Chapter Text
Upstate New York, September 1946
It was strange that such a small thing could cause as much devastation as this thing had.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Howard fixated on the glowing box of crystalline material, dark eyes wide as the light within it shifted and pulsed, swirling with energy of its own making. If Peggy didn’t know better, she would have almost assumed the it was artificial, but the Tesseract’s light was self sustaining, this despite hundreds of years of hiding and being used to power countless versions of Arnim Zola’s weapons technology. “It’s almost magical isn’t it?”
“Depends on what you mean by magic,” Peggy murmured, staring at the thing through the many levels of protective glass in Howard’s personal lab. She felt a chill crawl up her spine that had nothing to do with the cold dampness of the place buried deep in the earth. “Where did you find it?”
“On the bottom of the ocean,” Howard murmured, jerking his head towards the pile of maps and notes on one of his steel-topped tables. “I had thought I would find…”
He trailed off, his mesmerized smile fading to pained sadness as he flickered a look towards her. “Well, I didn’t find him. I tried, Peggy, I did...I had hoped when we found this he would be nearby.”
It had been a good gamble and certainly not one of Howard’s worst ideas. “In all of that ocean?”
“Followed the gamma signal. The samples that Rogers brought us back from Azzano all had low levels of gamma radiation, and I figured this would too. Had a spectrometer on the ship and just headed north. Took us most of the summer just to find that. My guess is something happened to knock it off Schmidt’s plane, either they fought or it got thrown out. Only explanation I have for it not being near the crash.”
What happened beyond Schmidt’s death, they still didn’t know. Peggy desperately wished that she did. “Have you figured out what powers it yet?”
“No,” he sighed, turning now away from the glass and towards the table with his notes and work. As an engineer, Howard kept meticulous notes on everything, all in his neat handwriting in his notebooks. He picked up the one in the middle of the table, flipping pages to show her his theoretical sketches in tidy lines and the various calculations he had made. “The substance it’s made of is strange and there is no way we can even get a sample to test it. However, the name is apt, from what I can make of it, it’s a true tesseract, which may mean that deep inside it may contain a source that keeps powering it.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged, his hands in his pockets. “Who knows. Based on the intel you gathered back in the day this could very well be something not of this world. You said that the HYDRA scientists believed it was given to us by the gods?”
“That’s the story at least.” She closed Howard’s notes gently, careful to keep his place marked. “The archaeologist who was studying it for Schmidt, Bremer, believed that the Norse gods were real - Odin, Thor, all the rest - and that they walked the earth once. The Tesseract was supposedly one of the most prized possessions Odin had, but he hid it on earth to keep it safe should the Jotunn ever come looking for it, at least that was what one of the stories about it said. Others said it was tied to Ragnarok and the Norse end of days. Whatever the case, the stories all said specifically that it was dangerous, best left untouched by man.”
Her implicit warning only earned a mild smile out of Howard. “Fairy tales always have those sorts of warnings, that’s the point of them.”
“Sometimes those warnings are there to be heeded,” Peggy insisted, already seeing the dangerous paths Howard’s brilliant mind was taking. “If even a hint of them are true then do you want to really tempt fate by playing with something you don’t understand?”
“You’ve seen what it can do, Peg! All of Zola’s weapons were powered by that one little cube. Endless energy, right at our fingertips!”
“Howard, don’t even think…”
“Of what? Studying it?”
“When you don’t know what it is or how it works?”
“Hence why we study it, Peggy, that’s how science works.”
Of course this idea would be in his teeth now. Howard never let go of something once he had fixated on it. “Think about it, one of the main causes of any war is resources, power, the lack of it and the desire to have it so as not to be left behind. But what if we can figure out a way to harness it, produce it, make it cheap and affordable for everyone in the world. Everyone from the richest countries to the poorest colonies could have it. Do you know what a difference that would make in people’s lives? Suddenly there can be hospitals and treatment plants where there were none! You grew up near London, you remember the smoke and the fog that would choke everything? That’s all figured out, same with the smog in LA. A hundred years of industrialization will be changed overnight by having a power source like what that little baby can help us produce.”
