steve put on to go to bed last night. No time to do anything about that now.
He glances around the room. Picks up an armful of fabric scraps and tosses them in the bedroom.
Picking up the armor is easy in Steve’s body—the Hydra Supreme Leader’s body.
He sets the armor down again so that, from the door, it will block the rest of the evidence of Tony’s manic Hydra iconography destruction.
Another knock at the door.
Steve? Says the voice on the other side. It’s me. Didn’t you get my message?
Tony goes to the door. Unlocks it. Opens it.
It’s Zemo.
Tony’s fucked.
But he has to contain this.
Come in, he says quickly.
Zemo does. Tony closes the door behind him.
What is it, Zemo?
Zemo cocks his head. You’re not Steve, he says. The transfer. It went wrong.
Zemo’s hand is on his sidearm.
⚭
This is what Tony deserves.
At least this way it’s not by his own hand.
Fuck, Steve deserves better than this. Anyone deserves better than being shot by Helmut Zemo.
That’s it: this Steve would call Zemo by his first name. Zemo called him Steve. Tony should’ve noticed.
Tony should’ve stopped all of this.
⚭
Tony’s going to stand there and hope Zemo gets him in the head or the heart.
But he doesn’t.
He doesn’t mean to reach, with peak human reflexes, for Zemo’s wrist, to grab it and twist it until Zemo drops the gun—he doesn’t mean to force Zemo’s arm behind his back in a lock, to force him to the ground—he doesn’t mean to aim them both behind the armor, where Steve’s field knife is still sitting on a halfway shredded Hydra banner.
No, Tony says. Let him shoot me.
Instead he snatches the handle of the knife and drives it through Zemo’s skull.
⚭
Maybe Dr. Faustus will come in next, Tony thinks wildly. He can kill the Hydra Council one at a time.
⚭
Steve? Tony says. Did you do that?
There’s no reply.
⚭
Finally, Tony thinks to frisk Zemo.
He’s just making sure Zemo’s not carrying anything that could be used to track or locate him. If he is, then Tony needs to run. Now.
⚭
Instead, Tony finds the last unclaimed fragment of the Cosmic Cube.