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In his first life, he was ignorant.
His first life spanned from 1561 until 1620, and his name was Lorenzo Juan Puerta. It was at this time he was chosen and trialled for the first time. He had no idea it’d even happened. He’d ended up rescuing a dog from being run over by a carriage after hearing a voice call out for help. Then the dog started following him around – because of course it did.
He lived in a superstitious time so when the dog spoke to him, his first thought was the Devil. But…the dog never asked him to do anything evil, or anything at all, so…he stopping thinking like that. Besides, he was a man of science.
So he sought to understand it instead…and understand as he could speak to every animal about him. Often a time they sought him out for help. Within his village, Lorenzo became well known for his love of animals and his altruistic intentions towards them. It was viewed more as a harmless eccentricity.
Then…he died and he found himself…in an experience he could never hope to explain.
He found himself born again soon after. This time in a different part of the world. He found himself born in the Ottoman Empire. He had a different face and a different name, but he still remembered being a Spaniard. For a time, he wondered if himself fanciful or, worse yet, mad. But his power persisted. He continued to speak to animals, this time from childhood.
This time his name was Hamit. He was born in 1625 and he lived until 1691. As a young man, he joined the army, seeking excitement. He survived due to intervention from the animals about him, calling out warnings and even sometimes attacking the enemy forces before they could strike him down.
His life was relatively long and he eventually expired of natural causes.
This time as he wandered, between lives, he wondered what it would be like to be a woman. So, when he was reborn, he was reborn as a she.
If anything, though, the time as Florette Deforest – and then Florette Sauvage – brought an appreciation of the plight women experienced. She had no control over her life and no agency, considered far more feeble and sensitive than she actually was. She did not even get to choose her own husband. Any control she did have needed to be exercised with extreme cunning and subtlety.
She could do it, but it was far too much work.
Not to mention all the sorts of things a woman’s body went through in her lifetime.
Being a man was just so much easier!
So, after a break at the end of that life, this soul once again reincarnated into a male body. And, this time, he looked for a place where something exciting was happening. He thought the country where a woman was revolutionising the country sounded good, so he reincarnated himself into Russia as Isaak Shvets.
Isaak lived from 1775 until 1843. And he’d been right. There were many, many wars against those who took umbrage at the power and freedom Catherine the Great wielded. Issak even ended up a soldier and the Empress had taken note of his ability to speak to animals. So he was a favourite of hers for many years, though the history books didn’t remember it.
Whatever. He had fun.
The next time he returned, he returned in 1847. Emboldened by the Russian Queen’s reaction to him, he was a little more open with his power now. This was the lifetime he got famous in. It was also the lifetime he finally made an entrance into the British Empire and trained up to be a veterinarian.
But it was also the lifetime he found the answers that’d eluded him from his first life.
He went on a long trip with many animals who helped him make it up to the Temple of Transcendence.
And he stayed there and studied for seven years, learning why he had his powers and the conditions attached to them. He learned everything. Then he returned to England. Unsurprisingly, his family had thought him dead. They were delighted to find that he only went “on a long pilgrimage”.
It didn’t take long for his reputation to get around though.
‘Are you…Dr. John Dolittle?’
Turning around, he smiled pleasantly at the man who’d come looking for him. ‘That I am. May I help you?’
‘I am sent by my employer, sir,’ the man said. ‘My name is George Harvey. He has a job for you.’
That didn’t sound good. ‘And who is your employer?’
‘Mr. Barnum, sir.’
‘P.T.Barnum?’ John asked with narrowed eyes. ‘P.T.Barnum’s Great Travelling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome?’
John Dolittle did not like Phineas Taylor Barnum.
‘Yes, sir. It is—’
John cut him off. ‘It is a sham. The animals are abused and unhappy. The performers are deformed or have appearance-altering medical conditions, and because of that his show is their only source of employment. Realise that and understand that I myself have no such problems. I do not ply my trade for the entertainment of the masses. I do it to better do my job.’
The man frowned.
John left him standing there.
Over the years, P.T.Barnum continued to harass him and John became quite good at deflecting him and the people he sent. It almost became fun, and that encouraged John to make a game of it. Though, when he married and had children and they started slinking towards the children in the hope that they’d inherited John’s power…there he drew the line.
