Fanfic / A Colder War

A Colder War is an AU of the Marvel Cinematic Universe where Steve Rogers was recovered in 1986 rather than 2011. As a result, he is introduced to Tony Stark as a teenager and unintentionally escalates a few other plans by certain parties, leading to the formation of a very different kind of Avengers to face the threats of this more paranoid world.

The series consists of two fics so far; "An Early Thaw" and "The Arctic Front", with the potential for further updates in future.

A Colder War contains examples of:

• 10-Minute Retirement: In Arctic Front, Steve essentially resigns after Bucky’s death and Peggy’s confession that she at least suspected the Winter Soldier’s identity, but returns to action after a couple of months as an independent operative.
• A Minor Kidroduction: As well as meeting Tony Stark when he’s a teenager, Steve also meets Hope van Dyne while she’s a child and has a seemingly chance encounter with a teenage Phil Coulson and Melinda May at the space shuttle launch. Later, Steve’s new neighbours when he gets his own apartment are Sam Wilson’s parents, and a rogue Black Widow rescues Natasha when the would-be Black Widow of the Avengers is just a little girl.
  • While Steve doesn’t meet them directly, various chapters include a brief reference to what the future canon Avengers are doing at this point in their lives, such as two boys running off to join the circus (Clint Barton and his brother), or another attending his mother’s funeral while trying to suppress his rage at his father (Bruce Banner).
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
  • In Early Thaw, it’s revealed that Peggy married Dum Dum Dugan after Steve’s disappearance.
  • In Arctic Front, Obadiah Stane plans to marry Maria Stark after Howard’s death, although it’s clear to Tony in particular that the main reason for the marriage is for Stane to get a controlling share in Stark Industries.
  • While never directly stated, in contrast to their canon dynamic as Vitriolic Best Buds, here Steve’s relationship with Tony is a strange mix of Parental Substitute and an older brother, considering Tony’s emotional distance from Howard and his outright hatred of Stane.
• Adaptational Wimp: Essentially applies; in this version of events, the ‘Avengers’ are likely to be more of an elite strike team than Earth’s first line of defence, as they lack raw power in the absence of Thor and the Hulk and so are unsuited for open large-scale combat even if they’re still a skilled group.
• Amicable Exes: After the shuttle mission to rescue the Odyssey returns to Earth, Steve watches Bhavana break up with her husband as they accept that she just isn’t the type to be a full-time wife and mother when she could be an astronaut.
• Canon Character All Along: Essentially applies to SHIELD Agent Connie Fletcher, who is eventually revealed to be Black Widow Konstantina Fyodorova, and goes on to join Steve’s proto-Avengers with Natasha as essentially her foster daughter. On a more literal example, model Eva Natter is later revealed to be Viper.
• Dead Guy Junior: After the war, Peggy and Dugan named their son ‘Stephen James’ after Steve and Bucky (which results in an awkward moment when Steve accompanies Peggy to visit Dugan in hospital and the doctors mistake him for their son).
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Basically applies to Hank Pym, as in this reality he’s the one who ‘sacrifices’ himself to stop the nuclear missile rather than Janet as Janet sat that mission out due to an injury sustained on a previous one.
  • Steve kills the Winter Soldier in battle and only realises after the fact that the Soldier was Bucky.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A journalist trying to photograph Howard Stark’s dead body before Steve takes and smashes his camera is clearly intended to be a young J. Jonah Jameson.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even other members of HYDRA affirm that they wouldn’t want the Red Skull to take over again if he came back, with Viper expressing gratitude to Steve for stopping Schmidt.
• Evil Stepfather: In Arctic Front, Obadiah Stane is clearly setting himself up as this, keeping Maria and Tony from talking and grounding Tony indefinitely for defying him.
• Foil: Comparing model Eva Natter with a Black Widow agent, Steve reflects that they essentially represent different styles of seduction, with Eva the unattainable ‘goddess’ while the Widow is more of a ‘girl next door’ who gets people talking by making them comfortable.
• Foreshadowing: As Steve prepares for his first public appearance, Agent Fletcher warns him that people will have expectations of his return.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Tony nearly throws himself into outer space to dispose of the Red Skull.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the changes caused by Steve’s presence, Howard Stark is still killed by the Winter Soldier (albeit on his own via a sniper’s bullet rather than dying with his wife in a car crash), and Steve and Tony become members of a variation of the Avengers accompanied by a Black Widow.
• Irony: Steve has nightmares where Howard Stark’s assassin shoots Bucky from the train before he learns that the assassin is Bucky.
• It's All My Fault: Steve goes through this in Arctic Front when he learns that Hank Pym has died on a mission that Peggy was going to ask him to take, but Tony and Janet each assure him that he isn’t responsible for what happened to Hank when he couldn’t have known the consequences of his refusal.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Steve thinks of himself as this in terms of his plans; while he respects people like Peggy who can plan for everything, he recognises that his standard ‘plans’ consist of getting into places, hitting people until he gets whatever he came for, and then hitting people while he gets out.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Steve thinks everything but these exact words when he realises that the Winter Soldier was Bucky only after breaking the Soldier’s neck. He does it again when an attempt to use the Tesseract to bring Bucky back to life nearly destroys a small town and causes mass amnesia in most of the survivors.
