Chapter Text
His eye was wrong.
Such a strange, menial thing to fixate on when everything was so very, very wrong. The reflection in the mirror showed a hand prodding at his cheek. Articulating metal joints peeked through the skin over fake, metal replacement bones at the back of the hand and the joints of the fingers. The hand was his, but it didn’t feel like it. The skin wasn’t his either. It wasn’t a graft of his own, something modern science seemed to have more or less perfected. But that wasn’t what he had. It wasn’t what he was given.
Synthetic, he recalled being told in the same, vague way the rest of the modifications had been told to him. Made of some sort of material that he should probably care more about, but didn’t, couldn’t. It was just another fake replacement stretched over fake replacements.
He could see the seam where the artificial skin met his own. He’d had plenty of scarring, albeit mostly minor, before Rebirth and the Serum but that seam didn’t look like any scarring he’d experienced before. He doubted it was as noticeable to anyone else, but he couldn’t seem to not notice it. No matter how much he tried to look through or look past it, it was right there, unignorable.
Steve supposed he ought to be grateful.
All things considered, he’d be less surprised if they’d simply opted to forego the synthetic skin, skip right over whatever attempts to ease it into his own skin, and leave him exposed. Him, the mechanical modifications, there was little difference as far as he could see at this point.
He could hear the eerie whirl of the mechanical parts he didn’t even know the name for every time he moved, even over the constant music that neither he nor JARVIS had silenced in weeks. Music that provided some sense of grounding, gave him a minimal hold on his sanity. That was wrong too, all of it, but for the moment it was an ignorable wrong.
“Captain Rogers, Agent Romanov is requesting entry,” JARVIS announced.
“Surprise, surprise,” Steve muttered, toneless and too distracted by the reflection in the mirror to bother pulling his attention any further. “Did she say what she wanted?”
“I find it likely that she is here in regards to your missed appointments at SHIELD.”
His eye, though, was just wrong enough to turn his stomach, to set a bolt of unease spiraling down what they’d left of his actual spine.
Supposedly, it was all actually still his, the spine at least. They’d ‘only’ given the existing vertebrae — those that hadn’t needed new hardware of their own — some sort of plating, or coating of some sort while playing mad scientist. For his own benefit, of course. They would surely loathe if he tore in two under the weight of their helpful modifications.
Supposedly.
They’d also been able to save his left eye. The right one, though… It was set into his face just the same as its counterpart. It had a lid and lashes and brow–more synthetic, he assumed–just like its counterpart. He could see out of it, like the counterpart.
But that was where the similarities ended.
The focus was different. Sharper than even his enhanced sight, certainly far clearer than what he’d known before the Serum. He was certain it was unlikely to ever actually require light to see.
At least before, with Rebirth and the Serum, when everything changed, he’d mostly recognized his own face on the rare occasion he found himself in front of a mirror. His sight had improved but his eyes hadn’t changed.
But now.
Now, the blue was different.
Just that one.
Unnatural and reflective. It made no attempts to match the opposite eye, his eye.
It wasn’t always blue, either, not the way his natural one was. It was nauseating and disturbing to watch the ring of color flicker and change depending on the stimuli, the brightness of his surroundings was the most noticeable.
Never mind more synthetic skin that he supposed would seamlessly match his natural skin if he wasn’t so acutely aware of the differences.
At least he wasn’t exposed, right?
What a joke.
He supposed there must’ve been some sort of effort made to keep him mostly recognizable to people who didn’t actually know him. Mirrors didn’t count and neither did Steve but it probably would have gotten more difficult to keep selling his face for their benefit if they changed his appearance too much.
“Captain Rogers.”
Right.
They insisted he come in for regular check ups. For maintenance. The same appointments that finally succeeded in driving him from the SHIELD-loaned apartment and into accepting the offer to live among the would-be team at the tower.
He hadn’t bothered going to any since those first few days after the invasion, when he’d been given little choice.
Steve recalled, in the too-clear way his memory now forced him to, the agent doing maintenance on the Quinjet that Clint, Natasha, and he used to get into Manhattan from the Helicarrier. During those appointments with SHIELD, he might as well have been the jet for the way he was handled.
Though he was certain the jet’s technician probably thought more highly of his charge than SHIELD doctors and scientists seemed to be of theirs.
Steve supposed that he couldn’t be surprised that they were following up on it. Nor was he entirely surprised that Natasha was the one sent.
He really wished they’d just leave him alone. The sound of his arm whirling and moving, lowering to brace his hands against the sink, grated as much as any and everything else.
