Chapter 166: Returning to the Captain America World
Brooklyn, New York — 1943
After four failed attempts at enlisting, Steve Rogers had finally gotten through the door.
He was small. He was thin. His medical file read like a checklist of every reason the United States Army didn't want him. Flat feet. Asthma. Heart arrhythmia. The examining doctors had worked through the list with the bored efficiency of men who'd said the same words to the same type of young man a hundred times before.
But this time, something had been different.
He'd been standing outside the enlistment office — fifth attempt, same result building in the air around him — when a girl with a black cat had looked at him with complete certainty and said: "Good luck, Captain Rogers."
Not "hope it works out." Not "better luck this time." Captain Rogers. Like it was already decided.
The young man in the dark coat standing beside her hadn't corrected her.
Steve still turned the memory over sometimes, late at night in the barracks when the ache in his legs from training kept him awake. Captain Rogers. He'd smile slightly in the dark. It had felt, against all logic, like a promise.
That night he'd pushed through the final evaluation on will alone. He'd made it.
Life in the Army hadn't gotten easier after enlistment — if anything it had gotten harder. Basic training was designed for men built like furniture, and Steve was built like a question mark. He fell behind on runs. He struggled under pack weight that the other recruits barely noticed. He got knocked down more than he got up, and the men who knocked him down weren't particularly ashamed of it.
He didn't complain. He didn't quit. He read the newspaper in whatever spare minutes the schedule allowed — his way of keeping track of where the war actually was, which theaters mattered, where he might eventually be useful if he survived long enough to get there.
One article stopped him cold.
Two weeks prior, a small unit designation caught his eye — the 107th Infantry. Bucky's unit. The article described an ambush situation that should have gone badly, and then, without much explanation, described it not going badly at all. An intervention. A group calling themselves the Dark Council. A "young holy man" and his people appearing from nowhere and pulling the 107th back from the edge of a very bad situation.
The photograph was grainy — wartime photography taken at distance and reproduced badly in newsprint — but clear enough.
A girl. Holding a black cat.
Steve stared at the photo for a long time.
The paper's editorial had filed the Dark Council alongside HYDRA in the category of dangerous cults with religious pretensions. Steve had a different read. He didn't care much about organizational theology. He cared that Bucky was alive, and that the people responsible for that were apparently real and operating somewhere in this war.
He folded the paper carefully and put it in his jacket.
I'd like to find them, he thought. Just to say thank you.
"FALL IN!"
He dropped the paper and ran.
Somewhere in Brooklyn — The Same Week
In a residential building that the Strategic Scientific Reserve had quietly placed under low-key surveillance since the Dark Council's name first surfaced in their intelligence reports, a figure appeared from nowhere in a second-floor room.
Jake coughed once, dust from the transit settling on his jacket.
"—Did you hear that?" A voice from the hallway outside. Sharp. Alert.
Jake went still.
The door opened two seconds later. Two American soldiers stepped in with rifles raised, moving in the cautious, methodical way that meant they'd been trained for this rather than just winging it.
"Sam." The first soldier swept the room with his eyes. "You sure you heard something?"
"Cough and footsteps," the second one said. "Clear as anything."
"Room's empty."
"I can see that."
A short pause.
"...They said the Dark Council has people who can walk through walls."
The first soldier's grip on his rifle tightened visibly. "Should we report it?"
"Wait—" The second man's flashlight beam hit the floor. "Footprints."
By then, Jake was already in the alley behind the building.
He leaned against the brick wall, turned the collar of his coat up, and allowed himself a quiet moment of mild amusement. The SSR had stationed a watch team on his entry point. He hadn't expected that. These Americans were thorough.
It didn't matter. He hadn't come back to Brooklyn to be subtle.
His return to this world had been delayed. The Mad Max campaign had ground through robots faster than he'd projected — the battle against the combined Gas Town and Bullet Farm forces had cost him more machines than he'd budgeted for, which had meant another transit stop in the Real Steel universe to replenish.
He'd handled it efficiently this time. The Red Queen had assisted in coordinating a small automated production line, and the new generation of robots coming off it were a significant upgrade over the remote-control models he'd been working with. No more radio lag, no more operators twisting controllers in a fire zone. The new units operated entirely on full-body motion capture — the operator wore a suit, moved naturally, and the robot translated those movements with near-zero delay. For the Knights of the Dark Council, men and women who'd spent their lives learning to fight with their bodies, it was a far more natural interface.
But that was the Wasteland's problem, and the Wasteland could wait.
He had one specific objective here: Abraham Erskine.
