There was a particular kind of pleasure that Strucker had discovered very early in his life, standing at height and looking down. Not the fear that most people felt when they got high enough to understand how far the ground was: the opposite of that, the rush that came from being above everything and knowing it. He had chased that sensation from boyhood into adulthood, through Adolf's army, through the transition to John Schmidt's service, through every step of his long ascent within Hydra, and it had not diminished with age. If anything it had sharpened.
He stood on the fortress rooftop and watched his city burn at its edges.
The staff officer came up behind him with the particular footfall of someone who has bad news and is trying to arrive at the right pace for delivering it: not so fast as to seem panicked, not so slow as to seem like they are choosing their words with excessive care.
"Lord Baron. The enemy assault force has made contact. Based on the size of their personnel and their equipment profile, we believe these are the same unit that S.H.I.E.L.D. previously listed as eliminated: the Guardian of Terra." A pause. "In addition, Tony Stark, the one they call Iron Man, and an energy-type combatant operating under the designation 'Bestehm' have entered the city and are extracting civilians from our containment zones. The hostage operation has failed completely."
Strucker's mechanical eye caught the distant explosions, the rising columns of fire, the brief bright lines of energy weapons cutting between the buildings. His real eye did not move.
"Pierce," he said, to the night air, "is a waste. Pure, unqualified waste. A man who joins Hydra halfway through his career and spends the rest of it trying to look like he was always there. His faction could not even fully control S.H.I.E.L.D., which was an organisation built around the same principles we operate on." He let a beat pass. "That is why I never accepted the idea that the group which destroyed us was simply a collection of S.H.I.E.L.D. field agents. Something does not get eliminated and then reappear and destroy half of Europe's Hydra infrastructure unless it was never as eliminated as the report claimed."
He shifted his weight slightly, the mechanical arm adjusting beneath the cloak.
"Madam Viper's death. I will give good odds that is their work as well. A shame. I had a great business relationships through her."
He turned his head partially, not enough to look at the staff officer directly.
"Open the fortress combat reserves. Every elite unit, every piece of equipment. And if the engagement does not go in our favour, authorise access to the biological experiment confinement facility. My personal projects. Deploy them."
The silence from the staff officer lasted slightly too long.
"Lord Baron, the... nature of those subjects is not stable. There have been incidents. Last month, two of the human experiment participants, siblings, escaped the facility before containment could be reestablished. If we release the other subjects into an active combat zone without"
He did not finish the sentence.
Strucker moved the way large animals move when they are not bothering to be careful about it: fast, and then simply there, the distance closed without any visible intermediate stages. His mechanical hand came up and the five metal fingers closed around the staff officer's throat with the precise, unhurried pressure of a man who has done this often enough to know exactly how much force is required.
"I gave an order," Strucker said. "Not a suggestion. Not a topic for discussion."
He looked at the man's face, at the reddening, at the beginning of the specific expression that comes when the brain begins to understand what is happening.
"You want to talk about what went wrong? Let me tell you. When that alien creature came back and the fundamentalists rolled out the welcome arrangement, every person in this organisation who should have objected kept quiet. When Arnim Zola was pushed out of the Supreme Council by the same people, you all looked away and called it politics." His grip did not tighten, but it did not need to. "Now the enemy is in our city and you want to ask me questions about deployment protocols."
The struggle in the staff officer's hands was becoming smaller. Not from suffocation: the vitality was leaving him at a different rate, drawn outward by whatever had been done to Strucker's palm over the decades of his very long and very unconventional life. The skin thinned. The colour changed.
"Scum like you," Strucker said quietly, more to himself than to anyone, "are the reason we are standing on a rooftop watching fires instead of running the world."
The body that settled onto the rooftop floor made almost no sound. Within a few seconds it had the texture and colour of rotten wood, and a moment after that it was ash, and the cold night wind from the mountains took care of the ash.
Strucker turned around.
The remaining Hydra commanders were arranged in the rooftop's shadows, standing very still, their faces showing the careful blankness of people who have just watched something happen and are applying significant effort to appearing unaffected.
"Did you hear the order?"
"Lord Baron." The response came out in close to perfect unison, the voices overlapping. "Heard and understood. One hundred percent compliance. Hail Hydra."
The arms went up. The heels came together. They were moving for the rooftop stairs before the last word had finished, every one of them, with the specific urgency of people who have been given an extremely clear incentive to be somewhere else.
Strucker watched them go without expression.
He turned back to the city. The fires at its edges were spreading, painting the low clouds in an uneven orange. Behind the city, the mountains sat in their old dark patience, unchanged by any of it.
He thought about the death spore bombs in the lower levels. The cruise missile launch systems that had never been used in live conditions. The calculation of what it meant to drag everything down with you if it was going to fall anyway, the final and most absolute expression of the control he had always craved: not to rule, at the end, but to decide that if he could not have it, then no one would.
The mechanical eye's dark red light pulsed once in the dark.
"Come, then," he said softly, to the fires, to the forces approaching through the city streets, to whatever was coming up the mountain roads in the dark. "If you want to find me, come and find me."
The corner of his mouth pulled sideways, slow and certain.
"If I am going to fall, I will not fall alone. I will take the whole burning world with me."