• Mythology Gag: The church where Paul Wilson (Sam Wilson’s father) works as a preacher has a red-and-white bird as its symbol, a reference to the colour of Sam’s first winged costume in the comics.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Peggy starts to talk about a mistake being made during the Roswell incident before Steve interrupts her, and also confirms that she knows who really killed Kennedy (only saying that it wasn’t the post office or someone with superpowers without sharing the specifics).
  • When Hank Pym takes Steve Rogers and Nick Fury out in a shrunken submarine, he warns them that only he can exit the submarine while it's shrunk while wearing his suit, and the consequences of someone else doing so would be "messy".
• The Nth Doctor: The change in Howard Stark's appearance (from Dominic Cooper to John Slattery) is the result of a plane crash in 1972; Howard had to have reconstructive surgery afterwards and he jokes that the doctors were missing some of the best bits of his face when they put him back together.
• Oh, Crap!: Steve is clearly horrified when he realises that the entity possessing Shipley is actually the Red Skull.
• Parental Substitute: As the fic continues, Steve subtly takes on a parent-like role for Tony after Howard’s death, although it may be fairer to consider him more like an older brother.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: As in canon, Steve’s new team is basically this; as of the end of the second fic, he has formed a provisional team of Avengers with teen genius Tony Stark, defected Black Widow Connie Fletcher/Konstantina Fyodorova, and shrinking scientist Janet Pym .
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: In Arctic Front, Steve realises that the Winter Soldier is on board a Russian ship, but incorrectly assumes that the Soldier is there to kill him when the assassin’s actual target is Viper.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Steve eventually decides to go against the idea that it’s impossible to rescue the crew of the Odyssey by stealing the Intrepid with Tony, Fury and Bhavana; the only problem Peggy has with that idea is that she was expecting him to break out the imprisoned Black Widow and use her contacts to mount the rescue instead of going himself.
• Selective Obliviousness: After Steve kills the Winter Soldier, he confronts Peggy about whether she knew the Soldier’s true identity, and Peggy’s answer all but explicitly states that she strongly suspected that Bucky was still alive but just never brought up that possibility because she wanted Steve focused on stopping him if the two fought each other again.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Steve learns that Ronald Reagan is now President, Tony quotes Doc Brown’s lines from Back to the Future regarding that revelation.
  • During the confrontation on the Intrepid, Tony passes on a message to Steve by quoting a crucial scene from Alien to suggest that they defeat Schmidt by opening the airlock and forcing him out.
  • When speculating on places where SHIELD might be hiding the tesseract, Tony asks if it’s hidden under the Pentagon, citing that his second-favourite theory of the Kennedy assassination is that the killer had superpowers and was kept in a cell under the Pentagon.
• Something Only They Would Say: The true nature of the entity possessing Shipley is confirmed when he describes the super-soldier serum as enhancing everything within the subject, a description that would only be known to Steve’s closest friends and HYDRA as most modern sources on the serum describe it in a more scientific manner.
• Spot the Impostor: When Steve, Tony, Fury and Bhavana encounter an entity that claims to be possessing astronaut Shipley and drawing on his memories, Tony and Bhavana soon determine that at least that part of the entity’s claim is false; the entity claims to speak Italian where Tony knows that Shipley spoke Japanese, and the entity also claims that Shipley had a crush on Bhavana when Bhavana knows that Shipley was gay.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • Tony is the first person to find evidence that Howard was murdered by a sniper rather than just jumping off a balcony on his own.
  • In Arctic Front, Fyodorova points out to Steve that a Russian ship they’re on being so much colder than it should be is a sign that the Winter Soldier is on board, as only the need to keep him frozen would justify diverting that much power.
• Teen Genius: Tony is basically this at this point; at only fifteen, he doesn’t have a reason to build the full Iron Man armour yet, but he makes up for its lack by being such a brilliant engineer that he built a robot arm for the space shuttle. He also comes up with a plan to rescue a damaged space shuttle that the entirety of NASA had already written off as impossible to retrieve. Arctic Front sees him as the only person capable of understanding his father’s notes after Howard’s death, and in his attempts to build a new form of spacesuit he ends up creating an early form of the Iron Man armor.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: How Steve and Tony defeat the Red Skull in Shipley’s body.
• Transformation of the Possessed: Once the entity within Shipley is identified as Schmidt, Schmidt reveals that his face has already assumed its original red-skulled appearance and he was just wearing Shipley’s original face as a mask. Seeing the astronaut’s transformation, Steve reflects that he hopes Shipley is dead because he can’t imagine the man would want his body back after it was changed like that even if he could find a way to ‘exorcise’ Schmidt’s consciousness.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In Arctic Front, Steve is outraged and incredulous when Peggy not only has Fyodorova locked up, but keeps her separated from Natalia even though that means separating a three-year-old from her only guardian, only justifying it with talks about age-regression and the risk of a potential threat that Steve finds ridiculous when they’re talking about a toddler.
• Would Hurt a Child: Naturally HYDRA have no problems with this, threatening the infant Sam Wilson and toddler Natalia to try and make Steve give them the Tesseract.