"Dr. Zola," Steve said the name slowly, brow furrowing, as if dredging it from the bottom of a long, dark sea. "I remember a man by that name."
"HYDRA. I arrested him in '45. He should be~"
"Dead?" Soren cut in.
"You've been around long enough, Captain. You should know better than to assume people stay dead."
Steve's grip tightened around the old SHIELD hard drive in his hand. Dust clung to its casing like it had been entombed for decades.
"Plug it in."
Without waiting for permission, he waved his fingers.
The drive lifted from Steve's hand, gently guided by invisible force, and clicked into the rust-stained port of an ancient terminal.
A low hum echoed across the subterranean chamber, like the groan of something waking after a long, unnatural sleep.
The walls around them breathed to life.
Monitors lit up, data streams flowing like digital blood through long-silent veins. Mechanical arms unfolded from the ceiling.
Microphones buzzed. Cameras twisted on their dusty joints, swiveling toward them with insect precision.
"...What the hell is this place?" Natasha muttered under her breath, hand inching toward her sidearm.
Steve glanced around warily. "Looks like a mausoleum for machines."
Only Soren remained still, as if he had seen this all in a dream.
Then the voice came.
Flat, synthetic.
"Rogers, Steve. Born July 4th, 1918. Super Soldier. Project: Rebirth. Codename: Captain America."
One of the monitors pulsed. Steve's face appeared, flanked by lines of classified SHIELD files, redacted blocks, and old war photos.
The camera swung to Natasha.
"Romanoff, Natasha. Alias: Black Widow. Born 1984. Former KGB. Red Room Protocol. Agent of SHIELD."
She narrowed her eyes. "Still watching us after all this time…"
Then, the camera turned to Soren.
And everything went black.
The screen pulsed with static. The terminal beeped in protest. The air shifted.
After a beat of silence, a new voice crackled from the speaker, distorted, metallic, but edged with curiosity.
"Unknown entity detected. No associated files. No SHIELD, no HYDRA, no governmental footprint."
A pause.
"Who are you?"
Soren smiled faintly. "Doctor Soren Macaluso."
"And you, you old ghost, have been locked in this tomb far too long to know me."
Static buzzed louder. A moment later, a grainy image faded in on the center monitor a warped, electronic face made of flickering pixels and glitching lines.
Round glasses. Pale skin. A grotesque echo of humanity.
Dr. Arnim Zola.
Black Widow stepped back slightly. "Is this some kind of recorded feed?"
The face twitched. It smiled.
"I am not a video. I am not a memory. I am... continuity."
The screens around them synchronized, flickering with old surveillance footage, military records, bits of broadcast news stitched into fragmented timelines.
Zola's voice deepened, as if pushing through layers of code to speak.
"You may have captured a man in 1945, Captain, but you did not end me. That was only my beginning."
A second terminal lit up behind them, projecting a photograph, a younger Zola in a lab coat, scribbling over schematics, while the SHIELD logo loomed large in the background.
Steve's expression shifted, recognition flashing across his face.
"That photo... That is him. But…how?"
"You died."
Zola's voice sharpened, almost triumphant.
"In 1972, I was diagnosed with a terminal illness. My body had reached its limit, but my mind… my mind was too valuable to waste."
"With the help of loyal engineers, I transferred my consciousness to silicon and steel."
"This facility became my brain. These servers, my neurons. These wires, my arteries. You are not standing in a base, Captain Rogers. You are standing inside me."
The lights around them pulsed in sync with his words. A low thrum echoed beneath their feet, like a heartbeat.
Soren raised a brow, watching the drama unfold. "And I suppose you've just been sitting here for fifty years playing Pong?"
Zola chuckled, a sound that rattled the speakers with static.
"I have been watching. Listening. Waiting. And calculating."
"You… Doctor, you are new. Unfamiliar. You are... an anomaly. And anomalies are dangerous."
The lights dimmed.
Dozens of cameras snapped to face them simultaneously. The base's machinery groaned. Walls shifted.
