Wake Me Up
Disclaimer: I own nothing associated with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Summary: A story about love, family, learning who you are, and second chances. Multi-layered. Coulson mentors a new agent. When he is killed in action, will she be able to accept her new partner and give him the same chance that Coulson gave her? A S.H.I.E.L.D. researcher discovers her family's legacy is more than just the glowing blue cube Howard Stark pulled out of the ocean over seventy years ago. An Iraq war veteran finds a place as a medic with S.H.I.E.L.D., but what secrets is she hiding? A healthy dose of canon and not-so-canon pairings, following the events in the MCU up to and including Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Author's Note: To put it bluntly, I do not like plagiarizers. The original characters who appear in this story are the product of a lot of hard work and research; they belong to me and are not permitted to appear in any other stories without my express written permission.
Chapter One – Spies (I)
"I awake to find no peace of mind
I said, 'How do you live as a fugitive
Down here where I cannot see so clear?'
I said, 'What do I know?
Show me the right way to go.'"
- from "Spies" by Coldplay
August 8, 2001, The Triskelion
Whatever Phil Coulson had expected when he walked into the library to apprehend the hacker responsible for the break-in, this certainly wasn't it. The sullen teenager now in the interrogation room back at headquarters looked like she hadn't seen the inside of a shower or had a decent meal in weeks, let alone as though she was capable of making one of the world's top security systems look obsolete. Which, of course, was exactly what she had done to the chagrin of the entire intelligence division.
"Take care of it," Fury had ordered without bothering to take his eye off the report in his hands. "Make sure that it doesn't happen again."
"She's just a kid," he heard himself saying. "What exactly do you want me to do?"
Fury fixed him with a cold, one-eyed stare that made Coulson feel as though the director was looking right through him. "Did I stutter, Agent Coulson? Do whatever it is that you have to do to protect this organization."
And so Coulson found himself seated across from the girl who eyed him with a mixture of distrust and disdain. He offered her a tired smile. "Hello," he began.
The only response from the girl was the setting of her jaw and the crossing of her arms. Phil studied her for a moment, then cleared his throat. "I'm Agent Phil Coulson with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."
"Don't care," the girl muttered almost nonchalantly, tipping her head back and closing her eyes against the glare from the fluorescent lights.
It was a start. "You should," Phil countered. "We caught you trying to hack into our system. That's a crime."
"Not 'trying,'" the girl corrected him without changing position. "I got in. So throw me in the slammer and be done with it."
"Is that what you want?" Phil asked.
"Does it matter?" she snapped, sitting upright. "Don't act like you give a shit about me."
The sound of the expletive coming from her lips shouldn't have surprised him, but it did – although he was careful not to let it show. "Well, there might be an alternative," he said with a touch of uncertainty. Fury would kill him, but…
A sudden ripple of emotion passed across the girl's features, so quickly that Phil wasn't sure what he had seen. That was the only warning he had before she flew out of her seat and slammed her tightly-balled fists on the table. "Don't. Lie. To. Me!" she ground out through clenched teeth, enunciating each word.
Coulson held up his hands placatingly, unsettled by the sudden outburst. "Easy," he said calmly, feeling anything but. "Sit back down and let's talk things over."
For a moment, it didn't seem like she would comply. Then, slowly, the girl sank back into the chair. Now, more than ever, Phil felt certain of what he had to do. "The way I see it, we have two options. First, we send you to jail. For a long time." The girl settled back into her arms-crossed, jaw-set stance once more, her eyes slightly unfocused, leading Coulson to believe that she had tuned him out again. Jail time clearly was not a threat to her; in fact, it was probably an improvement over her current situation. He glanced at the mirrored glass to where he hoped Fury was watching – but knew fully well that the director wasn't – as though seeking permission before he laid out the second option. "Or you could work for us."
That got everyone's attention, from the girl sitting across from him to everyone who was listening in on their comms. He pulled the earpiece out and set it on the table to silence the hum in his ear as the channel buzzed with the agents' reactions. The girl spared a brief glance for the earwig before she leveled a piercing, Fury-worthy stare at him. "Why would you want me to do that?" she asked and Phil knew that he had her.
"Have you ever heard the saying, 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em'?" Phil replied.
The girl snorted derisively. "Of course I have. I'm not stupid."
"I see it this way," Phil explained. "You go to jail for ten, fifteen years, you get out, and what's to stop you from trying this again? If you work for us, though, you skip jail time and you work on beefing up our security system and defending it against future attacks. Everybody wins."
The girl looked thoughtful, drawing into herself. Phil could almost hear the unspoken dialogue as she weighed her options. "What's the catch?" she said at length.
"You give us the name of the person who hired you to hack us in the first place and sever all ties with him or her...and you repair the damage your virus has done to our systems."
It didn't take long for the girl to agree. "Ian Quinn," she blurted out, suppressing a shudder. "He's a grade-A scumbag."