Howard, the futurist, always thinking of what could be and never thinking of what was. “You and I both saw what this energy...that thing could do! I watched men, good men, get disintegrated right in front of me with just one bolt off of one of those guns powered off that thing.”
“I wasn’t saying we use it for weapons…”
“But what if it comes down to that?” Peggy threw the obvious point right in front of him, one he was clearly refusing to see. “In our lifetime there have been two wars and we are already priming for another one. What if the Soviet’s develop a bomb? You helped conveniently develop a weapon that now everyone else covets and now they are working on their own version. Is this your answer to that, creating more, bigger, crazier weapons till the entire world is left in ruins by our own hubris?”
Howard didn’t like anyone challenging his ideas, least of all her. “Hey, now, you are jumping to conclusions that I never said I was going to.”
“No,” Peggy shot back, angrily, shaking with her own temper. “Steve fought against Johann Schmidt so he wouldn’t destroy the world with that thing. He died to save the world from the Tesseract, not so you could go and do the same thing that HYDRA did.”
Howard veritably exploded on her. “Do you really think I am as bad as Schmidt was? Do you see me just like that red-faced freak of nature, a monster who would kill millions to have power over them?”
The force of his ire caught Peggy short, as much for its rarity as for its true passion. She had crossed a line with him and the guilt subdued her as quickly as her worries had gigged up her own fears. “No, I don’t think you would kill millions to have power over them, but I do think you would create something thinking that it was for the common good and that it would get used by others to kill millions. And whether or not that is ever your true intention, you know that will happen.”
He didn’t like hearing it, but he did seem to listen to her words. Shoulders sagging under his suspenders, he glowered, stalking over to the window to glare at the pale, aqua light from inside, cold and distant and alluring. “Contrary to popular belief, I may make weapons but I’m not interested in ruining people’s lives. So much of what I’ve done has been used for death and destruction. I want to create something that for once isn’t, that helps humanity, that leaves it better than the goddamn mess we inherited as kids. I want our kids to have a world that is safer, better, without the threat of constant war over their heads all the time. And maybe this could be it, maybe...if I figure out how to crack this, I can use it to make something good. We can use it for everyday purposes, or exploration, or….anything that isn’t another gun or weapon or bomb.”
“Maybe,” Peggy sighed, moving to stand alongside him, studying the crystalline box in its protective stand. “However, we both know that even the best of intentions can be twisted and neither you nor I will be here forever. This needs to be kept under the tightest of security, Howard, and only accessed by the two of us, no one else. No one can know it is here. It is far too powerful and unknown for that.”
He chewed on the corner of his mustache for a long moment, but finally gave in, reluctantly. “Fine, sure, we will keep it at the top classification and under lock and key.”
“And by that I mean here, not in any of your houses where some other Soviet spy can find it.”
“I learned my lesson, Peg, Jesus!” He glared at her, but without any real heat. “I get it, I already accidentally threatened New York once, I’m not interested in playing those odds again. That’s why I have it out here, away from the city, at least for now, I don’t want it near any major metropolitan areas, not till we understand what it does.”
She would rather Howard never try to understand it at all, but she knew that was like asking the sun not to shine or the planet not to turn. “I don’t know that we should be playing with anything that the supposed gods left behind on this planet, Howard. This could be bigger than we can understand.”
“Maybe,” he sighed, sounding so cavalry. “Or it could be the key to understanding the whole universe. What did you want me to do? Leave it on the bottom of the ocean?”
“It might have been better if you had.” Perhaps it would have been. Perhaps not, considering it could have fallen in someone else’s hands. After all, Peggy trusted Howard’s infinitely more than she did just about anyone else with it. “Let’s hope whatever you develop from it, it has a better impact on the world than Schmidt did.”
He did seem mildly mollified by that sentiment. “It’s hard to get much worse.”
As much as she knew he was right, Peggy couldn’t help but worry. After all, Howard wasn’t known for impulse control, and she could think of nothing more tempting to someone who believed himself more brilliant than anyone else than the alluring, azure glow of the unknown. She hoped she wouldn’t regret this.