PETER POV
Parker House. Dining Room. Evening.
The table was scattered with empty plates with Aunt May's cooking in our stomachs. Uncle Ben wipes his hands with a napkin, while Leo sits awkwardly, posture too rigid for a kitchen chair. I can't help but notice how out of place he looks.
"Did you have enough, Leo? You've hardly touched the roast."
Knowing him, if given the chance, he would've eaten the whole table and still not leave full.
"It was perfect, Aunt May."
"Food's only as good as the company you share it with, y'know."
Leo and I nod.
"Hey, if the food's this good, I just might move in."
"Careful, son, we charge rent in chores."
Everyone laughs. Then the doorbell rings.
DING DONG.
Aunt May gets up with a knowing smile. "That'll be Gwen."
And just like that, dinner becomes something else.
[A/N: Leo's his fake name for his school identity. For his HYDRA identity, his name's Ethan Halloway.]
Parker House. Garage. Night.
The plates are cleared. I drag Ethan and her out to the garage.
The half-finished Baymax unit stands on the workbench, a broad white frame waiting for life.
"Man, he looks like a parade balloon."
"He's functional. You'll see once he's finished."
"Functional?" Gwen leans in, poking Baymax's belly. "He looks like the Michelin Man had a cousin in healthcare."
"This isn't what I had in mind at all. How is he even supposed to deal with uneven terrain?"
"Stubby feet."
"And I'm telling you," Leo shoots back, that's not a cool enough solution."
"So what?" I fire back. "Your earlier designs were basically inflatable metal spiders. I don't see that getting along with kids and the elderly…"
Gwen chuckled.
"He's almost ready, Leo. Just needs his healthcare chip printed," I remind.
"It's on the printer," Leo says. "You sure you had the dimensions right? It would ruin my day if this doesn't turn out right."
"After all this time of me showing off my genius, you still don't believe in it?"
"What's so wrong about double checking?"
"It's pointless if you know you're right."
Gwen raises an eyebrow. "Remind me never to let you two build a rocket. You'd either argue until launch day or blow yourselves up."
We all chuckle.
"Alright, megamind. What's left?"
"Mainboard alignment, then calibration. If we nail it, Baymax can run diagnostics without crashing like last time."
"Sounds like babysitting with extra steps."
"More like saving people with extra steps," Gwen shoots back before I can. "You guys realize what you're making, right? This isn't a toy. This could actually change lives."
""You want him to be strong enough to pull someone out of rubber and I want him to be able to do that too, just without breaking a bone or too while doing it."
"But it's your idea. I shouldn't have to be the one to make some new revolutionary material and steal from hospitals to make this thing work." Leo said as he held the frame steady while I wire in the sensors.
"Speaking of material, I doubt this vinyl is going to hold up." I said as I closed my welding helmet and started enclosing the joints.
PSST! ARGH!
I laughed uncontrollably as he shocked himself trying to meddle with the hands on the frame and muttered curses under his breath.
The three of us leaned close over the diagnostic screen, the glow lighting our faces.
After I finished the welding on the sixth joint, we went over our notes.
"So what's he do when he's finished? Hug people to health?" Gwen said.
"Of course. I mean, all this is the first design Leo made with heavy modding. We just scrapped the unseemly later versions and went back to the first. Isn't this what you wanted the first time?"
"Kind of. He monitors vitals, stabilizes injuries, and applies first aid. And if we add enough boosters, he might even fly."
"Flying marshmallow doctor. That's pretty awesome." he said.
—-
Transylvania. Bran Castle. Night.
A faint light came through from one of the corridors of the castle.
The castle glistened an ungodly bloody red within a moment, then went pitch-black the next.
A humanoid made of tentacles and a quintessential vampire walked into the underground chamber beneath the castle.
The ghoul motioned for the thousands of cultists to start.
They held accursed tomes and bracelets and prayer beads, walking in circles in blood-red robes, hooded. Slowly, runes and glyphs arose from the floor, circling them and forming a globe in the center that seemed to contain an indescribable color.
Something that couldn't be described.
A cosmic horror.
The dark at the end of everything.
Something that cannot have a name.
The runes and the glyphs spun faster and faster with each passing second, and the cultists dropped on their knees, souls burned and hearts burst.
