This story is the result of a request from Goddess-of-the-Moon-39. Hope you enjoy it; I've had a lot of fun creating it!

Trigger warning in first chapter for war-induced PTSD and some pretty dark thoughts from the main character, and there is some swearing throughout. To be clear, I've figured from the little bits of information in the film that its events begin in 2012ish, so the flashback in this chapter is from 2009 and then the main events are in 2012.

Disclaimers: All recognizable characters and events belong to Marvel.

….

"Hey Bricks, think there's gonna be any action this time?" Lieutenant Casey slaps my shoulder and I shrug, half-smiling.

"Dunno, they won't let me anywhere near it." I shift on the none-too-comfortable seat of our transport and readjust my helmet. The Afghan summer heat is oppressive enough without adding the bulky protective tac gear. "Army says no women in active combat roles but sure, let's send the communication tech team thorough a roadside bomber hotspot 'cause it's the quickest way to get 'em where we need 'em."

"Long as top brass is men, there's always gonna be double standards, Bricks." Maggie Walsh, one of my best friends and consistent rival at West Point, finds the situation just as intolerable as I do. "Really, if they'd let us go at it, they'd have a hunnerd years 'o pent up resentment an' a lotta us just itchin' to prove ourselves in a scramble."

"We're getting' there, Walsh," I say, thinking of the women who've been making headlines recently. "Changes are comin'."

"Can't come fast enough." Walsh is fidgetier than I am, and even though she's tiny she's a born scrapper, a little Charlestown Boston Irish hellion. She gave me hell the first few months at West Point until we mutually decided if we couldn't outdo each other we were going to join forces.

I can still hear the angry shouts of our drill instructor from the time we actually ended up in a fistfight (I swear to God Walsh started it) on the parade grounds. No, that's not in my head, that's real, why do I smell fire, oh shit…

And then the world is a roar and flipping upside down and white fire and black smoke and the sound is deafening. And nothing at all.

Snatches of voices. Fading in and out. "Bricks! Oh God, just hang in there…" "Need an evac…" "Captain Avery Brixton, female, thirty-three, five foot nine, blood type B pos., Shrapnel embedded…punctured lung…might need to amputate…leg's too far gone…Losing…!"

And I fly up from my bed in a cold sweat, panting, still trapped in the exact moment my life-well, as the Ancient One would say, my astral form-left my body. Or more accurately, the first time it did. Twice in an airlift. Three times in an operating theater in Kandahar.

There's no way I'm going to be able to sleep again. I swing my legs over the side of the bed, and then sit there, just wondering in the amazement of that for a moment. I can move both my legs, of my own volition.

My left leg, under the fringe of my night robe, is one solid mass of scar tissue, suture marks, and pinned bone, but it's mine. Somehow, in the middle of an Afghan field hospital, a tenacious medic managed to save my leg, or what was left of it. Don't even know who he was.

Granted, for a long time I wasn't grateful at all. No one else in my vehicle had survived. Sassy, wild girl Walsh was never going to get to open that bar she'd said she was gonna buy and fix up in her old neighborhood. Casey wouldn't get to see his daughter take her first steps. My radio tech, Jackson, never said much but I got the feeling from that picture he used to keep tucked in his helmet he was waiting to get out of his ROTC duty to move in with his boyfriend.

And then there was me. Me with the dysfunctional family; the alcoholic sister and in and out of jail car-thief brother, and no future in sight. Eight months of recovery stateside, two years physical therapy that never seemed to do a thing for me…some days I wished one of those deaths had been permanent.

I had lived to be a soldier, a warrior, a defender. I'd been a month out of ending my third tour of duty and planning to join the Detroit police department to give back to my hometown when I got my discharge. I couldn't imagine life without the risk, without the fight to save the innocent. And with that taken away, and the only real jobs left being something deskbound, I was lost. I freely admit it got bad. PTSD, nightmares like the one I just had but infinitely worse, panic attacks that would leave me literally frozen, and then the drugs.

I never took them as an escape. Not that that's any excuse for what I did, but I was too proud to do that. I took more and more until it hid the pain, hid the weakness, and let me push on like nothing was wrong. And I was addicted. To the ability to make it through a day without feeling like my leg was useless. To pushing myself in therapy and telling myself I was getting better because it hurt less.

