skymurdock asked: for the three-sentence AU meme, not that I personally consider this an AU: Steve Rogers being IN SPACE and not knowing wtf is going on down on earth, go.
All right, did you mean ‘Star Trek mashup,’ because I refuse to dignify Dick Spencer with even the slightest iota of my attention and I LOVE STAR TREK. Um, there’s definitely gonna be more than three sentences, I tried but I got overexcited, sorry. THERE’S A READMORE, THAT’S HOW OUT OF HAND THIS GOT.
- Starbase
616 is approximately five days at max warp past the generally accepted
middle-of-nowhere, the kind of place they send you when you’ve slept with a
higher-up’s spouse (or spouses, Security Officer Kellan will say mournfully,
not that he knew it at the time) or after you’ve blown up a very expensive
piece of equipment (Chief of Engineering Maxime Rochert is only allowed near
the engines with supervision, is the running joke). So when the ship drifts in, Starbase 616 has
a hot second of panic, because they have never
gotten a ship since the last troop of poor suckers was released from this
purgatory. It’s even worse because the USS Avenge left its last leg about a parsec
back and seems to have crawled in on some kind of souped-up impulse engine none
of them have seen before. It’s even worse because, once they get on
board to check why they’re not receiving a response to their thirty-one hails,
they find:
- an AI that apparently fried itself and shut down all non-life support or non-propulsion systems,
- a piloting and navigation console that looks like it’s been ripped apart and hotwired together,
- and
almost a dozen (sort of living) legends in deep cryostasis in the medical bay,
with no other signs of life.
- Starbase
616 has a moment of totally justified communal screaming, closely followed by
about a dozen increasingly panicky hails to Terra. By the time they finally get a response
telling them to do nothing, they’ve already pulled out the cryotube marked ‘Captain
Rogers’ and started the defrost sequence.
Chief Medical Officer W’llana shrugs—what can you do—and continues the
defrost sequence, but doesn’t pull any other cryotubes.
- Terra
sends a ship, the sleek battlecruiser HSS
Typhon, which turns up just in time for Steve Rogers, the once-pride of the
fleet, to wake up and punch one of them out, demanding to be shown to his crew. They insist that he’ll be brought to his crew
as soon as he comes with them. Starbase
616 has already started refining their stories of that one time they almost had
some excitement.
- Spoiler
alert: he does not go with them.
- A
handful of things come to light in rapid succession:
- Steve Rogers has been in cryo for some seventy Terran years, which, Starbase 616 supposes, explains a lot about why he punched the person who told him the date,
- Steve Rogers is dangerously devoted to his crew,
- and Steve Rogers is either intensely paranoid or knows something they don’t, if the way he tears through the base toward the Avenge is anything to go by.
- Steve
Rogers knows something they don’t, it turns out, because when the captain of
the Typhon finds out that he’s
started the defrost sequence on three of his crew and is working on a fourth,
they start a defrost sequence of their own.
- A
woman in security colors with flaming red hair, an man in an engineering
uniform with neatly trimmed facial hair, and a man wearing what looks like half
a medic’s uniform and half a security uniform spill out of the Avenge behind Steve Rogers, and Starbase
616 has a bit of a collective heart attack at having some of the last real superheroes on their deck.
- Out
of the Typhon comes a man in a mask, with
an arm that gleams and blank blue eyes, a wicked phaser rifle in his hands.
- Shit
goes south, and Starbase 616 gets more excitement than even the most reckless
of them was ready for. The crew of the Avenge is lethal, but they’re worried
about bystander casualties. The Soldier,
as they hear him called, is not.
- His
mask gets pulled off and Steve Rogers seems to go into shock. The face behind the mask isn’t familiar to
any of the others, but when he says ‘take him alive,’ they agree. Natasha Romanoff and Samuel Wilson—Starbase 616
has a few history nerds on board, who fill everyone else in on the details
pretty quick—help Steve Rogers deal with the Soldier, or try to anyway, and Anthony
Stark scrambles for the deck of the Avenge.
- The
fourth defrost sequence finishes.
- Wanda
Maximoff, the great historical mystery, drops from a ceiling onto the Soldier,
red light streaming from both hands into the Soldier’s skull, and he goes down
like a ton of bricks. They close ranks around her like a three-man
army, and she starts doing something that looks painful, something that looks
like she’s pulling scraps of something out of the Soldier’s brain.
- When the Soldier opens his eyes, they’re clear and horrified and he doesn’t try to kill Steve when he pulls him onto his feet. He blurts something desperate about an ancient, ancient story, something about a beast with many heads, and it makes Steve Rogers’ eyes go hard.
- “Stark,” Steve barks, and the engineer pulls himself out from under the pilot’s console. “Can you get the ship running again?”
- “Uh, yeah,” Stark says, rolling his eyes. “It’s got an engine, doesn’t it? Where’re we going, Cap?”
- “Home,” Steve says through his teeth. “We’re seventy years late for an appointment with the man in charge.”
- “You mean they’ve had seventy years to improve their tactics while we were floating in cryo,” Natasha says, meticulously examining the pieces of her phaser. “They weren’t exactly sending out assassins, back in the day. Well,” she concedes, “except for me.”
- “Then we’re going to have to improve, too,” Steve says. “Sam, defrost the others and take Buck and Wanda to the med bay, Natasha, with me. Let’s go have a chat with the captain of the Typhon.”