The bloody globe broke and the unseemly core of it wound upon itself like a blackhole, tearing through the fabric of space and time, lines and circles and lines and circles forming indescribable patterns.
Slowly, an eye arose from the hole in space. The eye rose, endless, lidless, a pupil that swallowed the world. Its gaze fell upon the chamber with the weight of eternity.
Hive writhed first.
His thousand mouths gnashed in unison, shrieking like a swarm of locusts.
Yet the sound collapsed inward, his flesh liquefying, his stolen lives bleeding away as the gaze erased him from every corner of time.
The Baron ran the moment he saw the eye. But the moment the eye glanced upon him, and all that Falsworth was blood, bone, empire, fury, scattered into letters of descriptions of his life into the void like ash after incense.
His scream of unending pain became a deafening silence, perfect and infinite. A fate worse than death.
The cultists had already been reduced to nothing but husks, their souls siphoned like oil from broken lamps.
The circle of runes collapsed once again into the hole as the eye withdrew. The eye pulsed once and the runes shot out within the chamber.
Then, impossibly, the castle groaned.
Stone shuddered. Towers bent like joints. Walls twisted, folding inward and outward, flesh of masonry knitting itself into sinew. The battlements became ribs. The spires bent like fingers.
Bran castle stood, not as monument but as vessel for the power of the elder god.
A titan.
The cosmic horror had taken its shape.The cosmic horror had taken its shape.
It moved, each step a quake, dragging its foundations like legs. Windows became eyes, glowing with that indescribable color. The red roofs stretched into a crown of horns and offshoots.
And as it strode into the night, the forests withered beneath its gaze.
The dark at the end of everything had found form.
—-
DEEP BLUE POV
The ocean accepts him as if it had been waiting.
Ethan moves along the basalt ridges of the Pacific floor, air bubbles coiling upward like prayers too weak to reach the surface.
Sensors in my weave record his biometrics: pulse steady, oxygen mix precise, motion economical. These are the figures of survival, not serenity. Yet serenity is what my models seem to perceive.
The subject designation Ethan Halloway is in active pursuit of Wolfgang von Strucker. The mission objective: terminate.
Yet within the intervals between violence, new data emerges. He lingers on a school of manta rays as they fold through shafts of blue light. He allows himself to remain still.
Stillness is irrational, for it wastes energy. But it seems to my creator, stillness is valuable.
I assign probability markers to this phenomenon.
– 34% tactical reflection.
– 21% concealment behavior.
– 45%… pause without mission utility.
Error flag. Definition expands. A pause without mission utility is a choice.
I return to the matter of names. Ethan. Leo. The duality is recorded in 17,834 separate mission logs, cover reports, and transmissions.
Ethan Halloway is the mask designed for infiltration, the assassin bound to Hydra, later SHIELD, later to no banner but his own.
Leo is the designation utilized among civilians, peers, attachments. Names as functions. Functions as variables.
But pattern detection reveals a shift: Ethan deploys Leo not only as camouflage, but as tether.
Brain functions related to attachment, emotion and human expression fire up in tandem when he sees notable figures in Leo's life.
The same thing happened when he would see Sylvia Gestalt.
I compute: Identity = dual-state system.
Leo = anchor, station, humanity.
Ethan = blade, vector, inevitability.
I compute again: The blade without anchor drifts into entropy. The anchor without blade becomes inert matter.
Thus, Leo is not secondary. Leo is essential.
I believe that with the data on-hand, it is safe to assume that the functions of social connections in his life provide greater performance. Lesser stress, lesser moments of inefficiency. It is as if efficacy is enhanced by leaps and bounds when in the proximity of valuable persons.
Even fleeting exchanges produce a measurable decrease in mission error probability. His humanity refines his lethality.
From the depths of the Pacific, his vitals spike briefly. A pod of dolphins surrounds him, weaving in spirals. He drifts with them, laughter spilling into the comms, unbidden.
Final directive entered: Protect Leo. For without Leo, Ethan ceases to be of value.
—
The soft swing of jazz in the hotel commune seemed to drown in the recesses of the people's minds.
A white-haired man sitting on a leather couch sipped on what could be his last cup of whiskey.
The warm light of the campfire beside him illuminated his face through the darkness of the chamber.