I pushed too far, and my body told me what my mind couldn't. One day I just collapsed, and I was told, when I woke up, that what I had tried to do had irretrievably damaged my leg. I was so low that night that I really, truly thought about something I had once sworn on a friend's grave never to do. I told myself I'd already been gone five times, what was one more?

I didn't see an end. I had no one and no plans. With no hope of ever walking without a terrible limp. The only thing that saved me was my brother. Goofball kid hung out with some guys in the neighborhood who'd just come from the Big Apple and one of them said he used to play basketball with a guy who'd had a broken back and was walking.

Nate lost no time in telling me that with his typical wide-eyed enthusiasm. I didn't believe him, frankly, until he dragged his friend to the care facility to meet me. And three months later, I was in a leg brace, and headed to New York.

It took me a long time to find Pangborn, and the guy was cryptic as hell when I did speak to him. But he gave me the thing I needed most, hope. Although it was Walsh's parents who sent me the money for the plane ticket to Kathmandu. Well, the money Walsh had wanted me to have if something ever happened to her, her 'fix the bar' money. The note in the envelope when I picked up the weeks of old mail at my sister's place that we shared whenever I was home (she was never sober enough to bring my mail by the hospital), simply said, "Use it for your dream, Bricks."

Well, that dream took me to a run down alley and a woman whose age I didn't know, and things I thought only happened in the pages of books. When the Ancient One started going on about magic I was thinking this was all a little too Harry Potter (yes, don't judge me, my cousin's kid left the first one behind when they came to visit me in the hospital once and I was bored out of my mind with nothing else to read-and okay, maybe I liked it and read the whole series, but stop judging me, I can feel you doing it) for me.

And then she started talking about the astral form and the memory hit me. Of being suspended, painless and timeless, outside my own body and watching the medics trying to resuscitate me. And I knew she wasn't lying. Because I'd been there.

I think she saw it in me, because when I stopped arguing and just looked at her with that feeling that finally, someone understood what that was, she smiled. And then she told me, with that knowing look that used the scare the bejeezers out of me, that I wasn't done being a defender. That I could still be a warrior, I just had to learn a new way to do it.

Training has never been strange to me. And somehow, the magic came naturally. I was used to controlling my body, controlling my thoughts and even emotions in intense situations, and that served me well. Mastering the sling ring was surprisingly easy, and I soon found ways to work around my debilitating limp as well.

I've been here, at Kamar-Taj, for eight months now, and I've never felt more alive. I'm in tune with life now in a way I never was. I was always hyper-observant, a trait that served me well in the field, but now I don't just notice little things, I take pleasure in them. Like the way the sun shines through the golden leaves of my favorite ginkgo tree on a cloudless day. Or the smell of dusty books in the library as I browse shelves while the librarian and one of my best friends, Wong, rocks out on his I-pod to his new favorite songs. Yes, I introduced him to the wider world of pop music, specifically my Beyoncé workout playlist. No, I have no regrets.

Honestly, this place is more modern than I expected. We have Wi-Fi, and if I had a computer that would be awesome. But I prefer hiking (with my magically-empowered leg brace…and it's really much cooler than it sounds) and sitting by my favorite waterfall and doing the meditations the Ancient One instructed me in when I showed an interest in exploring not only the physical, but the spiritual healing magic could offer.

But sometimes the nightmares still come. And tonight I don't feel like pushing them out with thoughts and chants. Tonight, I'm going to push them out by force.

I buckle on my leg brace, which glows faintly blue ever since the Ancient One cast a spell on it for strength and mobility, slip into my burgundy training robes (a sign that I'm no longer a novice pupil but advancing in the ranks-that's something I understand well) and creep out of my room, careful not to disturb the other students of the Ancient One who sleep here. Some live in surrounding villages and leave for home each night, but those from farther away, like me, make this our home.

In the training room, I bind my hands and then tie my hair away from my face. It's still something of a shock, even after three years, to see the silver-grey where there was once mahogany brown. When I first saw myself in a mirror, five months after the bombing, I had thought I looked like my grandmother. My hair had gone white from the incredible stress.

