"So... there I was... cornered by a dangerous enemy..."

"Enemy? It was one guy with a taser-we're not even really sure he was fully HYDRA."

"Shut up, Tony. Mamma's speakin'."

Tony Stark crossed his arms over his chest, pouting childishly at the reprimand. While Jane was head, shoulders, knees and toes deep in whatever complicated astrology project was currently taking up her time, Darcy was balanced precariously on the edge of a stool, listening intently to the story that had been retold countless times by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s 'resident asshole' (as named by Nick Fury himself).

Mary leaned forward in her rolling chair, dragging her eyes from person to person dramatically. Tony was still pouting, Darcy looked intrigued, Jane was pretending she didn't exist.

"Anyway... the enemies advanced on me. I was merely a baby Avenger at the time, not yet schooled in the art of Avenging. I had to rely on the only thing I'd known how to do my entire life..."

"Be a bitch." Tony deadpanned.

"No, princess," Mary waved his comment off. "I had to go for the balls."

"The balls!" Darcy called out gleefully. "Hear that, Jane?" The pretty scientist gave a halfhearted thumbs up in their general direction.

"I threw myself to the ground!" Mary cried out. "While he was distracted by my flailing, I reached up and cupped his two danglers."

Tony had begun to look nauseous. Darcy's eyes were practically glimmering with delight.

"Then..." she paused for effect. "I twisted hard and yanked down!"

"That's the worst part," Tony whined, his face queasy.

"While he was screaming like a little bitch, completely incapacitated and without his manhood, I managed to sneak away to safety!"

"Hurrah!" Darcy clapped her hands energetically.

"So that's how I escaped the HYDRA reveal." Mary leaned back into her chair with a flourish. Fury had banned her from having a rolling one because she kept trying to run over his toes every time he entered Jane's lab for a check-up on whatever assignment he'd given them. Really, it was a miracle she hadn't been fired yet. He loved her really.

In reality, the showdown between her and the handful of HYDRA agents she'd encountered on her escape from the Triskelion had gone much, much differently. She had been classed as a potential asset for the Nazi fan club, so a good percentage of the moles that weren't trying to take out Captain America were trying to restrain her, throw her into transport and ship her back to one of their bad shit warehouses. Most of them had been management or archivists, so they'd had no idea what they were up against. She'd wiped the floor with them. But she liked telling the testicle-grab story, even if it was just to see the look on Tony's face as she went into vivid description of what it felt like to try and separate a man's scrotum from his body. The STRIKE teams (or what was left of them) hadn't liked her eager narration when they'd heard it in post-mission drink sessions either.

Darcy, however, practically glowed every time she heard it. "That never gets old," she sighed.

Just as Mary was about to go into that one time she walked in on Tony buck-ass naked and black-out drunk in her living room, the doors to Jane's lab slid open with a hiss. It was Captain America, Deliverer of Justice and Owner of the Best Ass in S.H.I.E.L.D. who stepped in, looking everything like the chipper angel that he was. Mary would've climbed him like a tree if Darcy wasn't already hanging from the branches.

"Doll!" the blond man cheered, opening his arms wide. Darcy launched herself at him as expected, wrapping her legs around his hips and curling around him like a vice. It could've been a cute, harmless scene to watch if they hadn't started trying to swallow each other's tonsils. Mary reeled back in disgust.

"I'm really gonna vomit," Tony said weakly. "I can feel it in my throat. It's chunky-I think it's chunky."

"Sorry," Steve gasped, surfacing to take in air. "I came in here for something important, I swear!"

"So I'm not important?" Darcy pouted.

Steve looked every inch the concerned, doting boyfriend. "Of course you are, doll. More than anything."

"Steve." Mary clapped her hands together to get his attention. "What is it?"

Cap smiled sheepishly. "Oh, yeah. Uh, Fury wants to see you in his office."

Mary groaned, slumping down in her seat. Usually, being called into Fury's dwellings meant that she was gonna get a verbal ass-kicking and possibly, if he was having a good day, a minor threat on her life. She couldn't remember doing anything bad yet. Tony had had a self-proclaimed 'sex-weekend' with Pepper to make up for whatever argument they'd had the week prior, so they hadn't had time to set out a plan for the trouble they usually caused. Fury was going to have a big post-Uprising conference with important world leaders on Wednesday morning and Mary had already been thinking about implanting a massive whoopee cushion in his assigned seat, but she hadn't run it by Tony yet. He was the only one with the smarts (and cash) to get them into the conference room early enough and inconspicuously enough so that they could leave the cushion, attach a camera and microphone for giggle purposes later, and then dash away into the shadows without being caught.

