bloody and sacred truth and lie: the story (history)
Herc asks Erskine, "Where are you from?"
"Queens. And you?"
Herc laughs, a little. "I'm just a kid from Brooklyn."
...
How does an English spy become the director of a major covert American agency?
For years, the answer is, (in varying degrees of crudeness) "Sleep with Captain America," but the joke goes out of style in the mid-seventies as the jokesters either retire or die off and Peggy Carter reigns on.
Stacker Pentecost isn't known to have a sense of humor (that responsibility goes to his 2IC), so when he receives the appointment in 2001 the Question goes colder than Herc Hansen's long-lost bones. Rookie agents come across it in old interviews, in transcripts of older interrogations, and the rumor goes that anyone who asks if it was true disappears, never to be heard from again. No one asks.
In 2014, three years after Herc dethaws, at a very well-heeled, very well-attended conference gala, Mako Mori asks the Question; two of the junior agents assigned as her handlers leave suddenly for the washroom and a third steps outside to vomit into a potted plant.
In a perfect English deadpan, Director Pentecost answers, "Fuck Captain America, of bloody course," and to his left Herc Hansen bends nearly double for laughing, because for all the jokes and rumors it took nearly seventy years to make it true.
...
What do you call it when three trillionaires, an American icon, an alien, a spy, a sharpshooter and a monster walk into a shawarma restaurant?
A punch line.
Get it?
...
Mako dreams about swords sometimes.
She dreams about forges and folding steel, and of large patient spark-scarred hands wrapping around her own small ones to show her how to hold a bokken.
(They're very specific, these dreams.)
She dreams about a small house in the country and wet winters and beautiful kimono and her mother's grace and a sand garden, but mostly she dreams about swords (and scraping out a bit of the shakudō and the ivory inlay from one of the tsuba-maker's carefully-carved sakura petals, where the seppa would cover it, to place one of her baby teeth instead, you won't tell Ogumi-san will you Mako?) and the warm subtle smell of choji oil.
She thinks sometimes that maybe they're memories, that maybe her father was a swordmaker.
But if her name truly is Mori then they can't be so, another confabulation from her decade(s, you are twenty-two years old, Miss Mori) in the Red Room. The records tell her there was a family of swordmakers named Mori; they lived on Tanegashima until the last of them was sent to Manchukuo to make swords for a number of officers in the Kwantung Army.
Mori Masao died with his family in the Soviet offensive on Harbin in 1945.
It is just a coincidence.
...
Some kids dream about growing up and running away to the circus.
Raleigh grows up dreaming about running away to real life.
It's not all bad, being a kid with a few hearing problems; le cirque picks up the bill for the hearing aids after a few years and the nice part about having an international childhood is no one cares about his English and girls appreciate flexibility and his mastery of tongues.
But then his mother gets cancer and his father bolts and it doesn't really matter anymore how Yancy's good at everything, not even he can take a five person act and make it work with the three of them, so they learn to do other things. Raleigh takes tone-deaf to unprecedented heights, but Jazmine can sing, thank god, so she shuffles off to the arts side while her brothers learn how to succeed in the fine art of falling. (And showmanship, and pantomime. But mostly falling, gracefully, without appearing graceful at all.)
Around the time Raleigh turns eighteen, though, management realizes the brothers Becket could do more for publicity without the thick layer of Mehron white, and as it turns out they're very creative and they have very good aim with blade and arrow.
Very good.
Not good enough.
...
They all have nightmares after New York.
(They all had nightmares anyway, but they joke about liking a little variety now and then.)
The Weis don't talk about Afghanistan.
It's the first and last line in the press kits, and thanks to LIU's diligence in purging the online records, after the first six months no one in the media can name which one has the arc reactor embedded in his chest. (It's Jin, for the record.)
They dress to conceal Hu's burn scars, they change their gaits to accommodate Cheung's prosthetic legs, and then revolutionize prosthetics by designing nerve-responsive muscles and ligaments from optical fibers and recycled plastic, and better synthetic skin that looks close to the real thing and provides almost perfect haptic feedback. They resume jogging in their favorite brand of hideous designer gym shorts; Hu and Jin both find themselves a little envious of Cheung's dead-lifting capacity, thanks to his new titanium alloy knees. They decide to take up ballroom dancing and are beyond insulted when Dancing With the Stars snubs their inquiries.
They wear sunglasses everywhere until they find an acceptably functional replacement for Jin's lost right eye, and create a micro-holoprojector good enough to fool any camera to conceal the way his new eye doesn't look anything like the old one. (They could have modified it to look more natural but when they're just hanging around the house in California or Wei Tower he turns off the holoprojector because it looks so cool.
You're just jealous.
Fuck your robot heart and your cybernetic eye, you're not that great.
Both of you shut up before I plant my cyborg feet in both your dumb asses.)
...
On the upside of things, Sasha moves into Wei Tower after the Battle of New York.
Her giant green problem aside, she's a model roomie. They all graduated from the same MIT class with Lightcap and Rhodes and D'onofrio and sometimes they host spontaneous reunions to Do Science (and not each other, to Hu's unending disappointment.)
She notifies them in advance before she takes the extended research trip to London, (and who did give her the grant funds, the donor was anonymous but the miserable melodramatic way Jin and Cheung cling to her arms and propose marriage to attempt to get her to stay does indicate it's likely not the Weis, they're terrible actors all) and she leaves instructions not to kill (that includes smoking them, assholes) her plants.
