I'm not normal.
And wasn't that the fucking understatement of the century. Not that you knew that. Not yet at least. I wasn't one of those people who rebelled to be noticed in a crowd of normal people and wasn't 'different' just for the hell of it. My life hadn't been the boring monotonous existence of most, not even at its start. I simply wasn't normal. I hadn't even been born that way.
To be short, my life took the word 'normal' and tortured it until its definition had faded out of existence, never to remember its original meaning as it was redefined by me.
I've been continuously fucked by the world since I was a baby. My parents had both been gone by the time I was two months old. I was raised by a telepathic dog. I was trained to be a human weapon. Now … well, we'll get to the 'now' soon enough. Patience is a virtue, or so I had heard, or some such rot that didn't actually apply to me.
For the time being, kick back and enjoy the juicy details.
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I never had real parents. My dad ran off to some godforsaken place, and my mom was murdered in cold blood. Why? Well, what's a story without some ambiguity? It keeps the intrigue alive. How did I know this? Well, I'll leave that to you to figure out. It shouldn't be too difficult.
I was thrown in a dumpster by some asshole. Left to starve, freeze, and eventually die for all my nonexistent sins. What kind of sick fuck throws a tiny baby in the trash to die? Who was I retrieved by? Not some Good Samaritan, that was for sure, whether or not they existed was probably another question that needed a good answer, but a puppy. A slobbery little Mastiff dragged me out of the garbage.
Did I remember all of this? No. We don't remember what our lives were like as babies. Not even I was born to be that special. No, this was told to me by someone, someone very important.
Gared.
Gared is the puppy's name, by the way. Oh, maybe you haven't figured it out yet, but Gared can talk.
If that ain't cool as hell, I don't know what is.
He doesn't actually speak, so maybe 'talk' isn't quite accurate here, but he communicates through my mind. We're connected, somehow. I still don't exactly know how. That's the first inquiry I've made that wasn't rhetorical, by the way. It is quite fun to toy with the audience.
Man, do I love breaking the fourth wall. The sound of it shattering is particularly wonderful.
The next few years of my life were spent on the streets. I have vague memories from about age 3, not many though, and what I remember from my childhood it was filled with going from alley to alley, sleeping in the shivering cold or sweltering heat with nothing but Gared and my body heat to keep each other warm in the winters - basically doing whatever we had to do to survive. Each alley had to be carefully chosen for the season, or that season could end badly.
Atlanta's weather is fucking brutal, if you don't know. It gets up into the humid hundreds in the summer, then drops into single digits in the winters. With barely any snow. How I relish March and April.
Anyways, Gared would go out and beg for food in the early years. He'd usually get a small amount, but not enough to feed both of us. When I was four, I discovered that I had a knack for stealing. I would walk around the downtown area, in the general area of Philips Arena and the Dome. I would pick up dropped wallets, maybe even swipe some from people's pockets - it wasn't too difficult when they were sufficiently distracted - and go buy some food from the vendors that worked down there. If I didn't get any results, I would just steal a couple hot dogs. Simple enough, right? Well, it worked for us.
Hawks and Falcons games were like open season for me. With so many people in such a cramped space, I could steal a couple dozen wallets a game with no one the wiser. While we didn't have much, Gared and I were happy. We had each other, as cheesy as that sounded, and we made pretty good money. I would stop and pick up Chick-Fil-A or Zaxby's for us a lot. Sometimes I used the five-finger discount.
Just sometimes.
Okay, maybe a lot.
On special nights I would bring some Taxco, a Mexican restaurant that remains one of my favorite places today. (A/N: Yes, it is a real place. If you are ever in Atlanta, you NEED to try it) It was a rare treat for both Gared and I, well more for me than Gared if we wanted to try something new. I would get the beef enchiladas while I would bring Gared some cheese nachos since other Mexican food upset his stomach.
Badly.
It was horrifying. The stuff of nightmares, if I were to be honest with you, which I am.
I've withstood torture, and I'd much rather be tortured than have to deal with Gared's diarrhea again. I'd take several bouts of torture instead.
I'm not exaggerating, not by a long shot. It would be fucking difficult to exaggerate that, well, shit.
Anyways, back to the point. My life was already weird enough. I was homeless at two months old, and was being raised by a dog that aged at exactly the same rate as I did.
What a coincidence, you might think. You don't fucking say, but I've learned better than to question things without an answer.
Gared and I were, and still are, inseparable. Our bond is stronger than family, stronger than anything that can be described in words. It's been so many years, and we're still together. That's got to mean something, beyond a strange loyalty.
