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Secret Bit of Right From Wrong	By : ChrisCross Category: Marvel Verse Movies > Avengers, The Views: 9417 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Captain America or The Avengers. I make no money, and live on reveiws alone

Chapter List
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A.N. We're in the home stretch, folks! Just so you know why I've kept Arnim Zola around, despite his being around in CA:tFA, is that he's just the best gosh darn super-villain biochemist ever. Also I've been re-watching Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and I love the scene where Zola tells Zemo to go get him a DNA sample of Steve's, and Zemo is all "I'll do that, so you can cure me." and I keep seeing this imaginary thought bubble over Zola's head saying "Yeah, we'll go with that."
As always, kindly review, even if you don't review kindly (I mean it, I love reviews, even critical ones).
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Early the next morning, before Karen had even begun waking up, Steve woke with a start, his heart pounding, lungs fighting for air with a familiar burning sensation. He wasn’t sure what had woken him, but he was sure it wasn’t anything good. Upon looking around, though, he saw only the same tranquil forest, nothing remotely threatening. Perhaps it was just old memories coming to haunt him from his past. After all, they’d spent the last night talking about their respective pasts, including the little bits and pieces he knew of the organization that had chased them down to begin with. It must have triggered some kind of bad dream, nothing more. Reprimanding himself for foolishness, he relaxed back down into Karen’s warm embrace to try for a few more minutes of sleep.
As Steve was convincing himself that it was nothing, stealth-cloaked Doombots advanced on the pine tree the two lovers were sleeping under. Not making a sound, an impressive task for a two ton machine, the Doombots circled their target, forming a perimeter. Viper and her team advanced on the tree once their borrowed robotic men had a solid position. There was no sneaky teleporter, this time; the moment for Viper to claim her prize was upon them, and there was nothing the no-longer-super soldier could do. With a quick mist of sleeping gas to keep them docile, Viper and her team gathered up the duo to return to Zemo.
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Arnim Zola was growing concerned. The Viper had turned their quarry over three hours ago, departing with her fascinating kitsune, and Captain America had yet to wake. That specimen was worth far less dead than alive, after all, dissection could do only so much. Although, he had to admit, the assumed value was based on the presumption that this was indeed the Captain America of the forties, a fact the scrawny figure put into doubt. If this really was what Erskine had to work with, he was a better scientist than any member of Hydra had given him credit for. They’d all assumed that the story of a boy so sick and frail becoming the pinnacle of physical perfection was yet another American propaganda, the physical embodiment of their precious ‘American Dream’, no more real than King Arthur or the Aeneid. But if Viper’s intelligence was right, then he was currently monitoring the fragile life-signs of a real, living legend.
It had taken all his skill to keep the boy from dying, and even so, the recovery balanced on a tight rope. As it was, only the specialized oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth was keeping him breathing, at least until he could do that on his own. He’d had a mild fever and some swelling in his joints when Viper brought him in, necessitating a cocktail of anti-inflammatories, febrifuges and painkillers on constant IV drip. His color was getting better, now that they had stabilized his blood sugar and gotten some iron supplements in him. But for all that work, at this rate of improvement, they might as well go back to focusing on the Dreadnaught program.
The female specimen was presenting better endurance, even waking slightly in the prep room before Zola had a chance to re-administer the sleeping drug, but she wasn’t the target. The only reason Zemo ordered her kept alive was as leverage against the Captain. Her DNA revealed nothing particularly interesting and even her value as a test subject was debatable. He had plenty of data on baseline subjects; his scientific pursuits now required something a bit more special. She presented no interest, but her ability to shake off the sleep gas, a particularly potent form Viper concocted, marked her as a potentially difficult subject. He’d like to just put her down and be done with it, but orders were orders, and no-one disobeyed the master of Hydra.
Nevertheless, it paid to keep subjects likely to be noncompliant close, so he had her restrained in the main lab. Remembering where that lab was, and the price promised to obtain it, Zola hoped Captain America would wake soon, otherwise his ability to create cures for Zemo and Von Doom was greatly impaired. Not that he doubted himself, of course, he was the greatest biologist to ever walk the earth, but men with chronic, agonizingly painful conditions were more likely to lash out, and the ability of each to injure him had been proven.
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Karen awoke in a large stone hall, shivering against the moist granite blocks her wrists had been chained to. She blinked the sleep-gas induced grogginess from her eyes, taking in the room with quick, darting glances. It easily could have been Castle Frankenstein in any black and white horror flick. Grey stone, polished steel, and dark wood covered every surface, and one wall was consumed by an elaborate glass beaker set up, like the ones in any good Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde movie. The ceiling was high enough it was impossible to see in the murky torchlight.
*Seriously? Honest-to-God torches? Was there a sale at the German Science Villain Cliché-mart? Or are they that cheesy in real life too?*
The smoke from the burning wood drifted down and stung her eyes, the smell causing her to wrinkle her nose. The smell was awful, but worse than that was her bladder letting her know that mutiny was eminent, should she fail to get to a bathroom. While she was debating whether to call out for a guard or someone to ask for a pee break or to piss herself in protest like the hippies of the sixties (props to them for nonviolent resistance, but yech!), her captors walked in. Taking that as a sign, she cleared her throat to get their attention. They ignored her, which she decided to take personally. ‘The girl-friend of my enemy is my target’ aside; that was just rude. Steve had said the purple-clad swordsman was arrogant; perhaps derision would get his attention.