When her passport clears every check at the Frankfurt airport, she buys a ticket on a whim and detours to visit her parents in Odesa for the first time in years. She checks in at the Bristol Hotel with the black Visa card the Weis gave her for 'emergencies, science, boredom... anything, fine, JUST TAKE IT,' and under a security camera, she signs thank you LIU as inconspicuously as possible before going out: she takes tea with her mother at their favorite shop, catches a short-notice performance at the Philharmonic Society with her father, and buys a truly astonishing amount of Belochka pralines and cherry cordial candies. In her hotel room, she eats them all, and it's the best vacation she's had in years.
It isn't until she touches down in London that she wishes belatedly that she could have shared her home city with Aleksis. The regret is short-lived, because he reappears in her life just after her jaunt through the factory and that strange otherplace. She wants to slap him and fuck him senseless, these things not being mutually exclusive, and she's just deciding which to do first when he takes her to his home city instead.
Regretfully, the Asgardians can't separate her from the Hulk, but there are other consolations. Sif teaches her how to braid her hair in the traditional manner of the shieldmaidens, she gets to smack Loki properly, as herself, she takes tea with Freya, and when the dark elves come...
All the Nine Realms come to respect Prince Aleksandr's monstrous bride.
...
Two Russian super soldiers and a circus performer walk into a bar.
This isn't the story you think it is.
(If it was, there would be a punch line.)
...
"I'm just a kid from Brooklyn," Herc Hansen says. It's a joke, it's funny, because he's forty-one years old and late of Sydney, Australia: he looks every one of his years and sounds every bit like home. Herc is hilarious. He has to be, or he never would have made it otherwise.
Consider Herc Hansen, the man, and see in his pallor and his ever-so-slightly whistling breaths the echoes of the infant his parents name Hercules because they think giving him a strong name can compel him to live. See in his gait and rounded-over posture the boy who cringes unheroically through his adolescence because children are cruel and his working class parents can't buy him a spot among his betters. See also, though, the young man who reads, who studies, who's good with figures if not words, who works in shops and back offices and falls arse over tin cups in love with Angela MacDowell, she of the bright eyes and brilliant temper and moneyed family, and cannot fathom in any universe why she loves him back but marries her anyway.
It's Angela's family, rich from the wool trade (uniforms in the last war and now the new one), that supports them the first few years as the war bears down and everyone goes a bit leaner. They resent their daughter's choice for his frailty but Angela is an only child, much indulged, and they cherish the son she gives Herc. They name him Charles for her father, and Chas burns bright and hale and well, flush with both their strengths and none of Herc's weaknesses. (Herc daily thanks the god he never really believed in before for that particular mercy.)
And then Herc's employer closes shop in the back end of '34. Angela dies half a year later, takes to bed on a chilly winter's night with a headache, comes to wincing from the sunlight in the morning, and a few hours later falls into fevered confusion and shortly thereafter sleep from which she never wakes. Her parents blame Herc (it should have been you—a fact with which he doesn't disagree), and between their rejection and the pride Angela taught him and the derision in the susso line, like all those other blokes aren't there for the same damn reason, Herc gambles, sees the shot and takes it and takes himself and Chas to America in January of '36. Angela's mum was a proper New York socialite before her marriage; Herc banks on a few lightly-altered documents and America's odd immigration rules and just like that his boy's an American citizen.
And American citizens are subject to the Draft.
At Camp Lehigh, Herc is twice the age of the most of the other recruits, a full head or more shorter, and Colonel Phillips thinks his name is the greatest joke ever.
He throws himself on the grenade thinking, you shits had best do the same for my boy or so help me god.
...
The 107th?
"And who are you supposed to be?"
Herc's not in the mood to put on the accent the hoity-toity language professor drilled into him, so when he says, "I'm Captain bloody fuckin' America," he says it full unapologetic Oz.
"I beg your pardon?" says the pommie.
On the ground, the big guy in the bowler says, "What, are we taking everybody?" like they aren't all there for the same goddamn reason, and Herc's pretty well done.
"Oi," Herc snaps, "show some respect."
"I'm from Fresno, ace," the other guy says, but Herc's already moving on, scanning every face, hoping against hope, jesus, jesus, please please please.
"Is there anybody else?" Herc says, prays. "I'm looking for Sergeant Charles Hansen, Chuck, has anybody—"
"Mouthy Aussie bastard, yeah," Bowler Hat says, then actually looks at Herc and snaps his gob shut. Herc feels the old reflex to open his mouth and apologize for his kid and doesn't, jesus just let him be alive.
Pommie tells Herc about the isolation ward no one's come back from, and Herc goes to fetch his boy.
A year later Chuck says, "What took you so long, old man?"
"You had 'im on the ropes, didn't you?"
Chuck half-grins and then—
...
Who the hell is Chuck?
...
Raleigh brings Mako into S.H.I.E.L.D.
She takes him down, puts him on the factory floor in Prague, right thumb pressing into the pressure point inside his clavicle, left hand pressing the knife to his carotid artery. He's looking at her, unblinking, and in the dusty light his eyes look green, the dossier said blue but—he inhales through his nose and tilts his head back to give her his throat. His skin opens to the blade and she doesn't press down, Red Room programming warring against her assignment, if you have the sh—as an operative of the red room . . .
Her objective is—
Raleigh Becket cannot be allowed to live. Coordinate with other operatives in the field. Exchange information as needed, confirm your code word.