The long glass corridors to Fury's office were bustling with panicking interns holding coffees for their middle management bosses. Mary remembered when she'd been like that-young and doing anything for the approval of her seniors. She would've wiped Charles Xavier's lily white ass herself if it meant that she'd feel like he liked her. The memory of the Professor brought a smile to her face. It quickly died out when she arrived at Fury's door. It was glass, so she could see him sitting at his wide desk, fingers steepled in front of him. Typical Fury power position.

Mary shouldered the door open and collapsed into one of the fancy chairs situated in front of the desk. It creaked under her weight.

"So," she began, sitting her elbows on the arm rests. "What's up?"

"Garcia," he huffed out, as grouchy as ever. His one eye was scowling deeply into her soul. "How was the Ukraine mission?"

The Ukraine mission had just consisted of Mary, Clint and Natasha doing recon on an old HYDRA base that had been discovered after the big worldwide information leak. Like always, the compound had been wiped clean of everything from DNA to dust, the computer hard-drives had been destroyed and it had been worryingly empty. Mary didn't even sense a fly the whole time they were there. HYDRA couldn't run but they sure could hide.

"It was shit," Mary answered with a shrug. "We didn't find anything, Clint somehow cut his finger on a computer mouse and the flight back was weirdly bumpy. Wherever HYDRA are, I don't think it'll be anywhere that the whole fucking world now knows about."

This was an argument that had been constantly rehashed in the months since the Uprising. The Cap, Natasha, Barton and Mary had been adamant that no matter how much surveillance and raids they did on known HYDRA safehouses and bases, the Nazis simply wouldn't be there. It was common sense not to hide out some place that had already been found. Fury, however, had continued sending them on pointless, irritatingly boring missions that had yielded no results thus far. At this point Mary suspected it was just so he could get rid of her. Without Mary, things around the new headquarters tended to run a whole lot smoother.

Fury gave her a one-eyed look that roughly translated to I don't wanna hear it.

"Why am I really here?" Mary questioned. Fury rarely held one-to-one meetings about missions because if he was going to yell about misconduct (usually, it was Stark and Mary ignoring orders), he preferred to do so in front of the whole team. He had a thing about public embarrassment and letting everyone know he was disappointed.

"We've acquired the Asset," Fury revealed, leaning forward ominously.

"The Asset?" Mary raised an eyebrow.

"You may know him as The Winter Soldier. Or, due to more recent revelations, James Barnes."

Ooooooh. Mary roughly remembered hearing the name. She hadn't been part of the face-off with HYDRA after Fury had almost been assassinated, so she'd missed basically all the drama-like Steve finding out that his dead best friend had actually been a HYDRA plaything for the past ninety years. Though if it hadn't been for his actions during the collapse of the Triskelion and Project Insight, Steve would probably be resting up in the clouds with Elvis. She knew at least that much. The rest she didn't care for.

"What has that gotta do with me?" she asked.

"I need your talents." Fury replied. "He's been under HYDRA's control for decades and they did what they had to to make sure that it remained that way. He's got a lot of problems, most of them being because of deep conditioning and constant refreezing."

"Refreezing?" the mutant arched an eyebrow. "Like, we talking they stuck him in an actual freezer? Is that even humane?"

"It's HYDRA," Fury said, as way of explaining. She hummed in assent. "I want you to root around his brain and fix him."

"Will he even let me?"

Mary was a very big fan of mind consent. She'd hated when other telepaths had slunk around her conscious, flicking through parts of her and leaving a sour taste in her mouth; like acid. PProfessor X had had to do it after one particularly atrocious childhood moment, when she'd manage to down a whole dorm of twelve year olds because of a nightmare, and then Jean Grey had done her share during her whole Phoenix rampage. Mary would never forget that sensation of being torn in two, left broken and tattered because someone had dug their claws deep into her mental being and cut out her soul. It had taken years of rehabilitation for her to even be able to use her ability without reducing into a blabbering, crying mess.

"I guess we'll have to see," Fury smiled.

Author's Note:

so i'm gonna just gonna spiral out after CA: Winter Soldier cuz I'm too lazy to go into Civil War and any of the Avengers movies after the first one. I'll make it fun tho

Hope you enjoyed!