"Why'd you do it?" Steve Rogers was sitting across from me, looking me dead in the eye.

I sighed, thinking about why exactly I had done it. All the clever excuses, all the genius reasons why I, and I alone, should hold the reins of power. I had wanted it. I don't know if it was the right answer, but it felt to me like that was the real reason. It had been so long ago, the world had been so different when it began.

"Hail Hydra," I laughed ruefully. He kept staring. "Have you read 1984?" He nodded. "I want you to know I never dreamed of O'Brien's boot stamping on a human face - I believed that, with power, I could help the world. I suppose... in the end..." I would have gesticulated, but I was chained to a table. "I guess it began with my arrival in this world. A... being appeared to me and it offered me power, almost unimaginable power."

"What kind of being?"

"I called it something else once, but seeing where it ended me up, I'll name it the devil."

"What happened to that power?"

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"I got it. You're looking at it."

I was locked out of biological modifications for fear it’d undermine my other abilities, but all in all… My brain was super-charged - My senses were heightened, my knowledge base expanded to nearly all forms of public human knowledge, with a second of focus I could figure out almost any skill to the level of a talented amateur (though it was impossible to retain), and I had gotten an inventive genius rivaled by only Tony Stark. And I was handsome and rich and, now, powerful. I should have thanked that interdimensional meddler more.

"And then this being forced you to serve Hydra?"

I laughed and shook my head. "No, nothing so vulgar.…"

But I had been deeply, severely alone. The terror of Thanos’ oncoming snap held me down. All the people who I knew would die in the Marvel universe… They were my responsibility. I had to protect them.

I started by killing Obadiah Stane with a drone to ensure he didn’t kill three-to-eight people on some LA freeway. I ended up in a very different place…