He looks at her and Mako looks at him and she does not see Raleigh Becket. There is a gap in her memories, a white hole, a redaction. Someone has been edited out.
Wipe them. Start over.
He has a habit of deviating from standard combat techniques. He takes risks that injure himself and his partners. (His current partner is dead in the next room.) S.H.I.E.L.D. is currently reevaluating his suitability as an active field agent pending his ret—
Take the shot!
She drops the knife.
Raleigh brings Mako into S.H.I.E.L.D. You have to trust them.
...
He asks her, "Do you know what it's like to be unmade?"
"You know that I do."
...
Why do we fold the jewel steel, Mako?
To make it strong, 'tousan.
(You are the strongest candidate the Red Room has seen by far.)
Yes, but also to take out any remaining impurities from the tamahagane, to burn away the weak points so the only steel left is the sword itself. Do you se—
This fire doesn't belong to her father's forge. The smoke smells wrong. Outside, her mother screams.
(The Red Room has made you strong, Miss Mori. But remember—)
There would be no point to folding this one again, it is finished: there is nothing left to take away now, nothing to gain from it. Better now to start a new—
(—your strength is nothing to the Red Room. You were made once, but you can be unmade and discarded, or made again. If you break, it is of no consequence to the Red Room. There will always be others.)
Beyond the door, she hears shouting in a language she doesn't know. Mako, my girl, we made terrible things here, to fight other terrible things. I am so sorry. But remember—
(Are you frightened? You should be frightened.)
—you are the strongest thing I have ever made. Look at me, Mako! Listen: don't be afraid, your heart is made of the jewel steel, anything that happens, anything that hurts you, it only hurts because it is burning away the weak parts, you will fold and bend but you will be strong, they can't break you, I promise.
In the Red Room, she watches tempered steel break. When they ask her why she flinches, she doesn't know.
...
The one person Herc Hansen trusts unreservedly in his new life is Stacker Pentecost. The man keeps secrets, but they sleep in the open, occupying an invisible hanging space over the coffee table, or sometimes nestling in between the fluffy white towels in the linen closet: Stacker's Secrets make close friends with The Things Herc Doesn't Want to Talk About. They maneuver around those things by talking about other things, or sometimes by falling into bed without talking at all. (They talk about that by talking around it, discussing what's changed and what hasn't since the War. There's been some progress, but Herc all too frequently finds himself disappointed by humanity.)
They don't talk about the potentially hundreds of reasons why sharing a bed is a conflict of interest, because doing that would mean both putting a name to what they're doing and filing Herc in context with the modern world and Stacker, thank god, has enough interpersonal skills to understand why Herc would want to do neither. Also, so long as Herc continues to be a man out of time, he lives outside S.H.I.E.L.D.'s chain of command and thus remains free to operate within or without as he chooses.
And he doesn't have to pay income taxes on the decades of back pay that appeared in his bank account nearly overnight. (The Weis say they hate him but he knows he has their grandfather to thank for the original account never closing. Howard Chou Wei, you infinite optimistic arsehole.)
Practically speaking, it means that Herc could, in theory, buy a puppy for every child in Brooklyn and feed it for a year. He could buy a puppy for every agent in S.H.I.E.L.D., who might as well all be children for how old they make him feel. He does buy a puppy, but only one: a squat roly-poly American Bulldog, purebred, and hands over his debit card because he can't imagine drafting a check for that kind of money. He names it Max. Chuck always wanted a dog named Max.
Stacker hates the puppy. Mako, when she visits, adores the puppy, and usually threatens to steal him in a full fleet of languages, only some of which Herc can recognize. The Weis visit once, and Max pisses on Hu's shoes—ahh shit, sorry 'bout that Jin—(he allows them to think their shell game works and he can't tell them apart, but one of these days...) He makes a friend out on his morning walks with Max, a nice young black woman named Lu (short for Luna-like-the-moon, yeah, I know, right?), a vet back home from war herself. He starts to settle, to find his footing again.
And then a sniper manages a kill shot right through his goddamn brick wall.
...
In the Red Room, there are certain rules.
An operative of the Red Room does not question her orders. (Operatives of the Red Room do not ask questions beyond defining non-standard operational parameters. Other questions are not permitted.)
An operative of the Red Room does not bleed. (Operatives of the Red Room do not leave behind traces. If engaged by hostile combatants, the hostile combatants must be rendered inoperative by the operative. If injured in engagement with hostile combatants, the operative must not be seen to bleed. The operative's failure to comply results in corrective action.)
An operative of the Red Room does not commence operations until an extraction plan has been established. (If the operation does not succeed, the operative self-terminates. If the operative is not successfully removed from the site of operations, the operative self-terminates. If the operative is c—)
You have to trust him.
Raleigh brings Mako in, but it's Stacker Pentecost who sits on the other side of the interrogation table and asks her, "Do you have any questions before we get started?"
She takes Raleigh to bed, permits him to run his mouth over her entire body, press his tongue to every scar, and it is still four years before she allows him to see her bleed.
Their first joint operation occurs eight months after Raleigh brings Mako into S.H.I.E.L.D. They drop in Budapest, and under heavy fire Raleigh sets down his bow and crosses the plaza to her location, where she fires at hostiles with the pistol in her right hand and tries not to pull the trigger of the gun in her left, because the muzzle of the pistol is pressed into the soft underside of her jaw and she can't lower her hand. Raleigh drops without extraction plans; she thought she had broken her programming and now she's going to kill them both because in the event of unsuccessful operations the operatives are to self-terminate and she can't lower the gun.