The family dogs had permission to maul anyone who so much as looked at the children the wrong way.
But time passed, as it always does, and John Dolittle grew old.
He watched World War I break out, too old to serve but his sons went to fight instead. None of them ever returned, leaving their own children fatherless. It broke his heart, but he knew this was the nature of war. Men went and men died because their leaders had problems with each other. It had always been like this.
Peace came, though, and then John Dolittle died of old age just one year later in 1919.
But…the peace had been won and restrictions imposed that would cripple Germany. Their economy would be drained dry by England and France. He knew what would happen to the economy and, rather than suffer the consequences himself, he moved his soul and reincarnated himself into Belgium – just close enough watch the fallout without suffering it.
Claus Gorman was born in 1925.
But this was the shortest of his lives.
Before, they’d always been the Worshippers of the Hive. They were a cult that had existed as far back as anyone could remember. But, when the Second World War broke out, they changed their name (but not their insignia). They became HYDRA, and they started saying “cut one head off, two more grow in their place”…which was stupid, given how the hydra was destroyed in legend.
During World War 2, Claus joined the Belgian Resistance. (The French Resistance might have been more famous but every conquered country had its own version.) In his time serving, he met the famed Captain America…and he was not impressed. The man was a living example of everything wrong with America.
He did not listen to what anyone else said (except for Sgt. Barnes, who gave of the impression of being long-since used to working around “Stevie’s” bullshit), and didn’t even hide that he looked down his nose at them. He had to be no older than 25 and called even men older than him “son”. He looked good and had charisma, and that was probably why his men loved him, but he was really just there as a way to draw enemy fire while the rest of his team did the real work.
Claus had his own way of getting back at the sanctimonious ass.
Steve Rogers found himself the target of a lot of animal pee.
Then the war ended and…over the course of the next handful of years, word started to reach his ears. Claus had noticed Peggy Carter then too. She was indolent and proud, and “Cap’s best girl”. She was a woman who responded to overly forward men with a punch to the face. She was violent and Claus had never liked her.
Turned out…he had a reason.
After the war, the SSR fell into redundancy. She went to work for them and ended up forming them into SHIELD. He heard more stories from birds mostly – the animals that could watch without anyone thinking anything of it, and then fly across the sea. And what he heard…flatly, it horrified him.
She had Howard Stark manipulated and basically trained just the way she wanted him. She actively hunted down anyone with powers and if she couldn’t recruit them…they disappeared. And she had created an organisation so secretive, for the sole purpose that she wanted to get away with it.
Worse still, HYDRA had infiltrated them from inception…and had thus gained more power than they’d ever had before.
Simply because Peggy Carter was the kind of woman who feared power, and craved it.
So, when he was warned, in the early 60s, that she was coming after him, he fled. But SHIELD hunted him relentlessly. They chased him across the continent, across the sea, through rainforests and over mountains. It didn’t matter than his powers were literally communication with animals. He had power and they wanted it.
In 1968, he found out that Peggy Carter herself was coming onto the field.
That was when he made a decision and he travelled down into the sub-Saharan plains of Africa.
And he tracked down a Black Mamba.
‘You speak to me, human?’ the snake asked rising up.
‘I do,’ Claus said. ‘I’m being hunted for the very power that allows me to speak to you. I have been hunted for nearly ten years.’
The animal would have blinked at him, if it’d had eyelids. ‘You come to me for a lethal bite, then? Have you nothing to live for?’
‘More to the point,’ Claus said, ‘these people are too powerful. They will continue to pursue me until I am dead or until I am captured, which will eventually result in my death. I am also of a people with souls that transcend death. All I’m doing by dying now is leaving the body they know.’
The snake considered him. ‘Very well.’
And Claus Gorman died, in 1969, by a snake bite from one of the deadliest snakes in the world.
He got the satisfaction of flipping Peggy Carter the bird as his body fell, transforming into gold dust as he went down.
And further satisfaction as he chose his next incarnation.
On May 29, 1970, he was reborn…as Tony Stark.