quigonejinn

Am writing Yuletide. Have one night to write it because I'm booked tomorrow night and the night after that. What do I write instead?

1.

The first time you take a shot at living forever, it takes the form of a skinny blond kid from Brooklyn. You aren't impressed -- you don't see what the psych profiles see in him, and you are hesitant to use the serum on him. There are rival methodologies at developing the Super Soldier; most of your competitors have come up with complicated, multiple-month procedures involving operations and hyperbaric chambers and bone fusion. You, on the other hand, took some of the work that you were doing on that other secret government project and applied it with a twist. You are confident that it should work; small samples tested out with dogs and lab primates have had incredibly promising results, far beyond what anybody else has been able to produce, but you know that if it fails with this -- well.

If it fails, you don't want it to be because you got a shitty test subject.

But you go into your lab with the needle series behind you on a cart. And the kid is sitting on the guerney with his sleeve rolled up already.

"If you want to look away you can," you say to him before you start laying out the needles in order of size. You explain to him that the needles aren't just going to go into his arm; they're going to be in his thighs, in his fingers, in his spine. One is going to be going into his right eye, all the way in. They're going to be injecting into the base of his skull, through the little hole that lets blood into his brain. It could blind him for life and will probably leave him crippled.

"If you want to back out now, you can."

"I want to serve my country," he says, quietly and calmly, and he looks you in the eye.

It's the last morning he'll ever have brown eyes: the next morning, Steve is still strapped to the bed, and he won't have his voice back for a week, but his eyes have turned as blue as oxygen-starved glacier ice.

And he is still the most honorable man you will ever know. You never manage to quite make another batch of the serum, but making Captain America is, in and of itself, enough to justify a man's years on the planet.

Too bad you go on living for about fifty years after that.

2.

The second time you take a shot at living forever, it takes the form of a company that will make the bombs and the airplanes using the ideas in your head. It is, quite generally, an abysmal business failure, and if a certain predecessor to a certain government agency hadn't thrown you a couple bones in those early years, neither you nor the company would ever have made it. As it was, it wasn't exactly like you could report developing second-generation interrogation serum and biological agents on the company balance sheet, could you? The people who give you work in those days don't really want to hear about bombs and planes and guns. And you want to build bombs and planes and guns. You can do it. You have the ideas; you made the atomic bomb, didn't you? Captain America wasn't the only way you helped win the war.

And then you meet a blue-eyed young executive at General Electric. He agrees to come out for an interview, and you tell him to take the train to the end of a certain LIRR spur.

It's a cold November day, and he is not quite dressed for the weather. He has been waiting at the station for thirty-five minutes when you pull up in your car, and he is confused, too, because he had been expecting you to send the driver for him.

You don't have a driver. You don't have a corporate office. You have your garage, your brains, and twenty thousand dollars from helping the CIA develop a tasteless, odorless chemical agent that can render a city block helpless in twelve hours if put into the water supply. It leaves everyone who had more than a glass or so of the stuff shells of themselves, permanently, but that's kind of the point -- after making things like that, building guns almost seems like an honorable thing.

You drive him out to a suburban field that, in another universe, will become nothing more than a bunch of white flight tract houses. Maybe a park. Maybe a shopping strip at some point far down the line . Right now, though, in this universe, it's an open field gone yellow and brown. The highway is about twenty minutes away, and the sky is mostly gray. A little white.

"Where are we?" Obadiah says.

"The company you're going to help me build."

As expected, he is a little surprised, a little shocked, but he signs onto the idea -- or so you think until the night, thirty years down the line, when the Benz spins on something that might have been black ice.

3.

The third time you try for immortality, you do it by slightly more conventional means. Instead of marrying the daughter of an old Los Alamos co-worker, instead of marrying the boarding school-raised eighteen year old daughter of a business associate, you pick up a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman you've seen with a few different men at a few different parties. It isn't hard to guess her history or why she has that slightly desperate look in her eyes; Obadiah makes a few inquiries, and things check out. You take her to the St. James after one party; it surprises you how much you like her, how much you like spending time with her, and as she is pulling her stockings off and you come back from the wet bar with a drink in each hand, you hand her the Scotch and make her an offer: you'll be a good husband to her if she can give you a family.

Five years and three months later, she comes up to you and hits you hard enough to make your jaw hurt.

You rub your jaw and look her in the eye. "Do you really think I deserved that?" you ask.

She stares at you, hand raised for another slap.

You wait for her to slap you again, and when she doesn't, you ask whether the benefit she has planned for next week is black or white tie. Your tailor needs notice, and the white needs to be re-worked in the shoulders.

The brutal truth of it is that if you could talk to Steve again, you would apologize for thinking that so much of what made him special was the serum that you developed. And you are, also, sorry that you had to deceive Maria to get her to sit for the shots, but if Steve Rogers, the one experiment of yours that you ever did right by in the world, turns up again in oxygen-starved glacier ice as blue as his eyes, prompting Tony Stark to go looking through his father's old notes, and on doing so, comes with a paper laboratory notebook that was never digitized and has shot regimens and early ultra-sound photos and test results -- well, if he finds out that the intelligence boosters took, but nothing else did, that is just a disappointment that he will have to learn to live with.

After all, by the time he was four, he certainly was yours.

The bit about Maria slapping the shit out of Howard and Howard being like OHAI WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT MY TUX is from