Coulson filed the name away to check up on later. "Why did you agree to help him then?"
She shrugged. "Desperation," she answered. "Look at me: a guy in a fancy suit comes up and offers me a thousand bucks to plant a virus in some database, I'm not going to say no. I've spent enough time on the streets to be sick and tired of it."
Coulson didn't have the heart to tell her that the sum she'd been offered was cheap for those kinds of services or that it wouldn't go very far in D.C. "How does someone like you acquire that particular skill set?" he pressed.
Another shrug. "I've always been good with computers." The unspoken words 'And I haven't always been on the streets' hung in the air.
That seemed to be the extent of the explanation. Coulson stood and replaced the comm in his ear. "If that's all, then I'll go and get your intake paperwork. Do you have anyone that you'd like to notify? Anyone who might worry about you not coming home?"
The girl gestured to herself, one eyebrow cocked in apparent amusement. "Do I look like I have a home to go to? Or anyone that cares whether I come back or not?"
"No, I guess not," Phil answered with a patient smile. "Well, how about your name, then?"
"Robyn Hoode," the girl said without missing a beat, grinning from ear to ear. "My parents had a sense of humor. That's Robyn with a 'y' and Hoode with an 'e'."
Phil couldn't help but chuckle. "I'll be back soon with the paperwork, Robyn. Try not to get into too much trouble," he cautioned in mock severity. When that failed to elicit a reply other than the twisting of her mouth into a resentful pout, he turned and exited the interrogation room.
Once outside, he paged one of the agents who specialized in tracking people down. "Thompson, get me everything you've got on Ian Quinn...and Robyn Hoode."
There was a bark of laughter on the other end of the link. "You're joking about the second one, right?"
"That's Robyn with a 'y' and Hoode with an 'e'," Phil repeated. "I want to know her real name and what she's doing here."
"Quinn will be easy," Thompson answered. "I'll see what I can get you on the girl but I'm not making any promises."
"Thanks, Aaron," Phil said. "I'll let you know when I'm on my way down." He reached up and switched the comm off before the other agent could reply, then ducked into Fury's office.
The director was waiting for him, his face unreadable. He cocked an eyebrow as Coulson entered the room; the agent remained standing across from him. "That wasn't exactly what I had in mind, Agent Coulson," he began without preamble. "She's a little young to be an agent."
"She'll grow into the role," Coulson argued. "Jail would keep her off the streets for a while, but then she'll just do the same thing again once she's released. The only other reasonable alternative to neutralize the threat she poses was to offer her a position. You told me to do what I had to do, so I did."
Fury sighed. "You don't know anything about her; what if she's working for this Quinn guy and reporting back to him? Then you've just offered the most dangerous threat this organization has seen a golden ticket to take us down."
"No. Her reaction was genuine; she doesn't like him," Phil said, sensing how much it irked the director to admit that one of their most severe security threats was a homeless teenager.
"She doesn't have to like him to report back to or take orders from him. What if he's blackmailing her?" Fury shot back.
Coulson hadn't considered that before but he still shook his head. "No," he repeated. "She won't have anything to do with him. I consider myself to be a decent judge of character and I think she's a good person at heart, she's just up against some bad circumstances."
Fury leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingertips together. "You'd better hope that you're right. She's your responsibility now, Agent Coulson. If she turns out to be more of a liability than an asset, you'll both be out of a job."
"Sir." Coulson nodded sharply. He didn't trust himself to say anything else. The director was right; the girl in interrogation had the potential to be one of their best agents - or to destroy S.H.I.E.L.D. from the inside out. It felt like he'd just taken a coin and tossed it into the air and he hoped that it would land right-side up.
She hadn't counted on getting caught. Of course, she mused glumly as she studied her reflection in the mirror opposite, criminals rarely did. Her face flushed with shame. 'Is that really what I am?' she asked herself.
'Yes yes yes,' her mind chanted in a twisted refrain, 'yes yes yes. You've been a bad girl. You've been a very bad girl...'
The cuffs chafed at her wrists as she reached up to scratch an itch behind her ear. 'I did those things to get away from people like you,' she told the voice. 'I am not a bad person.'
'Whatever helps you sleep at night,' said the voice, sounding smug. 'Bad blood will out. You're worthless. Like your parents.'
The girl looked up as the door opened and the same agent from before entered, this time looking less than thrilled. "So, it's not okay for me to lie to you, but you can lie to me?" he said sharply, tossing a file onto the table. He flipped it open and she found herself looking at an old school photo. "Your name isn't Robyn Hoode. It's Rachael Donnelly."
She pushed the file away. "So?"
Coulson sat down across from her again with a huff of frustration. "This is only going to work if you're honest with me."
The girl scrubbed her eyes and shook her head quickly, as though trying to clear her thoughts. "Don't talk like that. Please," she added hastily. "I'm sorry."