He was tired. So tired.
They could have at least done him the courtesy of ensuring he no longer needed sleep or the horrors that visited whenever he had the nerve to try.
So vivid too.
He’d always had something of an active mind and memory. He’d spent much of his youth relying on it for drawing. Coming across something that set his mind spinning and his fingers itching and clinging tight onto the image until he got home to put pencil tips to whatever scraps of paper he managed to scrounge up.
He didn’t know if it was the serum or whatever SHIELD had done to him, but he could certainly have done without reliving those memories with all the clarity of those modern films everyone seemed so keen for him to spend his time on.
On the other hand, though? Steve wasn’t sure that he was the sort of tired that any amount of sleep would somehow cure.
Sixty-something years of sure hadn’t done anything of benefit for him, afterall.
“I’m not in,” Steve sighed. “Just… I’m not in, JARVIS.”
“I don’t believe that will delay her for long, Captain.”
“I know but I’ll deal with that when I have to. You’d think they’d realize they’ve done more than enough.”
“One would think.”
“The salvage and recovery team brought you to us severely compromised.”
The words were dry and the tone was interested in the script but not the presentation. They were spoken aloud but not to another person.
“Sixty-plus years in what is essentially a crude form of cryostasis should have given the enhanced healing factor enough time to recover from the plane crashing into the water. However, that did not seem to be the case.”
He pressed his face into his hands and closed his eyes as tightly as he could, pointedly refusing to acknowledge the unsettling differences between the left and the right. He didn’t have the capacity. Not now. Not yet.
Not that it helped.
“Preliminary scans indicated widespread blunt force trauma sustained to the majority of your right side, due either to the initial impact or possibly the recovery processes. The clavicle, scapula, and head of the humerus of the right arm were shattered, multiple fractures to both cervical and thoracic vertebra. A series of fractures and dislocations throughout the ribcage. A series of compounded and simple fractures throughout the pelvis and femur.”
The screaming echo of metal tearing and warping. The shattering of glass. The burning press of the frigid water. It all still broke through every attempt at ignoring them, at drowning them out.
“Further scans corroborated that and also suggested severe traumatic brain injury, such as what we’d see in victims of severe car accidents. The vast majority of which would be unlikely to live to tell the tale.”
Lucky them.
That… that was unkind, and he knew it. It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard, time and time again, the sour envy over how quickly he recovered from major and minor injuries during the war. There was a reason the base medics didn’t typically bother to waste resources on him. There wasn’t really much point.
Steve didn't realize that little secret was meant to stay under wraps. He could clearly recall Bucky and Morita's sour faces. Howard's quieter but no less fierce anger. Steve tried his best to reassure all of them, obviously he was fine. He healed. He would fully recover in no time. That hadn’t seemed to settle any of them.
Steve wished any one of them was around to show that defensive anger now. His voice clearly wasn’t cutting it. Though, that was pretty familiar too, he supposed.
He really couldn’t afford to focus on that.
Not here and not now. Not under this doctor’s critical scrutiny that would no doubt be used to fill pages of notes of things Steve didn’t even know he’d given away.
One break at a time.
“While the enhanced healing factor from Doctor Erskine’s Super Soldier Serum may have repaired all the damage, there was no way to be certain and we couldn’t take the chance. Finding you, alive at that, was not something SHIELD was willing to leave to something as unpredictable as fate. Not when we’ve created or gained access to technology advanced enough to drastically improve chances.”
The serum heightened his natural senses to an oftentimes painful level. Necessity had required him to adapt quickly, to learn how to push down and away on the near constant sensory overload. He learned, it was wartime, he didn’t have much of a choice. Now, even closing out the too-strong stimuli was impossible. It didn’t work. He sensed it all just the same.
Steve recalled, just months ago by his own memory, being shot.
Not for the first time but it was the first that hadn’t gone straight through. The bullet struck high on the left side of his chest and lodged into the bone in his shoulder. It hurt like hell, but, then again, Steve was acquainted enough with pain, that part came as no surprise.
Morita was on him as soon as the fighting died down. Steve would smile if he could, recalling the scathing lecture about recklessness.
Had he been a normal, unenhanced soldier, there was apparently a solid chance he wouldn’t have made it much past the end of the fighting. The bullet had nicked a few things on its way through, causing further damage and the damaged pieces causing more damage. Steve’s continued fighting had done nothing to lessen the damage or slow the blood loss.