Mako, stay with me, stay in the now. I've got you, put th—
The operation succeeds. A week later she claims to have no memory of the incident.
In the future, Becket and Mori drop into joint operations without extraction plans. She trusts him with her body, and to keep her alive, and those secrets he discovers she lets him keep, but.
Raleigh brings Mako into S.H.I.E.L.D. It's Stacker Pentecost who becomes her fixed point when he asks her if she has any questions.
...
"Who the hell is Chuck?"
...
An hour later Herc's standing with Mako, Lu and Tamsin Sevier, staring down a still-very-much-alive Stacker Pentecost who will not look at him.
"I wasn't sure who to trust," Stacker says, and only then does Herc realize he won't look at Mako either.
Herc lays it all down, and when Stacker says he didn't know about Chuck Herc says, "Would you have told me if you did? That's my son out there, Stacker, my son."
Herc says, "It all goes." He means it.
Stacker considers the room of solemn faces around him at last. Tamsin leans back in her chair and says, "He's not wrong."
Mako stays silent. Lu holds her hands up in a pacifying way. "Don't look at me."
Stacker sighs. "Luna Florence Pentecost, what in the titsy hell are you even doing here?"
Lu rolls her eyes skyward, and in the brassiest, ballsiest inner-London accent Herc has ever heard, she says, "I dunno Stacks, what're you doing here? Last I heard you were s'posed to be real damn dead, bruv."
Captain America (erstwhile Australian), has a very surreal moment wherein he realizes that they are out to save America and not a single one of them in the room was born within her borders. Also, his entire life is a cyclical series of jokes and lies and the same losses over and over again. Chuck is alive.
Six years ago by Herc's time, seventy-three by everyone else's, he promised himself and his dead wife that he'd die for their boy, and he finds himself still very comfortable with the idea.
...
"He might not give you a choice," Lu says. "He doesn't know you."
Herc leans into the railing and looks out over the dried-up culverts. "He's my son." He doesn't say he's not planning on coming away from this alive, but Lu's posture shifts and she leans in next to him. When she speaks again, her accent sits somewhere between the American one he knows and the one she used with Stacker.
"For what it's worth, I never lied to you," Lu says. "I coulda, Stacks left me safe 'n sound with MI6 and that sort of thing sticks. You'd never've known."
"You're not making a convincing case here, Luna." He draws the second syllable out halfway to forever, to annoy and goad. (A dead man walking is still an Australian.)
Lu pulls a face. "Nice, Hercules. But it's like... Stacks throws a long shadow, 'n me, I'm Icarus, I wanted to fly. The moon wants to see the sun sometimes." She shrugs. "You can believe me or not, I don't need you to trust me to do my part, but to me? You were just a cute ginger with a puppy 'til you said your name."
Goddamn Pentecosts. The way she says it, just like that Herc believes her, and his mouth quirks up in spite of his every impulse.
"Is that so?"
Lu grins, and in her face then he sees the echoes of Stacker too. She straightens, and sidles backwards across the causeway. "Ohhhhhhh yes. I always imagined you differently."
"Better or worse?" Herc calls across the distance.
She laughs and calls back, "Taller!"
It's only as he's turning to follow Lu back in that Herc sees Mako waiting just outside the heavy doors, watching him, and the way she's staring at him is exactly the same as it was in the mall after she kissed him, even the wry amused way she said afterwards, what, if you have the shot you take it (and knocked the air right out of him, she was the first woman he'd kissed since Angela but it was the way she said it—), hadn't covered up that lost, unseeing look. Then, and now, she looks at him like he's a stranger she misses terribly.
(He knows that look. He sees it in the mirror every morning.)
...
If you have the shot you take it.
If you have the shot you take it.
If you have the shot you take it.
If you have the shot you take it.
If you have the shot you take it.
...
Herc drops the shield. "Here's your shot, son."
If you—
"I'm not your son!" The frost cracks; signs of life in the tundra. Herc just needs to keep digging.
If you have—
If you have the shot you take it.
Chuck's face goes redder and redder, like Angela's did, when he's angry. What makes Chuck angriest? —Herc. What about Herc makes Chuck angry? —Everything. What about Herc is it though, what one thing makes Chuck angriest? —When Herc makes himself a target.
If you give them the shot they have to take it.
How does Herc make himself a target?
(It's easier than you'd think.)
Herc swallows the lump in his throat, and in the broadest, longest drawling vowels he can manage, says, "Naw, 'course ya are, mate, you're my son Chuck all right."
Consider the purpose of the Red Room: to take, to break, to remake, to burn away everything else so all that's left is a living weapon. Weapons don't feel, and so Herc knows it's not a weapon that comes in with that left hook near hard enough to take his head off, but a person: someone who chafes to the bone at the sound of Herc's intentionally mangled syllables.
If you have the shot—
What Chuck never understood and Herc never had the time to explain was that Herc made himself an easy target so the bastards would swing for him instead. Chuck thought Herc was a stupid old man trying to prove himself, and Chuck was wrong. On the city streets, on the walk to school, at the landlady's Christmas potluck, Herc made himself heard, made his accent stronger so Chuck's would seem less different by comparison. He made himself the obvious immigrant, the drowning single parent, so Chuck's successes (and lord he had so many successes, he was so bright and so strong, Herc barely saw any of himself in the boy, but that was fine, he was all right with the idea of Chuck being wholly Angela's) would seem the greater by comparison. Herc handed the bullies shots they had to take so they'd wear themselves out throwing hits on him, hits he knew he was strong enough to take, so they'd have nothing left to throw at Chuck.