The super soldier serum was at a finished-product stage in his own research lab — Birkin and Ashford had confirmed it. What it needed was human trial data. Comprehensive data. The kind of controlled, documented, medically observed data that you couldn't get from a volunteer in a cave.
The U.S. Army, as it happened, was in the process of running exactly that kind of trial. And their test subject was already selected.
Jake's plan was elegant in its simplicity: he would approach Erskine before the official protocol was locked, present his own upgraded serum formulation as a consultative contribution, and let the existing military infrastructure collect the trial data for him. If his version performed better than Erskine's baseline compound — which, given the T-virus derivative integration Birkin had added, it should — then the data would be even more valuable.
And if the enhancement process unlocked something beyond the baseline physical improvements that the historical record suggested...
Well. That would be interesting.
Jake pushed off the wall and stepped out of the alley.
He flagged down a car with one hand in the road.
The vehicle stopped. The door opened. The man who got out was heavy, well-dressed in the way that meant old money rather than earned money, and his expression at finding his path blocked by a young man in a dark coat moved quickly from inconvenienced to ugly.
"Get out of my way—" The man's face reddened, fat fingers pointing. "You have any idea who—"
Jake moved. A single step forward, one hand on the man's shoulder — the contact point precise, not violent — and his left hand made a small motion in front of the man's face. Open. Close.
The man blinked.
His expression went through a brief reboot.
Then he broke into a wide, genuine-looking smile. "My friend! I can't believe it — I almost didn't recognize you!"
"It's been too long," Jake agreed, and steered him gently back toward the driver's side. "I need to get to the other side of town. Do you mind?"
"Of course not, of course not — get in, please—"
They drove.
The car stopped in front of a modest building on a quiet street.
"Here we are," Jake said.
"Wonderful." The man in the driver's seat beamed at him. "Anything for you, old friend. Truly."
"Thank you." Jake got out, closed the door, and raised a hand as the car pulled away.
Two seconds later he heard the vehicle slow down. He didn't look back, but he could imagine the expression — the man behind the wheel suddenly blinking at his own reflection in the rearview mirror, wondering how he'd ended up across town and why he felt vaguely pleasant about it.
The Suggestion worked cleanly, but it didn't last long. It didn't need to.
Jake read the name on the door placard.
Dr. Abraham Erskine.
He let himself in.
The apartment was exactly what a wartime research scientist's living quarters looked like — lived-in, cluttered with paper and books, the furniture functional rather than chosen. A desk with too many things on it. A radio. A locked case that almost certainly didn't contain anything as mundane as files.
Jake settled onto the couch, crossed one leg over the other, and waited.
He didn't wait long.
The door opened. Erskine stepped inside, set his briefcase down, reached for the lamp — and stopped.
A man in a dark coat was sitting on his couch, apparently perfectly comfortable.
Erskine took two careful steps backward. His hands went behind his back.
"The desk drawer on the left," Jake said, without turning around. "Browning Hi-Power. Nine millimeter. I'd rather you didn't."
Erskine's hand paused on the drawer handle. He opened it anyway — confirming it was there, confirming the man on his couch had known exactly where to look — and then lifted the pistol and held it with the steadiness of someone who'd done it before, though not recently.
Having the gun in hand did measurably improve his posture.
"Who are you," he said. Flat. Not quite a question. "And how did you get in here."
Jake stood, straightened his coat, and turned to face him.
"My name is Jake Lance. I'm the founder of the Dark Council." He nodded toward the door. "As for how I got in — you left your door open. You might want to break that habit. This neighborhood isn't what it was."
Erskine's eyes moved to the door. It was, in fact, open. He'd been in enough of a hurry leaving the lab that evening that he apparently hadn't pulled it fully shut.
He looked back at the man in front of him. His grip on the pistol didn't loosen.
"The Dark Council," he repeated carefully. The name clearly meant something to him — the wrong kind of something, based on his expression.
"I know what the papers have been saying about us," Jake said. "I'm not here to debate their editorial position. I'm here because I understand you're working on something that I have a significant professional interest in—" He paused. "—and because I believe I can make it better."
Erskine said nothing. The gun stayed up.
Jake didn't move toward him. He simply looked at the doctor with the patient, unhurried expression of someone who had already determined that this conversation was going to happen, and was willing to give the other man whatever time he needed to arrive at the same conclusion.
"Put the gun down, Dr. Erskine," he said. "And let me tell you what I know about the super soldier program."
The silence stretched for a long moment.
Then, slowly — with the look of a man who knew he was making a decision he couldn't entirely justify — Erskine lowered the pistol.
"Start talking," he said.
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