Steve tapped a few buttons on the computer, trying to get information to send. "Information is coming through." He mumbles into his earpiece before stepping back, turning around, startling slightly when he sees the person standing in the doorway, he hadn't heard them walk in.
"Well... this is awkward." Steve glances down at his uniform, not his usually one, no... on it bold and in the front was the Hydra symbol. He tightens his grip around his shield, black with the Hydra symbol scrawled onto the front of it.
"Turn around. Pretend you saw nothing." Steve turns and yanks the memory chip out of the computer, tucking it away. "Hail Hydra." He whispers before turning again, eyes cold. Steve Roger's isn't Captain America... it's been so long sense he was, now, now he's Captain Hydra.
[AU where Hydra discovers Carlos is a double agent.]
Carlos sits limply in the chair he's tied to, head hanging low, chin brushing against his bare chest. He'd been found out, caught, and as to be expected Hydra was not happy.
Carlos looks up when he hears the cell door open, his hair is stained with blood, face heavily bruised, cuts littering his torso and chest, his lip split and bleeding. "More torture? Delightful." He mumbles, tipping his head back, wincing slightly.
He knows there's no way out of this, Hydra doesn't even want infromation from him, they just want him to suffer for lying and betraying them, and Carlos has accepted this is how he ends.
Torture. Punishment. Discipline. That was what he was good at, or at least what HYDRA thought he was good at. So whenever there was an asset, or even an agent on rare occasion, acting out or disobeying they where sent to him for some... behavioural training.
And that was exactly what had happened to the sobbing mess on the floor infront of him. Bruised and bleeding and crying. His boot roughly connected with their side, "Stop crying, mutt. You deserve this." He snapped and took a slight step back as if the person on the ground was the most disgusting thing he knew "On your feet, now."
// woah.. mun is actually doing a starter????? thats crazy dude..
the soldier cant help but enjoy the soft tender treatment that accompanies being “made pretty”, even if what comes afterward is just as horrible (or worse depending on his handler’s mood) as it always is. while they carefully brush his hair, shave his body, and apply the makeup, the soldier soaks up the gentle touches and tries his best to forget what comes next
Danny wasn’t born; he was built—stitched together in a freezing underground HYDRA lab from the broken DNA strands of James Buchanan Barnes, chosen not for loyalty or legacy but for blood. Something about Winter’s cells held a resilience no other subject had survived, even after decades on ice and countless mental fractures. Danny was Subject 077—barely more than a theory made flesh. A prototype for a new line of enhanced operatives. Something that could endure everything and obey nothing but the cold voice of a handler.
Jazz was worse. She was art. Red Room engineering at its most elegant and most horrifying. A near-perfect clone of Natalia Alianovna Romanoff, born of Black Widow blood but grown under their sharp hands and sharper scalpel. Jazz had beauty, poise, intelligence. But she was also an apex predator molded in ballet and murder, just like her source. She had been created to be the final evolution of Widow. A sleeper. An infiltrator. A masterpiece in patience and destruction.
They were never supposed to meet.
But then Vlad happened.
Dr. Vladimirov Masterov—Vlad Masters—was a ghost in every way that mattered. Once KGB, always KGB. They said he’d died during a failed mission in Chernobyl. He hadn’t. He’d gone half-dead. Half-ghost. A twisted result of an experiment gone wrong, his molecules phasing just enough to slip between states. He’d taken the failure personally, refused to fade. Instead, he rose again in America, as Vlad Masters, eccentric billionaire and corporate ghoul. But behind every charity gala and mayoral campaign was a hunger to perfect the science that had torn him in half.
Vlad had overseen Jazz’s earliest combat assessments. He’d taught Danny how to fire a Glock at age six. His affection was obsessive. Paternal in that twisted, post-Soviet way that smelled like iron and vodka. “You’re my legacy, my little phantoms,” he’d murmur, his gloved hand stroking Danny’s hair, like petting a favorite lab rat. He loved them the way a butcher loves the knife.
Jack Fenton—Jakob Fentzen—was worse. A HYDRA scientist with a permanent manic grin and a knack for building machines that did things no machine should. Quantum destabilizers, molecular disruptors, spectral centrifuges—things that turned flesh to glass and time to mist. He’d been the one to isolate the Winter Soldier’s regenerative traits. He laughed through the process. He called Danny “Champ” while inserting tracking chips into his spinal cord. Danny screamed, once. Jack said it was music.
Maddie—Maja Vuković—was quieter. Colder. Her notes were written in blood and brilliance. She designed Jazz’s conditioning routines. Psychological torment dressed up as ballet recitals and etiquette dinners. Jazz learned to disassociate by age four. “You’re perfect,” She would say, brushing Jazz’s red-gold hair. “Natalia was the draft. You are the final copy.”
And then something went wrong.
It was supposed to be a routine exposure. Just a test of the ghost portal Vlad had constructed in the basement of the Fenton Works facility—a decaying front in the Midwest. But Danny fell in. Or was pushed. Or ran. The records blurred.