If Chuck never saw more than frail, failed Hercules that was fine, it would motivate him to be more than his father could be, he need never know Herc used his life as a shield. (It wasn't like Herc was good for anything else, so he paid his son's fares with bruises and scrapes and a brave face and called it fair, until Chuck's draft number came due.)
Herc goes to his knees with a grim bloody grin and tilts his head back. "Take the shot, Chuck."
"That's not who I am!"
If you have the shot you take it.
"You're my son."
If you have the shot you take it.
...
(Luna Pentecost flies like hell to kiss the sun, empties her clips, and still walks into Alexander Pierce's office at her brother's side with a grin on her face. "Surprise bitch. I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me."
Stacker Pentecost's secrets sleep in the open because the only person who knows all of them slays dragons in her spare time.)
...
"Love is for children," Mako Mori said to Loki Laufeysson on the helicarrier. It's not that complicated. (Except for when it is.)
Nearly nine years on, any debt she owes Raleigh has been paid and paid again; it's not debt that binds them anymore, nor debt that drives their sleeping arrangements (she has learned that no debt may cause her to owe the use of her body to anyone, she is wholly her own), and yet.
They make no claims. Raleigh's life and time and body belong to him, it's nothing to her if he takes other lovers on extended assignment, just as he doesn't care if she sometimes travels between beds in her undercover work. They never formally agree to share quarters, it just seems a natural progression of their partnership; there is convenience to living and working and operating within close quarters, and besides, her feet go cold at night and Raleigh runs a few degrees warmer than the population average.
There is nothing untoward to her being the sole beneficiary of Raleigh's accounts, and if he's the first name listed after Director Pentecost on her own papers that is simply convenience. (It's a moot point: not that they have discussed the matter, but they fully intend to die together.)
Eight months after New York, Raleigh files a request for leave and actually leaves. He travels, sends her postcards from Venezia and Dubai and São Paulo, and she tells herself it isn't the lack of him that causes her skin to feel brittle and undernourished. (Attachment is for children, and Mako has not been a child for a long time, she thinks. She doesn't follow him.)
The request is not unexpected. Loki damaged him, deeply, in ways Mako can't fathom because of their compositional differences. Beneath her skin she is twice-ten-times folded steel, forged and quenched and hardened. Nothing in her can be taken and twisted and put back awry because nothing remains but her. Raleigh's mettle contains his courage and his strength and his resilience, but also bounds his kindnesses and cares and while she had always understood he would not survive the Red Room Mako had not cared for the idea of seeing her theory proved.
She expects the request, but not the duration. S.H.I.E.L.D. falls in his absence, the Director disappears and reappears, and Herc's puppy grows into a squat, foul-smelling ball of affection, the entire process of which Raleigh misses and Mako resents because she thinks he would enjoy a puppy, she would like to raise one with him.
Ten years and one day after Raleigh brought her in from the cold, a gusty February morning sweeps him back into her life. Mako sweeps him into bed and they fall into their usual post-op rituals like it's been four days since his departure rather than a year and four months. She studies his skin for any changes or alterations as closely as a near-sighted cleric would his holy books and realizes abruptly it's been ten years.
Raleigh was twenty-four years old when he gave her his throat. She can't find the scar from that even with her fingers when he's clean-shaven, and other landmarks have risen and fallen since. He has frown lines now (and laugh lines in equal measure). Where their work has carved him open, she's seen red lines form puckered scars and eventually weather down and fade white, the compressed life cycle of stars illustrated. He has eight fewer piercings and one more tattoo. She sees the decade's progress on Raleigh's skin and understands at last the other reason he waited so long to come back: where time has treated with him and bestowed no few favors, time has worked on Mako little, if at all.
She watches him watching her and doesn't wonder what he sees. There's no wondering in him either, because it's been years since she looked at him and didn't see only Raleigh Becket.
I don't care, she murmurs into his mouth. Don't go.
Stay, she spells into his skin.
Mine, she decides.
It's not that complicated after all.
...
The thing to remember about Herc Hansen is that he was prepared to cross thirty soggy, heavily-forested and probably landmine-laden miles behind the enemy's offensive line, on foot, by himself, on a rumor and the barest thread of hope that his son was alive.
Another thing to remember is that to Herc, the future is a foreign country, and a hostile one at that. In 1944, the worst thing someone could do to him was kill him. Seventy years later, someone can ruin him without ever setting eyes on him. In the wake of Hydra's fiery collapse and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s every secret becoming public information, certain corners of the twenty-four hour news industry sit very uncomfortably. In the search for something to discredit, or at least distract from the onslaught of unpleasant revelations, someone somewhere gets the bright idea to attend the Smithsonian's Captain America exhibit.
Herc went, once, to see what they had to say, and was surprised to see more than one display contrasting the fictional identity Senator Brandt packaged and sold to the eager public with the limited extant information available on one Hercules Andrew Hansen, Aussie Expat at Large.
A smug, suit-wearing 'patriot' manufactures a scandal and points a finger to cry 'imposter!' and just like that, they're off to the races. One particularly noisome human chunder-bucket pillories Herc in absentia with such intense vigor and creative misunderstanding of fact that the curator of the exhibit exhibit calls into his radio show to stand in Herc's defense, and that too somehow becomes more newsworthy than the legion of human rights violations.