Phil stared at the girl for a long time, puzzled by the strange request and sudden change in her attitude. "Is something wrong?" he ventured hesitantly.
Some of the tension seeped out of Rachael's shoulders. "No. I'm fine," she said.
"Are you sure?" Phil pressed, still disconcerted.
"Yeah. I'm fine," she repeated.
"O...kay," Phil said hesitantly, drawing the word out. "You want to tell me what just happened?"
Rachael shook her head and pressed her lips together. "It's fine now. Nothing you need to worry about. It just something that…happens," she finished lamely.
If anything, her answer only made Coulson more uncomfortable and he began to wonder if he'd made the right call in inviting this girl to join S.H.I.E.L.D. He thought he'd gleaned enough information Thompson's initial findings to get a good read on her but now he was glad he'd asked Thompson to dig deeper. He wasn't so sure that she didn't belong in a psych ward. "So, you're a long way from home," he made himself say in as neutral a tone as he could muster.
Rachael seemed to shrink into herself. "I didn't like it there. I thought I'd be better off on my own."
Phil raised an eyebrow. "You went through eleven different foster and group homes in seven years…," he began.
"Yeah, I'm not exactly the perfect child," Rachael snapped. "So sue me. I get it; you want to show me what a big, bad tough guy you are so you're trying to dig up all this dirt on me."
"We just want to know what we're getting ourselves into," Coulson said, trying to appease the disgruntled teenager. He paused, then corrected himself. "I just want to know what I'm getting myself into."
That got Rachael's attention. "What do you mean?"
Coulson shuffled through a couple of the papers. "You're sixteen, according to your file; still a minor. You need a legal guardian until you come of age. My boss tells me that I got myself into this mess, so I have to see it through. Which means that we're stuck with each other and it's up to me to prove him wrong and turn you into the best damn agent this organization has seen."
Rachael looked horrified. "I'm stuck with you?" she spluttered.
Coulson sighed. "Don't sound so excited. I'm as thrilled about this as you are. But the choice is you either go to jail or you work with me."
"Why can't you people just leave me alone?" Rachael groaned, burying her head in her arms and sounding less like a streetwise tough kid and more like a lost little girl. "I'm better off on my own than anywhere I've been placed. I know what's best for me."
The sudden shift in her demeanor made Phil's heart ache in sympathy. He reached across the table and grasped Rachael's hand. Startled, she looked up and made as if to pull away but he held her tightly. "Hey," he said quietly. "We're in this together. I wouldn't have stuck my neck out for you if I didn't think you'd be able to help us and I'm not going to let you off that easy, okay?"
Rachael snatched her hand away and eyed him warily. "Why?" she asked and it seemed like the whole of her existence had been compressed into that three-letter word so that she wasn't just asking why he wasn't going to let her walk away but why he'd taken this chance on her, why she'd even ended up here in the first place, why anything that had happened to her in her still-shrouded past had happened at all.
Phil took a deep breath, fully aware that what he was about to say could backfire horribly and he could be left with a hormonal, moody mess to clean up. "I don't know," he replied. "I don't know but we're going to figure it out, okay?"
To his surprise, Rachael closed her hand around his. "Okay," she agreed, her voice trembling.
With a smile, Coulson gave her hand a squeeze. "Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Donnelly."
New York City, the following day
The heat was oppressive, settling over everything like a blanket, but it was the humidity that made her squirm as droplets of sweat threaded their way down her back. A slight breeze stirred the wide brim of the hat she was wearing - her mother had insisted upon the stupid, floppy thing - and she let out a quiet huff of irritation as she reached up to steady the offending accessory. Briefly she wondered how much longer they were going to stand out here so that the droves of people - some of whom she suspected hadn't even really known her father - could extend their condolences, then forced herself to smile sadly as another stranger approached them. The man, dressed in black from head to toe, had a patch over one eye. He held out a hand for her to shake. "Miss Williams, your father was a good friend of mine," he said. "A very brilliant scientist. I'm very sorry for you loss."
She was dimly aware of her older brother shifting closer as she took the man's hand. "Thank you," she replied automatically. "It was rather...unexpected."
The man nodded. "Indeed," he agreed. His other hand produced a business card from inside his coat. "If there's ever anything you or your family needs, don't hesitate to contact me."
She took the card and pocketed it without bothering to glance at the name. "Thank you," she said again.
The man looked thoughtful for a moment before speaking up once more. "Do you happen to know what your father was working on before he died?"
The question was odd and, despite the heat, she felt goosebumps start to prickle across her flesh. "No, I'm afraid I don't," she answered.
The man gave her an enigmatic smile. "Pity. It'd be a shame to see all of his hard work go to waste." Just as suddenly, his demeanor switched again. "Remember, anything you need, Miss Williams - we're just a phone call away."
Before she could say anything in reply, he stepped away and was lost in the crowd.