And then he came back…wrong.
Cells mutated. Energy readings off the charts. Intangibility. Invisibility. An ectoplasmic core that pulsed like a dying star. Not just an assassin now—an anomaly. A walking ghost. They called it a miracle. Vlad called it divinity. Jack wanted to vivisect him immediately.
Danny refused.
That was the mistake.
They underestimated the side effects of individuality. The ghost powers weren’t part of the program. And with them came emotion, conscience, defiance.
They tried to recondition him. Vlad struck him. Maddie drugged him. Jack built something with screaming blades.
Jazz broke protocol. She slit two guards’ throats with a dining knife and pulled Danny out of the operating room. He was barely conscious, bleeding green and crying. She whispered to him the way Natalia might have whispered to herself in a Red Room dormitory: “We go now. Or we die here.”
They went.
They ran.
For three years, the world forgot about the Fenton kids. Until they didn’t.
The Avengers found out during a HYDRA base raid in Belarus. Steve Rogers opened a data file and dropped it like it burned. Natasha Romanoff stared at Jazz’s image and fell silent for an hour. Bucky Barnes had to be sedated after reading Danny’s file.
“A clone?” Bucky rasped, restrained and shaking. “Of me?”
“HYDRA’s final Winter Soldier prototype,” Bruce murmured. “He’s a ghost. Literally. His molecular structure—”
“I don’t care about his molecules!” Bucky exploded. “He’s just a kid. My fucking kid!”
Steve looked pale. “They’re so young...”
“They’re us,” Natasha said quietly, staring at Jazz’s face on the screen. “Our blood. Our sins. Our ghosts.”
They scrambled, but the trail was cold. Danny and Jazz had buried themselves deep. They moved from safehouse to safehouse, mostly living like rats. Danny phased them through walls, hacked ATMs with his ghost energy. Jazz manipulated human behavior like a maestro. They didn’t speak much. They didn’t have to.
“You okay?” Danny would ask.
“No,” Jazz would say. “But you?”
“No.”
Still, they stayed alive.
Until they slipped up.
It was a gas station. A security camera. A moment of laughter—Danny made Jazz laugh, and her teeth showed. That smile ended everything.
Tony saw it first. “Is that the Fenton girl? She’s…smiling.”
Natasha was on her feet before the footage ended. “Get the quinjet.”
Steve was right behind her. “We find them. Now.”
When they did, it was ugly.
The Avengers cornered them in an abandoned church in Chicago. Danny nearly brought the roof down. Jazz went straight for Natasha’s throat.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Natasha pleaded, parrying the blade with bare hands.
“Then you’re already weak,” Jazz snarled.
Steve took a punch from Danny that shattered his ribs. Bucky didn’t fight. He just stood there, tears on his face.
“I know what they did to you,” he whispered.
“You don’t,” Danny hissed, half-ghost and glowing. “You don’t know what it’s like to be built to die.”
“I do.” Bucky stepped forward, arms open. “They made me too, and I remember every scream.”
Danny hesitated.
That was enough.
Jazz disarmed Natasha and froze.
“You look like my nightmares,” she whispered. “But quieter.”
“You look like a second chance,” Natasha said, and her voice broke.
That night, the church became a refugee camp.
Tony brought blankets. Bruce brought meds. Steve brought silence. Bucky and Natasha never left their sides.
“Don’t touch me,” Danny had growled at first.
“I won’t,” Bucky said. “I’ll just be here.”
Jazz refused food until Natasha force-fed her soup and whispered lullabies in Russian.
“You’ll kill me eventually,” Jazz muttered.
“No,” Natasha said, brushing her hair. “I’ll love you first.”
It wasn’t easy.
Danny screamed in his sleep, glowing and flailing. Once he phased into the floor and didn’t come back for three hours. Jazz stopped speaking for two weeks. She stared at walls. Cut herself just to feel.
Natasha stitched every wound.
Bucky sat beside Danny and read him books about World War II.
“You’re not him,” Danny said one day. “You’re not my father.”
“No,” Bucky agreed. “But I wish I’d been.”
Steve took them outside. Taught Jazz how to ride a bike. Let Danny fly circles around the compound.
But one day, Vlad showed up again.
He appeared in Danny’s room, phasing through the wall like smoke. “Come home, little badger.”
Danny shrieked and attacked. Vlad didn’t fight.
“I miss you,” he said, bleeding green from his mouth. “They won’t understand you like I do.”
“You’re not real,” Danny screamed. “You never were!”
Jazz shot him in the chest. He smiled.
“Perfect aim. I taught you well.”
He vanished.
After that, they didn’t sleep for a week.
One morning, Danny sat beside Bucky on the roof.
“Do you think I’ll ever be normal?”
“No,” Bucky said honestly. “Though you’ll be loved.”
Jazz, curled in Natasha’s lap, asked, “Was I always going to be a monster?”
“No,” Natasha whispered. “You were always going to be mine.”