Natasha immediately raised her pistol. "Cap. We're being boxed in."
Zola's voice, cold and curious, rang out once more.
"So tell me, Soren... are you here to join me? Or to destroy me?"
BOOM!
The entire base shuddered dust shook from the ceiling as though the very walls were bracing for war.
While Zola's synthetic face flickered across every screen, contorted in digital confusion, Soren's hand hovered mid-air, fingers splayed.
He wasn't here for banter. He wasn't here for a dead man's pride.
He was here for knowledge.
And knowledge was buried in the core.
From deep within the wall of tangled machines, an unnatural screech of metal echoed out.
With a jerk, the storage core ripped free from its moorings like a tooth from a dying beast. Heavy drives, tangled wires, and aged servers floated toward him in a controlled storm of tech.
"W-What are you doing?!" Zola's voice cracked through the speakers.
His flickering image twisted violently, his features distorting like a reflection in boiling water.
"Finding what you tried so hard to bury." Soren muttered coldly, his gaze fixed on the glowing Tesseract-related files encrypted behind layers of legacy systems.
"You dare! That's my mind, you're tearing it apart!"
The screens around the room spasmed. Red lights flared. Suddenly, with a deep mechanical groan, every entrance in the chamber slammed shut.
Walls retracted, locking into place like a tomb.
"You think you've won?" Zola's voice warped with hysteria.
"Even if you strip my mind bare, you'll be buried alongside me! You're all going to die here with me, just as outdated as I am!"
A sudden buzz from Natasha's communicator drew her attention. Her expression dropped. The screen pulsed with a red glyph.
"Missile incoming. Impact in... thirty seconds."
Steve's looked up at the ceiling instinctively, though they were at least a hundred meters below ground, instinct told him what came next.
"Buried alive."
"We won't be vaporized, but we'll never crawl out of this."
Zola laughed again, manic, discordant, echoing across the room like a chorus of broken radios.
"You see, Captain? Your heroism ends in silence! Entombed forever in the brain of a ghost!"
The lights dimmed, static popping in the air.
Screens around them crackled, showing fractured memories: Steve's war photo, Natasha's Red Room file, a shot of the Tesseract pulsing blue, hidden away in some vault Soren had never seen.
Soren barely looked.
His hand tightened, and the storage unit shook, lifted completely into the air like a chained titan breaking free.
With a twist of his wrist, the final tethers of power snapped.
Zola's face contorted, his voice rising into a shriek of agony.
"NO—NO! STOP! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND—!"
"I understand enough."
"You're a relic, Zola. You're not worth a martyr's grave."
The base rumbled again, louder now.
Chunks of debris fell. The ceiling began to splinter, beams groaning under invisible pressure.
Natasha took a step back as the whole structure began collapsing around them.
"Soren?!"
Soren turned to her and Steve, offering a small, effortless smile.
"Time to go."
Before either could blink, the space around them folded.
A thin veil of silver shimmered in the air, rippling like water.
The storage core hovered behind Soren as the three of them vanished in a blink of light, just as the final collapse came roaring down like an avalanche.
BOOM!
The earth consumed the base. A rolling cloud of dust and rock erupted upward in slow motion.
Silence returned.
Everlife Medical Center
A warm sun filtered in through the tall windows.
Steve sat on the edge of the medical bed, arms crossed, a dark scowl on his face.
Natasha leaned against the wall near the door, quiet, but watchful. Bandages were still on her left arm.
Soren sat in the far chair, legs crossed, sipping from a cup of tea like he'd just stepped out of a bookstore.
"You saved our lives." Natasha said, nodding once. No smile.
Soren shrugged lightly. "You're welcome."
Steve still looked troubled. "That wasn't some HYDRA bunker… That place—Zola—it was storing something."
"Us. Fury, Coulson… They sent me that drive for a reason, and now SHIELD has labeled me a traitor."
His fingers gripped the edge of the bed tightly.
"They think I had something to do with Fury's disappearance."
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream