Susie had been twelve when her mother died. Orla Violet Vasquez had a severely debilitating disease – that Susie still wouldn't understand even as an adult – that caused her to use a wheelchair since Susie was three. When Orla started having seizures in her chair, it was Susie who called the ambulance, but Orla was dead long before they arrived.
Jeremiah Danvers was her new guardian, after that. It took a month before he was allowed to take her home and in that time, Susie had to live in a foster-home with lots of other children who stole her things and laughed when she cried herself to sleep. Jeremiah was kind and neither he nor his wife, Eliza, were afraid to wrap her up in giant hugs when she was upset. They even home-schooled her for three months so she could get a grip on life without her mother and living in a new house – with a new sister, too.
Alex was a six year old, surf-boarding menace. She still is a surf-boarding menace. Six year-olds are their own kind of person though and when Susie came to live in the Danvers household, Alex was quick to accept her into the fold and attach herself to her new sister like a limpet as she began to find herself. Susie learnt how to surf because of Alex – though she's 'really, really rubbish' at it.
Susie isn't afraid to call Alex her sister. She isn't afraid to call Jeremiah her dad, either – she never had a dad and Jeremiah knows that. He felt honoured to be her dad.
Calling Eliza 'mom' is a lot scarier, however.
"Why don't you just call her mom?" Alex asks her when she's just turned seven and Susie's still twelve, nearly thirteen.
"Because I have a mom."
"Ms Orla isn't here anymore, Susie – and you can have more than one mom. My friend, Lauren, has four dads and one mom who she doesn't see."
Susie flinches, "That's a lot of dads."
Thinking on Alex's words makes it hard to think sometimes. It plagues her for weeks. Finally, she brings up the courage to have a proper conversation with Eliza about it, after dinner – which of course is completely sabotaged by Susie herself when she says 'thanks mom', for passing the container of rice. Subsequently, Susie excuses herself from the table and hides under her covers for half an hour, until Eliza can come up and talk to her, hand resting on her head over her duvet in a comforting manner.
"You don't have to call me mom if you don't want to. If you do, that's fine. I'm not trying to replace your biological mom."
"I know," Susie sniffs. "I was- I was going to talk to- talk to you later."
"Well, we're talking now."
"You're a good mom."
"Thank-you."
Susie pushes her covers down, hugging Eliza tightly. "Do you want to call me mom?"
"Yes."
"Then you can call me mom. I don't mind if you want to call me Eliza, too."
"Okay," Susie sniffs again, head burrowing into Eliza's shirt.
"Okay."
Alex takes to it happily, grinning every time she hears Susie call Eliza 'mom' for months. Susie rolls her eyes eventually, rather than blushing. Susie's friends are supportive too and Leah gives her a big hug when they're alone in Susie's room, afterwards.
"I know it's a big deal. I'm really happy for you."
As Susie gets older, more thinks click into place – like her adoption. Just after she turns thirteen, she broaches the subject with Eliza, who brings in Jeremiah. Alex, eventually, gets asked too and once they all agree it's the right thing to do, they start the paperwork. Susie officially becomes a Danvers on the first of March, nineteen ninety-eight – and less than six months later, two weeks after Susie's fourteenth birthday, Winn comes to live with them.
Winn is a year older than Alex – nine to her eight – and five years younger that Susie rather than six. For a ten year old, he acts remarkably younger and Susie isn't very sure around him, despite how he's more her brother than Alex is, by blood.
"You have the same father," Jeremiah tells her a week after Winn arrives, when Susie is at her most confused. "Winslow Schott Senior married Winn's mother a year after you were born. He was in a relationship with her for five years prior to your birth."
"Oh," Susie's eyes had widened. "I'm a…proper bastard then. Like, a proper born out of a wedlock affair bastard."
Jeremiah sighed, then motioned out of the door. "Winn's your half-brother by blood, is what I'm saying and because you're one of his most stable relatives, his maternal aunts being unsuitable guardians, we agreed to take him in. He'd go to foster-care, otherwise."
"Like I would have," Susie thinks she's taking it considerably well. "It's okay. I- I don't mind him being here, though I know Alex has been complaining about how he cries." Her stomach drops at that though, like it had originally. Everyone in the foster-home laughed when I cried. I have to get Alex to stop.
"I'll talk to Alex," Jeremiah promises. "So are you okay about Winn?"
"Yeah, yeah, I mean, I have to be, right? He's my brother, I've- I'm going to look out for him."
Jeremiah's lip quirks slightly, before he wraps an arm around Susie's shoulder. "You're a good girl, Su."
"Thanks, Dad."
Susie looks out for Winn, after that. She checks his school-bag to make sure he has his lunchbox and his pencil-case – when he goes back to school, after being home-schooled for a few months like she was – and prods him to remember to put his laundry in the laundry basket. Eventually, she starts to mess up his hair in the morning, Alex copying her and usually instigating a mini-war in the morning where they mess up each other's hair. Susie gets used to brushing her hair again in the car to school – at least until she cuts it, then she doesn't usually bother. Leah gets bugged enough by it to run Susie's hair through with a brush as they sit in registration together.
"Susie?" Winn starts one day after being told to stop playing PlayStation on the main TV.
"Yeah, bro?"
"We're brother and sister…"
"Yes…"
"But you're adopted by mom and dad…" Winn frowns, "So are you really, anymore?"
Susie's taken aback by his words. "Winn, I'm never not going to be your sister. Alex won't either."
"Yeah, I know, just forget about it." Winn gets up off the floor, running away upstairs, Susie watching him go in confusion.
"Winn?" Eliza pokes her head around the living room archway, from the kitchen, looking at the stairs. "What happened?"
"He was going on about how the adoption affected how we're siblings."
Eliza gets a strange look on her face, then, one that Susie eventually will label as the 'I'm going to adopt this child' face.
Going to college later is fun, though she doesn't appreciate the two hour drive all the way to National City every day, six days a week, both going to the university and her work. She takes extra courses and works hard, almost burning out a couple of times before Alex and Winn team up. They basically press-gang her into quitting her work, which is not okay, but does take a load off her and because of Eliza and Jeremiah's lab jobs, they have enough money to pay for her college tuition six times over. Having no job isn't a burden on them.
However, when she's two years into her IT course, just barely twenty, she gets called in to a private room in NCU. Inside are dark suits in sunglasses that make Susie both scared and excited.
"Ms Danvers," the Head Suit starts, uncrossing his hands and taking off his sunglasses. In the future, when Susie goes to meet her soulmate's father, she'll morbidly wonder if her boss is pretending not to know who she is before J'onn reveals that he's a shapeshifter, borrowing a form from a random child on the other side of town, growing up close but far away, making sure he has a form to copy in adulthood. "I'm here to offer you a job."
"What kind of job?"
"One connected to the government. We get funding from the military and you won't know what exactly your job is until you've finished training. You've shown aptitude in your studies so far and we'd like to take advantage of that, using what you have right now and building on it. We'll school you, free of charge and if you're kicked from training or drop out, we'll pay for the years you have to catch up on upon returning to NCU or another university of your choice that you can feasibly apply for."
Susie, at this offer, in another universe might ask more on the price, on her future wages should she get through training and accommodation. But Susie, in this universe, thinks guiltily of living off her parents when she has the ability to get a job and support herself, unlike so many of her peers – and she accepts, only getting to those questions another Susie would have asked later, when she's going through her contract and multiple NDA's with the Danvers lawyer.
Her training lasts eight months, not including the six month physical and two month holiday – in which she meets E'hlan, her soulmate and love of her life. When she finally passes her training, it's to the terrible conclusion that she works for the Department of Extranormal Operations, specialising in the takedown and imprisonment of alien lifeforms.
Like E'hlan.
Like E'hlan and her father, who are on Hank Henshaw's hit list.
Susie doesn't know how to process her job for a while and it's seemingly endless lack of limitation. Hank Henshaw is a beast who despises aliens and thinks they are everything wrong with planet earth. Literally no-one else in the DEO is as full of shit as Hank Henshaw is.
Susie makes it her personal mission to stop him. She aims to work her way up the ranks, to be his right hand woman. By two thousand and nine, twenty-five years old and practically living a double life, Susie is that right-hand woman. Hank Henshaw claps her on the back and takes her aside the day she kills her first alien in a strange, horrible chance of fate.
"You've proven your loyalty, Danvers."
"She got what she deserved," Susie mutters, looking at her feet, only looking up when Hank lifts her chin, forcing her to look at him, look at the face she associates with two entirely different men.
"It. It got what it deserved, Danvers."
"It got what it deserved," Susie repeats, using the disgust she feels for him in her favour, pretending it's aimed at the now-dead Phorian. Later, she throws up in her bathroom sink.
Henshaw reveals more to her after that. Personal things – like how his father would make him run up and down the street when he misbehaved and how his mother's steak is the best in the world, according to him at least. Susie learns a lot of things. She also goes off steak and doesn't tell her boss she's a vegetarian when he invites her out to dinner with Jim Harper, his friend from the military.
"This is Danvers, Agent Susan Danvers. Recruited her myself. Practically my protégé," Henshaw boasts, before ordering her a medium rare steak with special sauce that she forces down. That night, Susie discovers yet another set of despicable personality traits belonging to Hank Henshaw and vows then and there to murder him. Slowly.
"Now the president, well, she's a proper wonder," Harper rolls his eyes. "It's unbelievable how she got into office."
"I know," Henshaw sneers, "If she weren't a lesbian, I'd say she'd slept her way up the ranks."
"She probably did anyway," Harper snorts as Susie cuts her steak sharply, scraping across the plate. "Careful there, agent – not used to steak knives, are you?"
"No, sir. My adoptive father is part Japanese and he doesn't care for them – we didn't use them often."
Henshaw grunts, "Weird family tree, Jeremiah Danvers. Japanese, Welsh, Irish and French Canadian – if he weren't so mixed, I'd hire him. One of the best unknown scientists in the country."
"Such a shame," Harper shakes his head.
I'm going to kill him very, very slowly, Susie vows, before finishing her steak.
"We need to talk," she approaches her mother soon after. Explaining what she's been doing over the last few years reduces Eliza to tears. Twice. But her description of Hank Henshaw converts Eliza to her Henshaw-despising religion long before she finally gets to the reason she's telling Eliza in the first place.
"You're a renowned scientist and frankly, mom, I'm terrible at science." Susie breathes in deep before locking eyes with her mother. "Mom. I need you to help me murder him."
Henshaw is dead before the start of two thousand and eleven.