“Hey, you there! You with the sword, I’m talkin’ to you! Am I gonna get a bathroom break or somethin’ any time soon? And can you do something about those goddamn smog machines pretending to be lights? You’ve got more toxic smoke in here than the testing lab at a cigarette factory.” She gave her complaints the most scorn, vitriol, and mockery she could muster.
There was little perceptible change in him. But not for nothing had Joslyn Kirby cast her as Fortunata the Psychic in the Cirque des Merveilles fundraiser every summer. She could tell he was fighting the urge to acknowledge her presence. *Let’s see, his type is always about control, and to him, reacting to the goads of a lowly prisoner would be a failure. A straight attack would be useless. No, I have to dust off my con artistry. Make him feel inferior, con him into believing I don’t fear him, find him unimpressive. That would make him look at me, recognize my existence. Then, he couldn’t ignore me without it looking like retreat.*
“By the way, love the décor.” She heaped on all the sarcasm in her vast reserves of emotional avoidance techniques. “I saw the exact same thing in the Castlevania game. Ooh, I’m sorry, was this meant to be scary? Please, you don’t even rate in my top ten jailers. My babysitter was scarier.”
*On second thought, Ms. Flemings wasn’t scary, just exasperating to the point of Geneva Convention violations. It was the prospect of enforced proximity that was terrifying.*
Focusing on the villain again, she saw her taunts weren’t cutting it. His shoulders did tense up, and the hand she could see had fisted, but he was steadfastly refusing to acknowledge her existence. Thinking over her Annoying People Hall of Shame, she decided to pull out the big guns. *They think they’re tough? All right, you second-rater; let’s see how you handle a Whiney-mann Special. Heh, never thought I’d ever be glad I knew the Heinemann’s.*
She took a deep breath and blew it out, flexing her diaphragm, her second breath filling her lungs to capacity. Closing the nasal passage at the back of her throat and pitching her voice a half octave higher and twice as loud, she began to harass the less oblivious of the two villains in a near perfect imitation of the nasal voice of her downstairs neighbor back home. She clearly heard the same fight so often, that by now it was like a memorized script.
“While we’re at it, would it kill you to clean this dump once in a while? It’s disgusting. I’d call it a pigsty, but that’s an insult to pigs! It smells gawdawful, like…” She hesitated, because the next line referenced Mr. Heinemann’s Aunt Delilah, which wouldn’t work in this context. “like when the Roth boys blew up the wall between the boys bathroom toilets and the chem lab. And what in the name of all that is holy is that?” Only having heard this fight, she never found out what ‘that’ was. She suspected it was hooch of some sort, and didn’t blame the guy for self-medicating. Instead, she pointed a contemptuous sneer at a convenient dribble of olive-green goo oozing down the wall a little ways from her. She really didn’t want to know, because it was almost certainly something nauseatingly vile, but once in the groove of a con, she never could stop. “You like to pretend the world’s done you wrong, but you’re just a lazy, filthy bum. Who lives in a pathetic, squalid ruin.” Seeing his shoulders hunch, the tension of his spine quivering with rage, she knew she was close. Dropping the inflection, she muttered just high enough to be heard, barely.
“No wonder you always fail.”
The resulting explosion of anger nearly blasted her head off, but did have a good result as far as the con went. Letting her muscles go soft, she stared at the closest approximation of the villain’s left ear. Reciting the lyrics to ‘Straight up’ by Paula Abdul in her head, she gave every appearance of not caring one bit about the threatening man looming over her. Before the second chorus was over, he finally asked her a question, letting her into the conversation, giving her power, although he couldn’t know that.
*Ha! Buddy, you just got conned by the Kare-Bear!* she thought, while out loud she said in a calmly slow drawl “Indeed, I do not know nor care who you are, I just want to use a bathroom. Your other option, of course, is to just let me pee myself. If you really do like living in these conditions, I suppose that could be what you’d prefer to do.” Phrasing it like that was the psychological equivalent of a pincer attack, either she got a bathroom or he had to admit to enjoying the surrounding squalor. *Point, me.*
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Meanwhile, the rescue team located the camp, despite losing Wolverine. It hadn’t been too hard, as the camp was downstream from the place they’d found the creek. The pine tree lean-to was more sturdily constructed, and the remains of a small campfire were left on a flat boulder nearby, along with a small pile of fish bones. It looked as though the couple would return at any moment, although the team knew otherwise. They could clearly see the tell-tale size twenty footprints that told them of the Doombot ambush, striking fear in Cate’s heart as she realized where her sister must be. *Stay cool, Cate. Karen’s been in tough places before, and gotten out just fine. She’s a though nut to crack, harder than some of the S.H.I.E.L.D. recruits you’ve been an SO for. You’ll get her back, you just have to hold on to hope.*
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Secret Bit of Right From Wrong