People don't see what they don't expect to see, so it's a while before Herc filters the furious haze from his vision and watches the background exhibit crowds behind the bickering commentators instead, and sees.
In 1944 he would have crawled thirty miles through bombs and barbed wire.
In 2014, he pays a cab to take him three miles.
"What took you so long, old man?"
...
Consider the Red Room, its methods and mechanics and concrete factory floors, examine the sterile soulless horror of the Production Line and its series of small white rooms. (Red Room is a misnomer. There is no one actual red room, as such. The name comes from Sanitation, with its easily-cleaned white tile walls.)
Consider now the trembling child taken from Harbin who fails to comprehend that her captors understand her language, or that they find amusement in her (perhaps literal) belief that her heart is made of steel and thus cannot be broken.
(Everything breaks in the Red Room.)
Miss Mori is thirteen years old when she meets Subject H. Subject H is learning the importance of compliance, and is introduced to the incoming class. The incoming class has been recently inoculated against a variety of common poisons and toxins, but there is an uncertain genetic component, and the only way to know which candidates will survive further training is to test the inoculations. Subject H watches as the incoming class is put into a room which is then flooded with a potent neurotoxin. Eighteen of a group of twenty-three die. Subject H is told that this is the price for future noncompliance. (This is a lie. They test a new incoming class every two months. Subject H does not refuse his orders again.)
Mako is fifteen nineteen years old (you are nineteen years old, Miss Mori) when she's reunited with Charlie. She thought he'd died in the accident but here he is again, alive and healthy, she had always been afraid of the Soviets but they found him again for her, they've even built him a new arm, what marvelous technology! And the nurse is very kind to let her borrow a pretty dress, she's so understanding, they haven't been together in such a long time... when it hurts, she blames their months spent apart, presses her winces into his mouth, and still Charlie is so good to her, asking again and again between kisses are you all right, oh god is this okay? (Do you remember the price of noncompliance? Make it convincing, Subject H. Enjoy yourself.) And then the Soviets change their minds, come and take Charlie away. He says her name when the knife slides into his chest and she screams and screams and screams.
Miss Mori meets Operative Striker when she is seventeen years old. He instructs her in marksmanship and evasion, and before their first assignment together he palms her a map and directions out. If you have a shot you take it. Don't ever look back.
(Wipe them. Start over.)
Miss Mori meets Operative Striker when she is nineteen years old. He instructs her in marksmanship and hand-to-hand. She fucks him on the concrete floor of the practice room, and again on the bench seat in the changing room. She shreds her palm on the rough catches of his arm.
(Start over.)
The Black Widow meets the Winter Soldier when she is thirty-nine twenty-two years old (you are twenty-two years old, Miss Mori). There are rules: if you have a shot, you take it. The Winter Soldier didn't take the shot. Tempered steel breaks, and the Black Widow flinches.
The Black Widow sees Hydra's rented asset returned for temporary recalibration when she is sixty-one twenty-two years old (you are twenty-two years old, Miss Mori). In the Red Room, there are certain rules.
(Look upon our works, and despair.)
...
A war orphan, an amputee and a deaf guy walk into a bar.
This isn't a joke. There is no punch line.
But they really wish there was because do they ever have some pent-up aggression to get out.
...
Raleigh is terrible at pet ownership.
He is, by every objective metric, astonishingly bad at keeping pets. He lets Max outside without a leash at least once a day, and it's only the dog's indifference to the outdoors and terminal laziness that prevents any serious incidents.
The front door opens and closes without the jangling sound of the leash, and the floorboards of the front room creak as Raleigh pads into the kitchen.
"I'm going to kill him," Chuck says into the pillow.
"Hnnn," Mako says.
"Oh shit!" Raleigh says in the kitchen, louder than he would if he were wearing his hearing aids. "Fuck shit shit, fucking again, jesus fuck Rals, shit." The swearing covers most of his scrambling dash, but Chuck sighs the slightest bit at the sound of the leash before Raleigh flings the door open and the house goes quiet again.
In retrospect, Mako's glad she's sterile. She might have done something foolish otherwise. Though the odds that Raleigh would be so careless with a—
The front door bangs open again, and Raleigh announces to the house, "Don't be mad! I caught him!"
Mako exhales the slightest laugh and points her toes to stretch her calves as she rolls over into the warm space Raleigh left behind in the center of the bed. Chuck shrugs his right arm over her, and runs his palm down her side to stutter and rest at her hip, where...
He turns his face up a bit, but the pillow still muffles Chuck's quiet, "S'rry, 'ko," as he traces his fingertips around the margins of the welted scar.
Six months ago, it never would have occurred to him to offer an apology for anything. He had the shot: he took it, and at that time neither knew nor cared what else he took. That he can guess at the cause of her thoughts now and occasionally hit the mark is significant progress. She shrugs and hums in acknowledgment just as Raleigh steps yawning back into the bedroom.
"You stole my spot," he says, sleepy and accusative at once.
"You ceded control to the commonwealth," Chuck mumbles in semi-intelligible Russian. Mako squints up to watch Raleigh pout but doesn't move otherwise, and with a sigh a magnitude of seriousness greater than the situation warrants Raleigh slides back under the blankets and curls in around Mako's back.
He can't be too disappointed, guessing from the half-hard erection pressing against her ass and the arm he slings over her waist a hairsbreadth from Chuck's. "Mmmm, Mako-in-the-middle, my favorite," he murmurs into her shoulder.