I've grown it out of my former standard-issue crew cut and now it's long enough to tie back while I train. I move to the center of the room and begin conjuring shields, small at first, then larger as my body relaxes and I fall in tune with the energy currents all around me.

"Double diamond shield; that's new. Borrowing Wong's books again?" I don't even so much as flinch at the sound. I knew Mordo would find me here. He always does.

He moves beside me and I draw on his energy, the strong, stonelike stability that he exudes. I'm more in tune with the element of water, myself, and my motions are more fluid, but Mordo's spells are stronger. Everyone, the Ancient One told me, draws on one of the elements to support their magic. She herself is one of the few who is strengthened by fire. Most sorcerers do not have the control to harness the chaotic energy of fire.

"I dreamed about it again." I don't have to explain, he knows all about my past and the horrors I carry.

I practice for a long time in silence, Mordo beside me. He never fails to be there for me when I need him. Lately, it seems like more than just two wounded souls trying to repair each other. There's something else in his eyes when he looks at me.

I'm not sure how I feels about that. Mordo is a good friend, but sometimes I feel so distant from him. Especially times like these. Mordo concentrates purely on the physical aspects of magic. The physical healing it can provide, and the physical power it gives.

Not long after I began to heal, I discovered that magic held a key to mental healing as well. The magic was helping my body but the PTSD was continuing and getting even worse. I was spiraling back into the depression that had held me for so long, and beginning to wonder if this was even worth the time I was spending.

And then one day during training, I felt myself fall outside my own body. Felt the touch of the astral plane. And it was like nothing I have ever experienced. In that moment, I was truly alive. And when I moved and it faded back into reality, I wanted to get that back more desperately than I have ever wanted anything.

I asked the Ancient One to teach me how to tap into that side of her art. She smiled at me in her mysterious way, and said something cryptic about destiny and the true purpose of magic. And then she taught me how to calm my spirit, how to still my mind in meditation, and how to align my own astral energies with the greater plane.

I discovered that I loved the peace that meditation gave, and I've spent many hours away from the main compound, high in the mountains in my favorite place to be alone and realign. I sit in the quiet and feel as if this is what I was born to. Something in me has been searching all my life for this feeling, and now that I have discovered it, I never want to leave. I've stopped thinking about how my leg will never really be right again, and how I'll never be able to do what I used to, and begun to love the life that has opened to me. Honestly, now, I can sometimes even be grateful for what happened. Because it catapulted me into the life I didn't know I was missing, the life I was truly meant to live.

I'm taking my time, as the Ancient One advised, simply exploring the astral realm. She promises that my calling will show itself in time. She doesn't say as much, but I can see from her eyes that this is not normal in her students. That there is something about me that she finds rare. And that she apparently wants to mentor. Ever since I expressed interest in seriously studying the spirit of magic, she has spent much more time with me and begun to treat me more as an equal than a pupil. It's honoring, but at the same time, a lot to live up to.

But when I told Mordo about how alive the spiritual side of magic made me feel, he laughed. He doesn't tap into the spirit of magic when he works with it, and he seems to think I'm some sort of hippie freak talking about the astral plane and out-of-body experiences. He says that's all nonsense and that I ought to focus on honing my battle skills, because there is a fight coming.

Just before I arrived, something terrible happened here. A former student called Kaecilius and his minions stole pages of dark magic and murdered the librarian whom Wong replaced. Now, it is likely that Kaecilius is seeking to harness dark magic to destroy the world.

I believe Mordo's right about the war, but not about how it must be won. Skill can lead only so far to victory, as I've seen proved on the battle front time and again. To really win the battle that's coming, we will need faith and belief.

Panting, I stop my practice and wipe the sweat from my forehead. "Thanks, Mordo. I'll see you tomorrow," I tell him, looking back as I leave the training room. He's watching me with that strange look on his face, and I feel a twisting in my stomach as I walk away, and I'm half-tempted to ask him what he's really feeling. Despite our disagreements about magic, we are a formidable team. I could be happy with him, I think. So why do I feel so wrong when I imagine that future?

….

Hope this intro brought Avery's character in well! We'll find out more about her connection to Stephen in the next chapter, I promise. But I felt that since she's such a complex character she deserved a good introduction. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I liked writing it.