It was funny, in a way, the dressing down he got from Bucky and from Morita were clearer now in memory than they were at the time he heard them first hand.
Blood loss. It played all sorts of funny tricks.
Regardless. They had fished out the round and patched him up the best field medicine could manage, soundly ignoring Steve’s insistence that they not waste supplies. His healing factor had already saved him, essentially turning a very serious wound into something that could easily be cleaned, patched, and left to heal on its own.
But it turned out that the bullet had fragmented. Despite how thorough Morita had been, a few tiny shards were left behind. As he healed, his body had ejected the fragmented pieces, leaving them stuck to his skin but able to fall free when the bandage was removed.
“We know from earlier and ongoing experimentation that modifications such as these can potentially cause long-term system degradation outside of what we consider to be acceptable parameters.”
Steve snorted bitterly, unable to tamp down the sound or feeling. He didn’t know who his predecessor might be in this game of playing God but he hoped, at very least, the poor sonofabitch had some sort of say.
Unlikely, the best he could tell.
“Our scans show that your biological systems have taken well to it, there has been no sign of rejection.”
It was funny, in a way, the cool, dry delivery of the words when Steve could hear the man’s heartbeat and breathing pick up as he spoke. The slight fidgeting of his fingers where they rested against the keyboard, quietly rattling the keys. Widened pupils and the faint, chemically muted, hint of sweat, only confirmed what Steve was already coming to suspect.
The man wasn’t just giving a clinical debrief, a run down of medical treatment. He was excited that their roughshod theories put into practice actually worked. It wasn’t about Steve, it wasn’t about his recovery or revival. It wasn’t to make him more comfortable or accepting of the changes.
It was an opportunity to show off, to grandize. Not so different from Senator Brandt using the ‘after’ of Project Rebirth to sell war bonds or Howard showing off his weapons prototypes, including the shield.
“Actually, the Super Soldier Serum seems to have made you particularly responsive to this treatment process. Your biological systems have integrated with our additions as though they were naturally born.”
Steve wished there had been. That his body would expel it all the same way it had done those sharp pieces of the round that had lodged in his chest. But it hadn’t. Despite demanding answers, quite forcefully at that, Steve didn’t need to be told that all the changes and additions had taken too well, too cleanly. He could feel it, sense it. It was undeniable, however much he wished he could deny every piece and part of it.
He was tired. So tired.
If Steve was certain of anything it was that he was the type of tired that no amount of haunted, horror-filled sleep was going to magically cure. But then again, he was under no illusion that he knew anything for certain.
Not a single goddamn thing.
All things considered, just plain and simple delirium went a long way to explain it all.
But there were other times, usually when he was on the cusp of sleep. Before the creeping tendrils of terrorizing memories would wind suffocatingly tight around him, pulling him down and under, drowning him in pain, fear, and flashes of too blue light, every bit as surely as the frigid Arctic waters. Or when he reached the point of exhaustion that he might as well be dreaming–that senses blurred and, strangely, overlaid. He could see the apartment, see and hear himself, as though outside of his body. From some strange vantage point of the apartment. Above and outside of himself.
In some ways, it reminded him of the fever induced hallucinations that his frequent battles with illness brought when he was young. His mother had been terrified. Bucky too, at least until the illness passed and it became an interesting topic of conversation instead. Until the next bout, anyway.
The uncomfortable lack of true silence. The constant hum and noise of tech that seemed inescapable in this day and age. The itching, jittery buzz of energy, surging under his skin didn’t help matters. His body’s insistence that he needed to do something—anything, everything—just to calm the uneasy restlessness warred against the weight of the desire to do absolutely nothing.
The combination left him deadlocked more often than not. Standing in the small kitchen staring into the refrigerator or sitting on the couch staring at nothing while blind anger, fear, and panic built and built. The tight, weighted pressure in his chest, the knot lodged immovably in his throat battled against the ever present numbness. He thought he might be sick. He thought, just maybe, he’d finally break and cry.
It was probably for the best that he was left more or less alone.
In a way though, that deadlocked, hyper-focus made the doubled senses worse.
Initially, it was easy to dismiss as paranoia, considering that flared hot, bright, and aching, too. A plague of tiny, invisible needles working their way under his skin and into his mind, prickling his nerves and senses but unable to find and remove the source. It wasn’t that he didn’t think it strange, seeing himself walk through the door in a shuffle or hearing the tired sigh he released as soon as he was alone enough to allow himself even that.
But he wasn’t alone, was he?
