Full Summary: When crimelord Leila Whittaker's dark past suddenly catches up with her, she's given an easy choice: S.H.I.E.L.D., or prison. Unsurprisingly, she chooses the former.
Little does S.H.I.E.L.D. know, Leila's not here just to keep her freedom and pay off her debt to society. She has her own reasons for taking up the badge. On her agenda: find a man she's heard only whispers about, the one who can change her life. Not on her agenda: become a superhero, stop an alien invasion, and fall in love with a costumed war hero.
But you know. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.
Or whatever.
Opening Notes: Hey everyone! So I have a full story into thing on my profile (including why I chose the rating, trigger warnings, a more comprehensive ship list, etc) and you can go check that out if you want. In the meantime I'll try and keep this short and sweet.
This is my first Marvel fic and I'm VERY excited about it. I have a lot of stuff planned that I'm really excited to write. This story is about an original Avenger character, and it's a very very slowburn Steve/OC. I personally picture Nina Dobrev as Leila's faceclaim/actress/whatever, but you can picture her however you like.
This story starts starts pre-Avengers but jumps into that plotline pretty quickly, and goes through a number of other MCU movies and original plots and then through Age of Ultron and beyond. (I'm hoping to take it all the way through both parts of Infinity War but am unable to really plan for it for what I'm assuming are obvious reasons.)
Like I said, I'm super excited about this story and I hope that you guys enjoy it as much as I do. And I'd really love it if you could leave a review and let me know what you think!
Prologue
"Time to give into the kindness of strangers."
-Kinda Outta Luck/Lana del Rey
Clint hates police precincts.
It's not that he hates police, usually. Out on the street, he has nothing against them, as long as they stay out of his way. Which they almost always do, and when they don't it's only long enough for him to flash his S.H.I.E.L.D. badge. Which he hates having to do, for the same reason he hates being inside police precincts.
He's been the guy with the badge for a long time now, but there's parts of him that don't believe it. There's parts of him that are still the circus thief, and he feels like he's pretending when he pulls out a badge and tells a cop to get out of his way, that he's got it handled.
Those parts of him are easy to ignore, mostly, but they get louder when he's inside a police precinct. The criminal in him feels like he's in the belly of the beast, get out while you still can, you idiot, RUN-
The criminal in him sounds a lot like his brother, actually.
Clint sets his badge on the counter. "I'm Agent Barton I'm here to see Leila Whittaker this is now a federal case," he recites boredly. It's actually technically an international one, but "federal" invites less questions.
The woman behind the counter shoots him a nasty look-it's always an insult, having a case that seems perfectly ordinary snatched by the higher ups (again: he cannot believe that he, somehow, now counts as The Higher Ups) but he knows that if any of them knew what they were really dealing with, they'd be grateful to have the problem taken off their hands.
The woman stands up, says "Follow me," and heads off down a hallway. He does.
When Coulson first gave them the assignment, Clint thought it was below their pay grade, because on paper it seemed like a simple recruitment operation-talk to the girl, tell her she can join S.H.I.E.L.D. or go to prison.
Then he read her file, and suddenly it felt like a matter of public safety and secrecy, and very much within their paygrade. Above it, even.
And yet, here he is.
The woman unlocks interrogation room for him. "There you go, agent," she says disdainfully.
"Much obliged, officer," he replies carelessly, and steps inside.
Leila Whittaker looks like she did in her file-a tall, wasp-waisted brunette-except that she looks older now than she did in the pictures, which means she's been doing a decent job at staying off the radar, and that she's added a hot pink streak to her hair that wasn't there before.
And she carries herself the way you'd expect a person of mass destruction to do so-like she doesn't have a care in the world.
After Clint read her file, he asked Coulson if they knew what abilities the kid had picked up since they lost track of her.
"No idea," was all the bastard'd had to say. "Best of luck."
Whittaker looks at him. "Are you my lawyer?" she asks sarcastically. "Cause-"
Clint doesn't bother trying to think of a quip, just snaps the bracelets onto her wrists before she realizes what he's doing, and then sits down and hopes they work.
"Sorry, you'll need those for the arraignment," he says in his best lawyer voice, before he can help himself. "Oh, look at that! I wasn't gonna do a line, but it happened."
Whittaker doesn't look amused. He stops smiling. On the plus side, the bracelets seem to be working. That or she's decided to hold back now. Either way, they haven't had the opposite effect of making her uncontrollably more powerful, so he's calling it a win for now.
The girl studies the bracelets carefully, and spends a moment or two trying to pry one off. It doesn't give.
She sighs and looks up at him. "Well?"
Clint studies her and leaned forward. "Tell me something, kid. You could've been out of here before anyone knew you were here to begin with. Is there a reason you decided to stick around, or are you just holding a 2-7?"
Whittaker studies him. Her face is mostly blank, but he can tell from her posture, from a slight widening of her eyes, that she's distinctly uncomfortable with him in a way that she wasn't before. She didn't know he knew.
She's still trying to get the bracelets off. She's trying to make it look like she's just rubbing her wrists out of discomfort. She probably thinks she's being subtle, and maybe it would work on someone else, but Clint's a spy-and more importantly, he's tried that trick before himself. With handcuffs instead of weird scifi superpower-negating bracelets, but it's a similar concept.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she replies nonchalantly.
