Chapter Text
Arnime Zola curls up into herself, sitting slumped outside the SHIELD medical department. There’s a piece of paper crumpled up in her hands, but she’s not looking at it. Her eyes are fixed on the ground.
“Doctor Zola?” Zola looks up, to see Director Carter standing over her, looking down with one eyebrow raised. “You didn’t show up for work today.”
Zola doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t feel like wasting what little breath she has left. Instead she just smooths out the paper in her hands, and hands it to Director Carter.
Carter’s eyes sweep down it, and Zola sees them catch on the words at the bottom of the page. Diagnosis: Terminal.
At the age of fifty, Margaret Carter is just as beautiful as ever, her neat brown curls touched with silver and her makeup picture-perfect. Zola has worked with her for twenty years now, and she has felt many things about the other woman - jealousy, affection, disdain, fear - but right now, she hates Carter.
When Zola was fifty, she was an old woman already, worn with a lifetime of cowardice and envy. But even when she was young, she had never been beautiful - a short, fat little woman who spent all of her time buried in her lab. It was not her ugliness that she resented, but her weakness. Her mind was strong, yes, but her body always failed her. Perpetually weak and perennially ill, she had grown up hating her body and her own humanity.
Carter, Zola can tell, never had such problems. Carter is strong, and brave, and beautiful. No man would ever turn away in disgust and mock her attentions. She’s like a movie heroine, winning the hero’s love with her perfect lipstick and her high heels.
Zola was never the heroine type. There are no women like her in the movies.
“Doctor . . .” Carter says, softly. “Doctor, I’m sorry. Can nothing be done?”
Zola’s hatred fails her all of a sudden. She didn’t expect Carter to sympathize with her. God knows she doesn’t deserve it - even at this moment, HYDRA’s tentacles are working their way deeper into SHIELD’s heart at Zola’s command. “It’s incurable,” she whispers, staring at the ground.
A hand comes to rest on her shoulder, and Zola looks up to see Director Carter sitting next to her. “You know I’ve never . . . gotten on with you,” Carter begins. Zola lets out a short, bitter laugh. That’s an understatement. Carter was always the last person to trust Zola with anything. “But you are working with SHIELD for a reason. And that reason is your intelligence.”
“What else do I have?” Zola asks.
“Don’t be like that,” Carter admonishes. “I know self-pity when I see it, Doctor Zola.”
“I am dying. Surely, if anyone deserves self-pity, it is myself.”
“Pity won’t get you anywhere, Doctor. You have done terrible things. You know that. But you’ve also done remarkable things.”
Zola frowns. “What are you saying, Frau Direktor?”
“I’m saying that you’ve performed miracles before, Doctor.”
Zola’s eyebrows raise. “You think I could save myself? Invent a cure to a disease that no one else could?”
Carter shakes her head. “I don’t know what you can do, Doctor. Only you do.” She pats Zola on the shoulder and stands up. “Don’t lose hope.” She offers Zola a companionable grin. “After all, the other doctors looking for a cure were only men.”
Zola is left staring after her and considering the possibilities.
Later, in HYDRA’s top-secret lab, Zola turns to the scientist in charge, and tells him, “Activate Project Asimov.”
Carter is right. There is still much left to be done, and Zola did not get where she is today by giving up easily.
And if Carter lives to regret giving her pet war criminal hope . . . well. Zola never claimed to be the heroine.