general disclaimer: I own nothing to do with the Avengers

warnings: allusions to the holocaust, possible symptoms of ptsd

You are born as Hans Tischler, but due to unfortunate circumstances you are not able to use it for very long before it is cruelly snatched away by bigger people with more powerful guns.

You become a number, which you do not care to remember but have burned into your skin with ink, an initial violation that is surmounted very quickly. You see your sisters sent to be cleaned, and you know with chilling certainty that you will never see them again.

You survive the war by the skin of your teeth, you survive through your own strength, and you survive with the knowledge that you will never trust your government again.

You are not a broken shell of a person, which is a great comfort to yourself even if no one believes you, not the therapists you are forced to see, nor your one remaining family member (when before family gatherings crowded an entire three storied house and the garden), nor your wife when you meet her. Your wife, at least, grows to understand.

You are not a broken shell of a person, because you have purpose, and you know that having lived through 6 years of hell you don't want to chance dying through it for eternity.

In the next sixty years you grow from a man waiting for another shoe to drop, for the bottom to fall out and to wake up back in 1942, into a man who can look forward to the day his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren (assuming you live that long) become adults in a world that is far from perfect but is closer than any time you have experienced.

When Iron Man explodes onto the world stage, you roll your eyes but inwardly you think of the rumours you heard during the war of the supersoldier named Captain America (kapitan amerika, you think) and are glad that someone else might regain hope for a heroic rescue.

You do not think about these new superheroes overmuch – New York is a long way from your home, and they do not seem to congregate anywhere else (privately you are glad, because even now you still do not trust your government to leave such people alone).

The occasional stories you do read are all much less positive than they should be, in your opinion. People willing to risk themselves for the world should be celebrated. Hating them for not being quite sacrificial enough is hypocritical when the writer has probably never been in anywhere near as much danger, would never fly into a warzone to save a town full of foreigners.

Loki comes to Stuttgart on a cold day – you were only out to buy a present for your newly born granddaughter, so being stalled by a madman only grates on your nerves. You forgot how to be afraid a very long time ago.

The place where fear should be kept in yourself is replaced by anger – anger that this man would dare to enslave anyone, anger that he thinks he is unique in his goals, anger that you cannot do anything about it.

And then you realise that you can do something.

When he tells you to kneel, commands it in such a voice that even without fear you feel your teenage self cringe a little, far in the past, when he orders you to kneel, you stay on your feet.

You know that this is a terrible idea, and you know without a doubt that it is the only thing you can do. You think of numbers on top of and underneath your skin, and when Loki says that there are no men like him, there is only one thing to say.

There are always men like you.