Prologue
„Herr Strucker?"
Baron Wolfgang von Strucker didn’t separate his gaze from the dusty window. The busy battue on the other side was enough to catch his attention – all those employees, running around like little ants, working and forming one big state. It was fascinating.
He smiled faintly as he answered the messenger boy, whose insecure voice once more confirmed Struckers high position in this organization.
“Just put the file on the desk.”
He’d never drop the German accent in his English. It was not a question of ability, but a question of wanting. He was proud of being German, being from the land where this secret imperium named Hydra had its roots. His eyes were still focused on the employees in the hall under him.
“It’s from department 12”, said the boy.
Strucker paused and turned around, eyed the messenger. A young man, probably about 18 years old, and his whole body language, how he leaned so uncertainly in the doorway of Strucker’s office, practically screamed of how much respect he had of the Baron.
Of course, he didn’t look like the most dangerous imperator, but he sure as hell knew what to do, what remedies to use and how to punish disobedience.
The messenger held a file in a white envelope in his gloved hands. The inscription said ‘эксперименты’. Strucker couldn’t read it, but he knew the Cyrillic letters meant nothing but ‘experiments’.
His glance shot from the black letters back to the big eyes of the young man. Strucker narrowed his eyes and held out his right hand while stepping up towards him: “Give me the file.”
The messenger didn’t get to handing it over, because Strucker ripped it out of his hands. The Baron waved him with a rough gesture the sign to leave his office, before he turned around and slowly stepped over to his desk. The sound of the closing door told him that he was alone now.
“Endlich.”, Strucker murmured while he sat down, opened the file and took out the two profiles. The twins.
The first profile was about the younger Maximoff, Wanda. The picture of her they used for the files and aligns was from a media report about the protests in Sokovia, she and her brother always were there, always in the front row – one of the reasons Strucker caught attention on them.
He skipped the general information about Wanda and flicked through the pages till he found the reason this file was brought to him: the results of the preliminary experiments.
The girl reacted with mental capabilities.
This meant she would be the main focus of Hydras interest, if she survived the real experiments – all of the former test persons always reacted physically, but now they finally had someone with mental conceptions. Now they finally had what they wanted.
Strucker gazed to the stack of files with failed experiments on the side of his desk. Then he looked back to the file in front of him and the undeniable potential. It was no hard decision: He would wait a little until he’d give the order to start the experimenting with the scepter on Wanda. He did not want to waste such precious material just because his henchmen were too incompetent to take care that their test objects didn’t kick the bucket in a row.
Till then they would put the girl up to mental exercise to improve her skills and the results she’d have if she survived – she just needed to be stimulated.
A smile sneaked onto Strucker’s face, he just couldn’t bite it back. After all this time they finally hit a success, something they could work with. Real potential. Real possibilities.
He put away Wanda’s file and took the one of her older brother: Pietro Django. At first Strucker was confused to find a kid with the second name ‘Django’ in the depths of Sokovia, but in the qualification surveys it turned out that he was named after his deceased father. Tradition in eastern European countries.
Their dead parents were the cause the twins signed up for the Hydra Experiments.
An old motive: revenge.
Strucker smiled as his eyes wandered further downwards, to Pietro’s results. The file said he didn’t achieve the same promising results as his sister, just as all the many other participants his results went more in the physical direction.
That was a pity, but nothing Hydra couldn’t work with.
The twins as a rehearsed team could make Hydra superior to all other organizations. They would open a door, a door to a world where not soldiers fought their battles, but... mutants. Experiments. Talents.
But they’d have to make sure that both of them survived. It already appeared that one twin separated from the other was more likely to get nervous or worry – or worse, disobey. They only had each other and if one of them would die it would tear the other one apart.
Strucker sank back in his chair and let his eyes gaze over the exposed files. His neck felt a little stiff.
Pietro had good chances in surviving. His results weren’t as good as Wanda’s – nothing had ever been that good – but he was young and fit, healthier and in better shape than his sister.
But yet Strucker had the feeling he needed to improve his chances, to prepare his body. Without him they couldn’t use him as leverage for Wanda, and if Strucker learned something in his time here, he learned that you always need leverage.
The solution was pretty simple.
Pietro had to be trained. No, not only trained. He needed to be worn out, to be stretched to his limits – and not only to the limits he already tested himself, but to the ones he didn’t even think of. He needed to be wrecked in order to put him back together, pushed to the boundaries of his physical abilities. They needed the perfect soldier as his trainer.
Strucker smiled.
He waited a long time for the right moment to make use of his right to put the Winter Soldier out of his cryostasis.