(Chapter 16)Morning After

I was showering inside a Hydra safe house on a private road near the park. Andromeda was burning my clothes and staying with me. There had been enough clothes here for me to find stuff that fit. I had never seen the fourth man, or fifth man perhaps I should say, and I wondered if it was his house. I guess they wanted me to think I could've escaped. How stupid did they think I was?

Alright, so there was no point feeling bad about the woman. Nicole. I wouldn't be able to intervene to help her family in any discrete way for some time. But I was in a new position - Whenever I exited Hydra, if I ever did, I was going to be spending a fair amount of time in prison or on the run. That was just the score now. I'd done that to myself and I hadn't even gotten leverage over Andromeda with it because I didn't record my own apartment - Just goes to show you, you're always the wrong kind of paranoid.

That meant I should be thinking in terms of how I could leverage Hydra to serve my own ends, technological uplift and averting the snap, while expanding my own knowledge of Hydra in order to have something to trade out for immunity or at least a plane ticket to some tinpot dictatorship where I could live in relative comfort. Both of these needs pointed in the same direction: I needed more power within Hydra.

Was this just a clever excuse for me to pursue my own self interest? Wasn't that what had wound me up here in the first place?

I emerged from the bathroom as the daylight began to leak into the house. Andromeda was waiting for me, changed into a yellow sundress, her legs propped up on the woodsy couch and a small, contented smile on her face. The emptiness in my chest wanted something to fill itself with and it would be more than happy to go with the pretty woman in front of me. I waved without getting closer. "Can we go back home now?" I asked immediately. "I'm tired."

"Sorry babe," Andromeda said with apparent sincerity, "Rules from on high are you spend the next forty eight hours on an all expenses paid vacation with me." Well, that made sense as far it goes. I too would not let anyone fresh off a murder a chance to reconsider.

"So… Disneyland?" I said sarcastically.

"If that's what you want to do, we'll charter a plane and rent a penthouse suite."

I got the principle of showcasing benefits immediately after initiation, but if that's what I wanted to do, I would just do it. I'm fabulously rich. I sighed, "Well, let's go get food. If it's on company dime, I'm starving."

The car ride was long and quiet, which gave me some much needed space to think. When we got to a nice retro-breakfast diner I had suggested to Andromeda, she smiled at me, "Have you been to every restaurant in the world?"

"Only the good ones," I said, smirking. The truth was I should probably tone it down, but I was tired and glued together by spite. We walked in and got a table in the sparse morning crowd. Our waitress was a younger lady - Natalie Keys, recent high school grad. Didn't know exactly where. The sensation of recognition of a stranger took me back to Nicole and I shook my head for a moment.

"Sorry, my boyfriend and I have been traveling since before dawn," Andromeda said, putting her hand on mine. "He's just a little tired. He wants Dr. Pepper, I want water."

"Thanks," I told Andromeda as Natalie walked away. "It's just been an eventful morning."

Andromeda laughed at the understatement. "Yeah, I wasn't planning on getting disarmed this morning. I mean, damn," she leaned in and I mirrored the action, "Would you really have let me shoot you?" She whispered in my ear.

I pecked her cheek before pulling back to make it look more normal. "Never make a threat you can't keep."

Andromeda nodded approvingly, "You really don't let your feelings get in the way."

"So, I guess now that I'm in, my first question is… how do I advance?"

"Getting in is the main hurdle, especially for mature adults like you. That's why initiation was so stringent." Yeah. 'Stringent.' I had to murder a woman on camera, it was just like getting into Yale. "We want our members to succeed, that's important to us. And internally, talent and work are always rewarded. Nobody skates by on blood."

"Not even you?"

"I may have hatched from the cradle," Andromeda said, weird phrase, probably Hydra language. "But I'm also a fairly good agent and I have an important role in obtaining exotic materials and knowledge. But it's nothing compared to what you could be."

That was ominous on multiple levels, but luckily we were interrupted by Natalie returning with the drinks. I smiled as brightly as I could at her and she smiled back, perhaps a little shyly. Maybe she was confused. Maybe she saw the emptiness in my eyes. I turned down the brightness and softened my eyes, "Thank you so much, sorry about earlier."

"Oh its fine," she said, waving her hand dismissively and snapping to full confidence. "I get it, you do a lot of traveling?"

"Usually I fly," I said honestly, "But my girlfriend woke me up this morning and said we were going on a trip, so here we are."

"Aw!" Natalie said dutifully, "That's a nice surprise."

"Anyway, I'm treating myself, so I want this chocolate-and-ice-cream thing."

"You're having ice cream for breakfast?" Andromeda said, offense in her voice.

"Look, I've taken this little morning surprise as well as I think can be expected," I slowed down, fearing I was leaking real anger into the joke. "But if you deprive me of my choice of sugar and carbs so I can have syrupy pancakes instead, we're gonna have problems."

Andromeda laughed and threw up her hands in surrender, "Far be from me to get between a man and his ice cream." She seemed calm about it and I didn't know whether that was to brush off suspicion and calm Natalie or if I was just expecting her to notice I was angry. That's the problem with deceit - You can never see how you're doing at it until it's unsalvageable. "I'll have a grand slam please."

Natalie walked away and I turned back to Andromeda and tried to maneuver the conversation back to Andromeda's own speciality: "Exotic materials and knowledge, huh? Could I get some of those?" I couldn't use, say, Captain America's serum - my brain's exotic physiology was too weird even for me - but I could certainly use it on someone else. Put a few more Steve Rogers into the world, that would be a good thing to do.

"Sure," Andromeda said. "I mean, you'd need to have a good reason to take something off my plate, but we've got some other stuff. We try to provide everything our people need. But I was say-"

"And could we get help finding people? Or could we get… leg waxes?"

Andromeda's mind churned for about fifteen seconds as she decoded what I had meant. "If the company can see the benefits of the, uh, leg waxes for the company, then you can get leg waxes. And yes, the company is happy to help with finding agents or expanding our ring of helpful contacts."

Good. That meant I could probably find freaking Kilgrave. I'd managed to get a bead on places where he had been, that wasn't particularly hard. But I'd never managed to find where he was. Maybe I could wax Fisk or the Hand while I was at it. For that matter, feeding the Rand Corporation to Hydra was basically a public service. "Good, I have a few that I was-"

"Mike, listen to me," Andromeda said, looking me dead in the eye with such a serious look I went silent. "You're the smartest, calmest person I know. You see opportunity and you take it, people like you, almost everybody in fact. And this tech stuff you can do is truly Stark-esque, it's basically cheating. I learned this morning you can do what it takes. I didn't put this in your file when I recommended you, but now that I've seen what you can do.." she leaned in and I met her halfway across the table. Then she kissed me. And I wanted it. It was long, it was in public, and it was really not an optimal kissing position. This woman had held a gun to my head not twelve hours ago, I had held selfsame gun on her not a minute later. But I still wanted it. "I think you could be the head of Hydra who achieves our dreams," she said in an intoxicating whisper. "And I will do whatever you need for that to happen."