As Raleigh's breathing evens out and he settles back into sleep, Mako looks to Chuck and he cracks open the eyelid that isn't pressed into the pillow and looks back: they are in accord.
Raleigh thinks he's sharing Mako with Chuck, thinks he's taking the step back out of respect for their previous relationship. He knew ten years ago when she didn't cut his throat that he looked like someone who had been important to her, so when she introduced them Raleigh made assumptions that Mako doesn't know yet if or how she should correct them.
He could be right in his read of their history, but Raleigh's guess is as good as theirs at this point. Zola's work was nearly finished before the Red Room got its hooks into Chuck but he's just as much a product of the place as Mako is, if only for what it took away. Where Raleigh's theorem begins to unravel is the assumption that Chuck is capable of sharing in the same way he is. Raleigh's caring and consideration would have been marked for weaknesses in the Red Room and flagged him for reprogramming, but they're also a not-insignificant reason she and Raleigh have made it through a decade together (and why she thinks she and Chuck wouldn't survive a year together without him.)
Raleigh thinks he's sharing Mako with Chuck when the truth of the matter is that they're sharing Raleigh. They can perform believable impersonations of real people, but take away the objectives and mission parameters and they're puppets on lax strings; at their cores Chuck and Mako are made of bullets and bones and kindness comes cleanly to neither of them. Mako does well enough with the pretending, but like Chuck she learns best by example, and she's had ten years with someone whose poker face requires a handicap.
(Chuck watches them make love and Mako watches the way Chuck's eyes linger on Raleigh. When Raleigh watches them fuck, his eyes stay trained and focused on her, which might worry her more if she didn't know for chemically-proven fact that Raleigh is very, very attracted to Captain America, she had kissed Herc for the particular purpose of telling Raleigh about it later, and Chuck is absolutely cut in his father's mold.
The solution seems quite obvious.)
...
Prince Aleksandr of Asgard doesn't understand the concept of baby teeth.
Aleksis stands up in the booth at the froyo bar so quickly that Chernobog tips off the table and leaves a three-foot-wide crater in the floor. "That is REVOLTING," he exclaims, peering at the slide show on the screen of Cait Lightcap's smartphone. "What of the roots, the growth cones, you simply remove them from your children, how many sets of teeth does your kind grow?"
Herc steals a spoon of Luna's pistachio-topped cheesecake frozen yogurt, and grins when she snaps her empty plastic spoon against his forearm.
Aleksis has declared his desire (dependent fully on the wishes and will of his lady Sasha) to have a regular pack of half-Asgardian, half-nuclear ragemonster children. He cannot be persuaded to see any of the potentially world-ending downsides to this plan, because to every awful outcome someone suggests he has an articulate, well-thought out counter. Aleksis and Sasha have discussed the idea, and pending the final analysis from their physicians in Asgard they see no harm in at least trying.
Herc's happy for them. He'll play sitter this side of never-never-absolutely-not-ever, but he likes the idea of someone who's been through what they've been through picking up their lives and putting the pieces together to get something like a good ending. And then Tamsin cracks a joke about hulklings in kindie and pulling teeth.
"HOUNDS SHED TEETH. YOU ARE TELLING ME THAT—"
The Avengers, as a mathematically-averaged collective, are a pack of massive juvenile arseholes. (Herc chooses to lay the blame at the front door of Wei Tower for that one.) That being said, not even he is immune to the irony that is a seven-foot-tall hammer-swinging demigod being more alarmed by the idea of pulling his (purely hypothetical, future) kiddo's tooth than he is by the thought of his beloved lady (and hypothetical future kid's mum) hulking up and smashing a few, say, planets about.
Across the booth table, Mako's face shows none of the group's general humor, and she's distracted and distant as she stirs the toffee-topped contents of her bowl into a soupy caramel mess.
...
The sakura are blooming when Mori Masao and his family arrive in Harbin, and their accommodations are lovely enough nearly to rival the falling blossoms. Masao brings along a volume of supplies, as well as his latest, nearly-completed sword, with the thought that there will be time to finish it while he waits for the Kwantung army to decide what to do with him.
Masao doesn't wait long: the next day an officer of the Kempeitai comes to escort him to Unit 731 in Pingfang. Masao is no stranger to the smell of smoke, but the smell of this smoke... He is told he should feel honored to make a sword for General Kitano. He sees the prisoners, so many of them, and feels only horror. In among their numbers, a cluster of fair headed Russians stand, hollow-eyed and hollowed out.
He remembers, years ago, reading the reports of the Nomonhan Incident, the bitter stab of fear he felt then as he does now. Masao had thought to avoid the war, and the ugliness of the war, to stay removed and well-clear. He had wanted his child to know only beauty in her life, to spend his life only making beautiful things before her eyes, and now he has brought his family as close to the ugly evil core of the world as it is possible to be.
He finishes the sword and sends it home and away. None of them will outlive this war, but, he thinks, it is important to leave something behind that will survive to carry their name.
When the Soviets come—
—it only hurts because it is burning away the weak parts, he lies.
...
The Weis are very big on Events.