I remember one specific day in particular, from my childhood.
Mainly because it was one of the biggest days of my entire life.
I was walking into my current residence in an alley behind a bar in Little Five Points. Today had been a playoff game for the Hawks, so I had snagged the fifteen wallets that I was currently carrying in my backpack. I doubted those people would even notice their wallets missing until they got home. I stopped and looked around. Gared wasn't here. I shrugged and laid down, losing myself in thought. I knew Gared was close by, and would jump on me any second now as he usually did.
"AH!" shouted a voice inside my head in sync with a big, black ball of fur landing on top of me. I flinched a little bit, but didn't jump or yelp. I was accustomed to this. He started licking my face furiously. No, despite what you might think, he wasn't doing it because he was happy to see me. He was doing it to piss me off.
"Ugh, Gared, get your nasty butt off me!" I yelled. No response except for more licking.
"I got fifteen wallets today!" That made him get off me and sit straight. I walked over to the back of the bar, which I recognized as The Vortex. I knocked on the back door to the kitchen and pulled out 30 bucks. A guy of around 20 years of age opened the door and looked around quickly before seeing me.
"Two bacon cheeseburgers with a Coke and a big bowl of water," I said, slipping the college kid the money.
'Um, sorry kid, but we don't serve under 21." The guy said tentatively.
"Keep the change."
"Deal." I rolled my eyes at the typical response after he closed the door. There was a reason I came through the back, instead of the front, by the guy's reaction you'd think that I asked him for drugs or something illegal. I waited about fifteen minutes before the guy came out with the food.
"Thanks." The guy smiled before going back in. Gared bound out from where he had been hiding, and plopped himself down next to me. I had to admit, the guy had gone a little over the top. We had two double cheeseburgers with extra bacon. I slid one of them over to Gared along with a giant bowl of water. I munched happily on my delicious burger until I sensed it.
I don't know what I sensed, but someone was there. Someone was watching us, and I didn't like that feeling, as rare as it was.
I looked over at Gared. He sensed it too. We mentally agreed to pack up the food and get going, as the atmosphere was beginning to grow uneasy. Just as we were about to run off, two black SUVs with eagle logos pulled up on either side of the alley and men in suits and shades stepped out. An Asian woman who looked to be in her late twenties with a skin-tight black leather suit jumped down from the roof, not something I would have dared to try, and walked up to me. She smiled, although it didn't quite reach her eyes. She was on a mission, and I could understand that. Sympathize, even, if I didn't get the feeling that the mission was me.
"What's your name little guy?" She asked. She was very pretty, although I got the sense that she could potentially be very dangerous, much more dangerous than anyone I saw on a daily basis.
"Percy." I answered.
"Well, I know this sounds weird Percy, but I have to ask you and your dog to come with us." I glared at her. Gared was not my dog. We were equals. Partners in crime. Neither of us were above the other.
"I think I'll have to pass up on that." I was not going down without a fight. She took a step closer to me.
Gared pounced.
She fell on her back before kicking both feet up in the air, straight into Gared's stomach. As she was turned towards him, her attention no longer on me, I grabbed the dagger that was sticking out of her boot and stabbed her in the back of her thigh. She yelled before Gared and I were grabbed by the men in suits and dragged into the SUVs. I managed to get a good few kicks at the men before I was knocked out.
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I woke up in a bright white room. I was alone with the exception of Gared sleeping on the floor next to me, and at this point I don't think he counted anymore. I tried getting up only to find myself tied down. I clenched my jaw in frustration as I remembered what happened. Two people stepped into the room. One was a man in his early thirties who had a short frame that was slightly stocky, but not at all fat. The other was a tall, middle-aged African American man with an eye patch and dark robes that swept behind him as he walked.
"Hello, sir. I am Agent Phil Coulson, and this is Director Nick Fury. We're with an organization called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division," the shorter man said.
"The who to the what to the thing now?" I asked incredulously. The man smiled as if he had done this several times before.
"I understand it can be a mouthful. We go by S.H.I.E.L.D. We deal with extraterrestrial threats." I let it sink in for a bit.
"Seems to me like someone just really wanted it to spell out SHIELD."
Hey guys! This is the first good chapter I've ever written here. Drop what you think in the reviews! I still have not decided the couples, so let me know what you think.
Shout out to rhead_a_holyc, my beta for this story! He/she took this from a "meh" chapter to an awesome one!