It took longer than it should, longer than he cared to admit, to realize that it wasn’t simple delirium. It was an uphill battle against himself, against the determined rationalization that whirled around his thoughts, that it wasn’t his mind playing tricks, at least not on this.
He wasn’t 15 and begrudgingly greeting the Reaper. This wasn’t one of those hallucinations that would end when the fever broke under his mother’s practiced hand. Those days — his illnesses and his mother — were long gone. It could never be that.
Instead of clenching his eyes closed tightly and shaking off the unsettling awareness, instead of stubbornly ignoring it, Steve found himself latching onto it. Leaning into the double sight, specifically, and wandering through the room until he found his sense of direction until he found the angle and location that the imagery was coming from.
Steve was a long way from being completely up-to-date on the modern world. He was working on it, slowly but surely, though undoubtedly more than a little reluctant. But exposure through the carefully cultivated lessons and resources that SHIELD wasted no time shoving towards him meant that he learned competence with advanced technology well before he even had the opportunity to understand the basic levels of modern tech.
That exposure, though, meant that Steve knew, with only a small amount of doubt, what he’d found when he pulled the small device free from where it had been planted, tucked unobtrusively in between the trim molding in the far corner of the room. The realization wasn’t a welcome one, nor was the shift of the double sight when he crushed the device between the tips of thumb and index finger, confirming his immediate suspicion that it wasn’t the only one.
Steve wondered if they knew. When they did what they did to him, did they know this would be a side effect? Did they suspect? Would whoever was watching him be surprised that their little planted devices could be found so easily?
He didn’t confront them about it.
While SHIELD was the most logical to have placed the bugs, just like with all of his other long list of cloudy dreams and unsettling senses, he had no proof, only suspicion.
Asking questions, demanding answers, would only give them room to poke and prod at his paranoia or, better yet, attempt to reassure him that it was all in his best interest. He might not know much about anything, but he wasn’t ignorant about those sorts of power plays.
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t have to confront them.
“Captain Rogers, Doctor Faustus would like to see you as soon as you’re done with training,” an agent said. His tone had an overbright cheeriness that Steve generally associated with attempts at covering nerves or uncertainty, a little too forced and tense to be fully genuine despite the best attempts.
Bucky had the same tell. Steve learned young how to pick up on that extra level of jauntiness in his natural cockiness. Becca used to mock it, borrowing that jaunty arrogance that Bucky wore as well as his jacket, to tease.
Steve harshly forced that dangerous line of thought aside and frowned, studying the agent for a moment, recognizing the twitch of his fingers as an indicator of the desire to fidget under the scrutiny. “Did he happen to say it’s about?”
He understood it. Between everything that Captain America had been warped into while Steve was locked away in the ice and everything that SHIELD did to him following his recovery, Steve was well aware that he was…strange. Different. He knew that people, whether agents or civilians out on the street or his would-be teammates, didn’t really know how to talk to him or what to make of him.
He couldn’t blame them, not really. He didn’t know either.
“It’s-uh-It’s just a follow up, he said,” the agent offered immediately, perhaps a little too eagerly. “Something about your return to duty paperwork, I think.”
Steve nodded his understanding, shaking out the ache in his hand that wasn’t even his anymore and turned his attention back to his ‘lessons’, listening to the tell-tale sounds of the agent lingering momentarily before turning and walking away at a pace too brisk to be natural. He stared at the screen for a long moment, not really registering anything that he saw.
There was always the chance that the timing was purely coincidental.
Steve wasn’t sure he truly believed that considering it was only just prior to the call coming in for this particular set of carefully-tailored lesson plans that he’d found and destroyed the third set of monitoring devices in his apartment.
The standing suspicion told him that SHIELD hadn’t known about the strange connection he’d used to locate the equipment. Maybe they still didn’t. Maybe they were acting under suspicion-without-proof just the same as he was.
SHIELD, however, had the means and opportunity to investigate their suspicions. Probably with some carefully worded questions, maybe a few tests that were intended to figure out the hows and the whys. Maybe they would even hook him up to another one of their machines under the guise of routine maintenance.
SHIELD was only slightly higher than the would-be teammates of the Avengers at recognizing that he wasn’t entirely incompetent, technologically or otherwise. He also knew that an agency stacked full of highly skilled, highly competent people didn’t think very much or very highly of his own experience with needing to just stumble through to learn what he knew, no matter how quickly he learned.
Being underestimated wasn’t new, though. It was probably the most familiar part of this whole new century they’d dragged him into.