Fanfic #133 Hail Hydra? by Rust(MCU)
This is a complete following in si in the world of the MCU. I really like this fanfic because it's a kind of character development I've never really seen before in superhero universe fics. I also like the comic elements that brought and used throughout the story.
Synopsis: An SI with insane gadgeteer abilities tries to avert the Snap and uplift humanity, but winds up joining Hydra along the way.
Rated: M
words: 210k
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/hail-hydra-mcu-villain-si-complete.851572/reader/
Here's the first chapter:
"Why'd you do it?" Steve Rogers was sitting across from me, looking me dead in the eye.
I sighed, thinking about why exactly I had done it. All the clever excuses, all the genius reasons why I, and I alone, should hold the reins of power. I had wanted it. I don't know if it was the right answer, but it felt to me like that was the real reason. It had been so long ago, the world had been so different when it began.
"Hail Hydra," I laughed ruefully. He kept staring. "Have you read 1984?" He nodded. "I want you to know I never dreamed of O'Brien's boot stamping on a human face - I believed that, with power, I could help the world. I suppose... in the end..." I would have gesticulated, but I was chained to a table. "I guess it began with my arrival in this world. A... being appeared to me and it offered me power, almost unimaginable power."
"What kind of being?"
"I called it something else once, but seeing where it ended me up, I'll name it the devil."
"What happened to that power?"
"I got it. You're looking at it."
"And then this being forced you to serve Hydra?"
I laughed and shook my head. "No, nothing so vulgar...."
....
Coming to this world felt like a clock being wound, a spiralling feeling that seemed to increase tension without stopping. I woke up in a world that felt alien even though it looked like my home planet. I was in a big city, a big change from my previous setting, and I was in a nice apartment it appeared. My senses were heightened to an insane degree. I could count the leaves on a ground floor tree, I could smell every scent of the room. My mind was full of thrumming information that I had never learned or studied, I felt like I knew every nook and cranny of the whole world.
I got myself up slowly, picking through my mind. It was 2009. Barack Obama was President. I was now particularly handsome. Also rich, richer than I had any right to be.
Tony Stark had just been kidnapped.
I processed the information and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was in the MCU. After Banner had been hulked, it looked like. I resisted the urge to freak out. In the MCU, the Snap had killed half the world's population. If Thanos got the Infinity Stones, it seemed inevitable that the Snap wouldn't be reversed. Doctor Strange had said the odds were one in a million? Less?
Still, in the immediate term, the best thing I could do for the timeline in the short term was to lie low and wait for Tony to re-emerge. Once he did, I was going to take as hard of a wrecking ball to the timeline as possible to avert catastrophe.
My name was Michael Trent and my raw intellect had not landed me on the map up until this point. The solar panel factory I had in the works in Detroit was all I had going for me. Tony Stark lapped up the news but I apparently offered very little on that front. I had two main sources of income, a major trust fund that I couldn't touch, and the big solar panel factory that was nearing completion I'd asked for. It turned out that I did NOT have a college degree or a graduate degree unlike real life. I guess that would have been Status in GURPS terms. Frustrating. Nobody I knew in my world had a parallel in this world, though people I knew of from my world did.
I had no idea how long Tony would be in the caves in Afghanistan for, so I tried to wait and plot. In the long term, I would seek influence and try to get into SHIELD somehow. I couldn't leave the Snap to chance, so I had to find a way to use an Infinity Stone to destroy itself. I had to leave as small of an imprint as I could manage on the world until Tony was back in country and working on his suit. I was magnetic, physically attractive, had a velvet voice, and I was rich and could afford nice suits. I was also bored. I didn't need to work, I had plenty of money.
It was mesmerizing to experience the way I walked into a room and drew stares, the ease at which I put everyone with a word. I enjoyed it, just the raw experience of it. But I managed to stay on top of myself at least until Tony came back. I spent time working through a plan, building a little robot butler for myself that I named Botler, and trying to figure out who I needed to kill.
It was a dauntingly long list, I admit. I would have squelched at that before I transitioned, but the massive boost to my intellect must have let me balance things more clearly. I needed to destroy these people before they killed too many people. Well, first I needed to verify my spoiler knowledge was real and I hadn't gone crazy.
Then it happened - Tony Stark was on the news, giving a press conference. It was time to work on killing Obadiah Stane.
------
"Obadiah Stane's murder, wasn't that in the Avengers' movie series you were talking about?" Cap asked me, raising an eyebrow.
I suppressed the urge to say I had done Tony a favor. "It's not like they had a date on the screen that I memorized." I replied instead.
------
I had bizarrely good knowledge of where everything was. I knew, if I thought about, it probably who lived at 98% of street addresses. I had the kind of reflexive, back of your mind knowledge about every street that I had about the roads around my university in my old life. It was bizarre, but it was also useful. That was why I was at this sunny paradise in California, dressed in my best working man's clothes, wig, and fake nose, piloting a drone inside of a maintenance van.
Obadiah Stane was standing on his balcony and I was piloting my drone gently down the coast, coming onto his property behind his security cameras. He was on his phone with someone, I didn't know who. I had the drone lock in, aimed, and fired. The bullet got him in the gut and he started rushing inside. Without hesitation, I fired off again. The bullet missed.
I drove the drone inward after him, grateful for the sliding non-automatic door being a pain in the ass to close, following the string of blood. Obadiah was unnecessarily gaudy and massive, high vaulted ceilings that made it easy to follow him. Eventually, I found him lying on the ground bleeding, where he was calling for an ambulance with a gun in his hand. He tried to fire at the drone, but his aim wasn't very good in his present state. "The Ten Rings sends its regards, traitor." I said through a mike before firing three times into his chest. I tried to drive the drone out of the meandering hallways in time to escape, but Obadiah's security was coming in quickly. The risk of self-destruct failing because of body damage to the drone was too high, I just flipped the internal killswitch and drove off.
One supervillain down, dozens to go.