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When they tell you you’re going to be just like Captain America most people don’t read the fine print, Private Haine sure as hell didn’t and frankly it didn’t even fully set in there was fine print until he was in the doc’s office being told ‘not to worry, he wasn’t the first person in the program to break their bonds and attack someone.’
They didn’t tell him he was the only one to attack a little kid, and the whole batch of them had been deployed before he’d had a chance to dwell on it.
As it turned out, super soldier serums did more than make you bigger, faster and stronger.
Heightened aggression wasn’t a problem, they were all army boys, that sort of thing tended to attract a certain type and if they did end up duking it out, all of them were usually good to go again in the morning. As long as they were beating the shit out of the enemy more often than they beat the crap out of each other, and they didn’t take it out on unaltered soldiers, it was an acceptable drawback.
What none of them expected was that the same processes that heightened their reflexes also left their impulse control almost completely shot.
By the end of it the project was considered a failure, all the volunteers got a little something to fatten their pay packets, the scientists went back to the drawing board, and everyone went back to their original units.
Those who didn’t figure out how to manage their new state in the general forces washed out in six months.
Lance corporal Haine managed not to be one of them.
Maybe he shouldn’t have started drinking on the job, but alcohol slowed down his brain, let him think before the shortened reaction time had him act. It kept him in the OSI, let him get promoted.
Most of all, drinking let him avoid dealing with (or worse, acting on) the new thoughts plaguing his mind. Images of tiny, heaving, bird-like rib-cages under his hands and skinny hairless thighs wrapped around his hips... Maybe it wasn’t really new, maybe it had always been there, lurking in the back of his mind when he jerked off in his bunk, but now it was front and centre. He couldn’t even think about touching his own dick without immediately picturing some little kid, couldn’t look at one without thinking what it’d be like.
And here he was with fuck all impulse control and access to all kinds of technology that could make it so very easy to...
The alcohol definitely helped.
The unfortunate thing about good behaviour was it tended to get you promoted, and promotions in any branch meant getting closer and closer to being welded to your desk instead of in the field.
Hell on earth with the pent up energy that came from the serum.
The few guys left from the program had gone out of their way to avoid that kind of promotion, if it got forced on them, they made sure to get themselves knocked down ASAP, in that way it wasn’t that much different from the army days.
That was fine and dandy for them. They could afford the attention that came with a little acting out just to stay in the field.
For a man like Courtney Haine, spending every waking moment worrying someone would figure out the serum changed something in him, putting eyes on him was not an option, and when he thought about it now, that promotion was where it all really went wrong.
It wasn’t that not even all the PT in the world could keep him from going stir crazy with his excess energy, or even that desk work was boring as hell. (Really he just drank more, as long as he didn’t pass out on his desk during work hours and didn’t puke on anyone, it was fine.)
It was that the rank came with security clearances and access to all sorts of confiscated goods, evidence lockers, sealed files, mission information and black mail materials.
Amongst those had been some images, images that were so much better than what his imagination provided. Stealing from carefully curated hoards of files and photographs was beyond stupid, but h indsight is 20/20.
What he’d cared about at the time was how it soothed the itch under his skin and made it easier not to wonder if he could lure off one of the less watched children at a work event, but what it meant was The Guild knowing they could use him.
The first message let him know not only had he been caught, but that they knew exactly why he’d done it and could easily expose the secret he’d spent so much time and effort concealing.
Really it was all down hill from there.
His rank and security access made him useful to The Guild, and The Guild knew exactly the kind of bribes and threats to get him to provide exactly what they wanted. By the time they asked him to join, he was eating out of The Guild hand.
Accepting Sergeant Hatred for what Courtney Haine was accounted for more loyalty than any serious attempt at blackmail.
T hough certain job perks and provisions didn’t hurt.
Sergeant Haine maintained the con for years, controlling the flow of information, destroying evidence, burying suspicious agents in busy work, ‘losing’ files to keep The Guild’s existence quiet, forwarding information on potential raids, recruits, materials, technology and operations to The Guild to cement it’s future power when it returned.
He wasn’t the only one in the OSI doing the job, but he was usually the one to help them disappear under the guise of prison or execution when they were caught. Some did have to die to throw off suspicion, but most of them made it back to The Guild with his help.
The funny thing was most of his batch ended up working for The Guild in some capacity, some of the later batches too . For a lot of them it was that, or becoming a mercenary. Couple ended up in SPHINX, but those were dead men.
S PHINX was the best smokescreen The Guild could have asked for. Aside from being openly and violently antagonistic, it was a hornets nest that was very easy to poke with the OSI stick to stir them up again if it seemed like they might settle into any kind of d étente.
With a big and loud threat right in front of them, there was never any need for the OSI to look at the subtler threats inside their own organisation. Especially when Guild activity was almost always attributed to SPHINX.
That SPHINX was a potential competitor to The Guild was just a bonus.
By the time SPHINX was finished, The Guild was thoroughly entrenched in every government agency (and more than a few major components of the American economy.) Hell, Sergeant Haine actually made it to an ‘official retirement.’ As a double agent of course, not from the OSI. Originally they intended to fake his death, throw on a little plastic surgery, have him return as a guild member full time.
That wasn’t how it went down though, someone not in The Guild’s pocket caught him in the middle of some extremely incriminating activities. He killed them before they had a chance to say anything, but it led to accelerating the plan by a couple of weeks with a far more public and direct defection where he made off with a couple million from the OSIs coffers and conveniently seemed to join The Guild of Calamitous Intent as it abruptly re-emerged into the public eye, bigger and more powerful than it had ever been before.
I t might have put him on the top of the OSI’s hit list if a few more defections hadn’t gone off at the same time and a major operation or two ratted out to the public. With enough chaos thrown out, damage control and the internal witch hunt became more important than hunting down the agents who publicly defected.
There was enough double agents embedded in the OSI to keep them chasing their tails long enough that by the time they were ready to hunt down the known traitors they needed to make political deals with The Guild.
Political deals that kept Guild members safe. From direct retaliation at least, indirect retaliation was part of the OSI’s business though. The inability to openly come after him or his fellow traitors with their own agents thoroughly hamstrung the efforts to have them executed or arrested.
Plausible deniability was the name of that game.
That particular stalemate was great for keeping them loyal to The Guild when betrayal meant being sold out to the OSI and the people they had betrayed on behalf of The Guild.
S ergeant Hatred could safely say he was sick to fuck with the spy games and politics element.
He couldn’t say he ever expected to become anything that could even loosely come close to the description of being a licensed villain. It took getting used to, and he still drank like a fucking fish but once he was in the field he didn’t even care.
The rush of using his modified body for what it was made for did a lot to ease the transition.
The rest was history really. The highs and low and learning to balance himself in his persona were all just part of the business.
Where would he have been without The Guild, probably dead or in prison. Depending on how and why he got there, possibly both. That wasn’t to say there weren’t regrets, but when he thought about it, he knew he probably wouldn’t have done it much differently if he’d known.
Or maybe he’d have done the sensible thing and eaten a bullet back when he realised just how much the serum changed him.
Hatred went back and forth on it a lot, but he couldn’t change the past.