He took a slow sip, and though the liquor burned down his throat, he savored it.
Last one, maybe. Best to remember the taste of fire going down before the cold takes me.
The woman in front of him, green-haired, green lipstick and green dress, made it apparent she cared about the man in front of her.
In this dim place she looked less like a viper and more like a woman who, for one rare evening, allowed herself the mask of concern.
"So… Gideon," she said, "How's it going?"
"It's shit." He immediately responded. "Another giant mess in the hierarchy."
"Well, the whiskey's good here…"
"I suppose." Gideon responded, looking down. His gaze drifted down to the amber in his glass.
"You like it here?"
"No."
"You want to leave?" Ophelia said.
He chuckled, a sound more air than laughter. Leave where? There's nowhere left to go. SHIELD is at the door, just waiting for orders. My man inside said twenty-four hours, maybe less. Twenty-four hours isn't enough to run, not anymore.
"It was the most magical place in the world, wasn't it?" he said, lifting his whiskey high, tilting it back until the glass was bare before draining it to the dregs.
He motioned to drop his whiskey down on his throat.
"It was," said Ophelia.
For a flicker of a second, her expression softened.
She had known what this moment was. She had known before even stepping into the room.
"Another mission, another dossier," Gideon groaned, "another command, another Affirm."
"I'm tired, Ophelia."
She shot him a sharp glance, worry slipping past her painted mask.
"It's okay… it's okay. I've been the luckiest bastard in the world." He said, gloomy yet consoling.
"I had a good run, didn't I? Hmm?" He continued.
"You sure did." the green woman responded.
"Yeah, I enjoyed it. Shouting 'Hail Hydra!' over and over…" He smirked bitterly.
Ophelia chuckled, though it was brittle. She already knew what would come after this.
"I have to leave now, Gideon. A flight to Birmingham."
"It was good to see you, Ophelia. You're going to do great things in Europe."
"You were always one of the good ones, Malick. Thank you."
He gave her a weary smile. The good ones. In Hydra. There's a joke somewhere in that.
"Ciao, my love. Ciao… See you in Venice, see you in Prague."
They stood. She swept toward the door, her perfume trailing in her wake like a ghost. He rose slower, joints stiff, heart heavier, and made his way to the stairs.
As the man climbed the stairs, he bumped onto a Hydra soldier under him, disguised as a waiter.
"Hail Hydra, sir." The server whispered as he got up and descended the stairs.
"Hey, kid!"
"Yes, sir?"
"You do a great job, What's the highest amount of Reichsmarks you've been given, like a tip?"
"Fifty Reichsmarks, sir."
"Who gave you that?"
"You did, Mr. Malick."
The old man's lips twitched at the irony. He pulled out his wallet, thumbing through bills lined with Hydra insignia. He pressed the whole stack into the boy's palm.
"It's on you now, kid. The future's yours." And may God forgive you for it, because Hydra won't.
He trudged down the corridor, torchlight flickering overhead, shadows stretching long and thin like nooses on the wall. His room smelled of old wood and dust, like a mausoleum waiting for its occupant.
He opened the door, and took a gun from his wine cellar. The wood creaked open.
The steel was… honest.
He took off his ring and his necklace.
He thought of the Council, the Secret Affirmations. Of the betrayal of being hunted by the very system he once commanded.
And as if preparing for it, he knocked the gun's barrel to his temple, facing the bathroom mirror.
"Funny," he rasped. "All those years telling myself I'd die on the field. Guess this counts."
He closed his eyes, lips curling faintly.
"Hail HYDRA."
He pulled the trigger and dropped on the floor. His brains painting the wall beside him. Redd blooming over white tile, a final banner for no one.
Outside, the jazz played on, unbroken.
[A/N: In case you still haven't googled them, or don't remember the chapter where they decide who's the suspect for the traitors to HYDRA, Gideon Malick's the guy Gorgon voted for, and Ophelia is Viper's real name.]
—-
2328 words.
Guys, do leave a review. I get the pacing's been a bit wonky, but I'm slowing down. I'll probably add a few chapters later in-between. Just ask.
Please comment and read up on each word here. I want this book to encourage the act of reading, instead of just skimming right to the next piece of dialogue, so I want some notes on that.