Hu likes planning blowout extravaganzas that make them look good in front of the media, but Jin and Cheung will partake in anything that involves a certain volume of photogs and an opportunity to look fantastic at the expense of somebody else. Then again, every few months, they have to commit to some type of generic Asian Cultural Diaspora event so the media doesn't tear them apart for being ungrateful and 'forgetting where they came from,' as if that was something they would ever be allowed to forget. That one month she was their executive assistant, they dragged Mako along with them to An Evening of Song (Dynasty) and Dance (the one that blew up on social media after Jin drunkposted a series of Vines about the terrible 'Azian Fuzion' cuisine, starting with the curried tofu watercress wraps), and after that it sort of turned into their regularly-scheduled social outing.
After New York, after nearly losing Cheung (and after #ACDC became the preferred Twitter hashtag over #AsianCulturalDiasporaCrawl, thank you very much jweiboif4eva), it was decided Mako could use a little more trustworthy heavy lifting and #ACDC nights turned into Avengers "teambuilding workshops."
This month, to apologize for the brutal failure that was February's Lantern Festival, Hu shopped around for a good charitable cause and tapped a few hundred shoulders for favors owed, so the Weis are co-funding an exhibition and a charity auction with MOMA on the Artistry of the Sword. Mako doesn't know how Hu managed to convince someone to lend the museum an early Kanenobu blade, but she's impressed. Raleigh makes eyes at a pair of beautifully balanced daggers from the late eighteenth century.
It's a simple affair for the Wei brothers, but a classy one. There are no fireworks, Jin's Instagram stays silent, and nobody tries to engage Cheung in an economics discussion, those being one of Cheung's favorite ways to publically shame others. The catering goes off without a hitch, and the auction starts on schedule with a short, gracious announcement thanking the donors, curators and museum employees for making everything possible.
Mako skims the program of swords for auction and studies the glossy hi-def photos with an appraising eye. The triplets slide into the row of seats behind where she sits with Chuck, Raleigh, Herc, Luna and the Director; apparently they're exhausted by a whole evening of behaving like responsible trillionaire playboy philanthropists, because in unison they pull out their phones to take individual, then group selfies.
Hu turns his phone around and tells them to smile for Twitter. It's baiting, aimed particularly at Herc, because he never can keep them straight, but everyone knows Jin's the one who interacts most with social media.
Herc sighs hugely to disguise the quirking smile at the corner of his mouth. "Ahh, knock it off, Jin!" Hu smiles in triumph for half a second before he notices Herc's not even looking at him, focused instead on turning and reaching back to take the phone from Jin's hands before he can post the photo straight from their personal cloud server.
"Hey!" the triplets say in unison.
Chuck cranes his neck around to give them a bored look as Luna says, "Oh, you were s'posed to be identical?"
Mako turns the page in the program and the air goes out of her lungs.
"Seriously," Chuck says, "I don't even—"
Mako's out of her chair and yelling "Five million!" before the auctioneer finishes naming the opening bid at a hundred thousand dollars. Nobody else bids, and Mako hisses you owe me behind her in Mandarin before exiting the room at the fastest walk possible. In the hall, she bends double, balances against the wall with her forearms on her knees and sucks in long breaths.
None of your past is going to remain hidden, Alexander Pierce said to her eleven months ago, like it was a threat, rather than a hopeful leading thread.
Mako Mori is all folded steel and focus, but that's now, and what she cares about are when and then and who, the incidental whats and whys the Red Room seared out of her when it took a person and made her.
She turned a page and felt the black-blue metal and ivory petals of the tsuba warm under her fingertips before she saw the date the sword was completed and the name of its smith, she knew it by sight and by touch and the Red Room never did get much better at forging any detail other than words.
She wants for one thing in her life not to be a lie.
Cheung brings her the sword, and with a pocket knife and an efficiency she never knew her hands knew, she removes the mekugi pins and the tsuka, unsheathes the blade and lays bare the tsuba and the gently gleaming seppa. Her eyes burn and blur out of focus for shortest moment The sword is so sharp she barely notices at first that she's bleeding, or that she cuts herself again lifting the guard and its protective washers from the blade
Mako hears the faintest click of movement inside the blood-slicked metal cupped in her palms. She nudges the seppa aside and sees the divot in the metal of the tsuba, the small hole where a sakura petal should have been, and there, loose against the dark metal, tiny and fragile and white and crumbling, but real.
(Operatives of the Red Room do not leave behind traces. Before becoming an operative, there must be no traces left to leave.)
The Red Room never took this, the Red Room never touched this, the Red Room never got the chance to break this and now it never will.
An operative of the Red Room does not bleed. An operative of the Red Room does not cry.
A survivor of the Red Room does both.
...
Notes: This fic was commissioned by the user hauntedjaeger on Tumblr, for the prompt 'Mako and Stacker as Natasha Romanova and Nick Fury.' Things got a liiiiiiiitle out of hand from there. (I take commissions, by the way. I've had a rough few months financially, and I am ABSOLUTELY willing to write you just about anything you want for an extremely reasonable price. This fic was supposed to be 1500 words, so with regards to final wordcount, Results Not Typical, obvs.)
MCU is not my primary fandom by any means, and I've not really followed the comics in an age upon an age, so a lot of my information is
very second hand. I kind of mixed and matched canons and fanons and a few ideas of my own as needed for the narrative. Mea culpa on anything egregious, all errors are mine, whether they be accidental or wholly intentional. (FF is seriously messing with the formatting, which is regrettable, so if you're interested in the more typographically-interesting version of this fic, it's cross-posted on AO3.)
If you liked it and you've the spoons for it, I absolutely love feedback! Comments are this fangirl's blood and beating heart!