"Really." Clint tilts his head to the side, annoyed, and slides her a file. Her file. "Do you know what happened in December of 2004?" he asks. "Because I do."
Whittaker blanches at this, but keeps her poker face in place and opens the file. She flips through it for a moment, then looks up.
"Feel like cooperating now?" he asks.
"That'd be easier to answer if I knew who I was cooperating with," she replies. Her voice is steady, sounding only mildly annoyed. He's vaguely impressed. "For everything you seem to know about me, I don't know anything about you."
Clint leans forward. "I'm Agent Barton. I'm with the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division."
"That sounds made up."
"Okay, I'm with S.H.I.E.L.D."
"That still sounds made up."
"Yeah, well...it's not, okay? It's a thing."
"You sound defensive."
"You sound like a murderer."
The smirk falls from Whittaker's face, and her entire body language changes. She stiffens; her face goes more flat than before. Her eyes turn steely and cold.
"You sound like someone who needs to get to the goddamn point or stop wasting my fucking time," she snaps.
Clint shrugs. "Fair." He leans forward. "I'm hear to offer you a deal."
He waits for her to respond, but she gives him a look, like, okay? are you gonna elaborate? or. So he does.
"You can either spend the rest of your life in a specially designed cell that'll cut off all access to your abilities."
"That doesn't sound like something you're legally allowed to do-"
"-or," he continues, trying not to sound as annoyed as he is at her interruption, "you can join our organization and help us take down people like you."
"People like me."
"People with abilities. People using those abilities to cause trouble."
Whittaker tilts her head, looking intrigued. "And why do you want a murderer working for you?"
"It's not like we know of any non-murder-y people who can steal other people's superpowers."
"I don't steal them, I cop-" Whittaker shuts her mouth suddenly, as if she feels she's said too much. She studies him, and then says "So the offer is that I can either use my...skillset, to help your shady as fuck X-files department, or you'll take them away?"
"Take the X-oh. Your-oh. Yeah, that's the offer on the table."
She studies him another moment, and then shrugs. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Sure." She leans back in her chair. "Do you guys have health insurance?"
"Uhm. Yeah, we get health insurance." He's slightly unsettled at the ease with which she seems to have made this decision-she seems genuinely relaxed now, not the faux-cavalier attitude she had when he first came in-but he brushes it off. "You don't end up using it a lot, cause they give you a mandatory check-up after missions and you kinda figure if SHIELD's best and brightest don't notice that you have, like, a tumor or whatever, then you probably don't have one-but, that's not my conversation to have. We'll have someone debrief you before you sign anything. At least, they did that with me; I'm not sure what the protocol is for…" he gestures vaguely in her direction.
She smirks. "Well, thanks for the heads-up, Agent Barton."
He just glares, and stands up. "Extraction's waiting three blocks away," he tells her. "I have a car outside. Try to act natural."
"I'll do my best."
Five Days
Three Years
Four Months
And Sixteen Hours Later
"So why do you want to join S.H.I.E.L.D.?"
Agent Hill's office is cold, and dim, and windowless, and looks nothing like an office. It feels more like an interrogation room, and maybe that's what this is. It definitely doesn't feel like a job interview. In fact, this is probably the most mundane question she's been asked since stepping into this room.
Mundane, and yet...
Leila taps her fingers on the table. The obvious answer is that they threatened to lock her up if she didn't, but she feels like she'll get further in S.H.I.E.L.D. if she makes it seem like she's not being held here against her will. And of course, saying that she wants to help keep people safe is not an option. It's blatantly transparent and borderline ass-kissing.
Which leaves option number three: The truth. Or part of it. Unfortunately.
Leila sighs. "Before S.H.I.E.L.D….contacted me-"
"You mean found you after you got arrested?"
"Nuance." Leila waves a hand. "I...was having trouble finding other people like me. People with powers."
"We've been calling them 'Gifteds.'"
"Gifteds?" Leila asks, drawing out the last letter. "Like...plural? Like as a noun?"
Hill doesn't respond, just gives her an unimpressed look.
"Who decided that? Did any 'gifteds' have a role in choosing the name? Because if not, that seems kind of unfair. Hey, what about calling us mu-"
"Get to the point, Whittaker."
Leila relaxes again, slouching against the back of the chair.
"The point is, my power doesn't work without other people's powers, and there's not, like, a facebook for 'gifteds' or whatever. So when Barton told me I'd get to help find and catch people with powers...I thought this seemed like a good opportunity."
"And the fact that he threatened to lock you up without the use of your powers didn't have anything to do with it?" Hill asks skeptically.
"I'm actually still not convinced you guys can do that. Scientifically or legally." The bracelets may have seemed intimidating in the interrogation room, but she's learned since then that they're not as infallible as Barton had led her to believe.
"S.H.I.E.L.D. is an international organization, we don't follow federal regulation."
"Firstly, that horrifies me. Secondly, the U.N. still exists, I think. And thirdly, how come almost every one of you has been American?"
Agent Hill doesn't miss a beat. "You're one to talk, the U.N. doesn't know about us, and one of our founders was English."
"Fair, still horrifying, and yeah, I know, Agent Carter, I went to spy school. But every agent I've met in real life has been American."
"Not all of them," Hill replies carelessly. "Some of them are just good at pretending."
"Why would they want to pretend?"
Hill smiles faintly. "You're the field agent. You tell me." And with that, she slides a badge across the table. "Welcome to S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Whittaker."