AGENTS MIELKE, BARTOS & CRASE, 2017.
For security officers, workdays were a blur of morning shifts and the transitional periods until afternoon and evening shifts; a drag of hours spent contemplating the growing numbness of too-tight kevlar weave and the general prolonged existence of seemingly endless hallways.
In short, being SHIELD infantry on HQ Guard was possibly one of the most boring jobs conceivable to the mortal mind — and Bartos reinforced that opinion having been previously stationed on the Iliad. The latter was a close second, made unbearable by virtue of being stuck on an oversized boat in the middle of the Antartic, but the Playground was boring for other reasons entirely.
"And you want me to take over your shift?" Bartos, unhelmeted and unsurprised, summarized the prior consultation with a stony expression.
Agents Mielke and Crase knew just how intolerable guard rotation was; they'd taken Fifth Shift since the start of Mace's directorship, and it was arguably one of the worst periods of the entire rotation. Bartos was a SHIELD veteran; ten years with the as of recently renamed Tactical and Infantry Division had made her competent and well regarded, but even she tended to drop off during Fifth Shift. It was hopelessly boring. It was hopelessly long. And, to make matters worse, their usual route took them along the site's upper floors, where the indoor heating was at it's highest. 82 degrees Fahrenheit was not an ideal temperature to walk around in, especially when one was decked out in full SHIELD regs.
Normally, Bartos took Third Shift. It allowed her to get the Battalion's various forms of paperwork done between First, Second and Fourth, and allowed for a full night's sleep throughout Fifth. It was a perk granted by command, something of which Bartos was still unused to, but was getting there. Slowly.
Taking Fifth now, however, would mean getting to bed immediately and hoping for at least an hour and a half of kiptime and, unfortunately for Bartos, dinner had brought along with copious amounts of coffee and coffee cake, so that idea was completely out of the window.
Idling in one of three staff rooms, the one most popular with Troopers courtesy of it being closest to the bunks, Bartos scowled at Mielke with such profound hatred, the man physically recoiled as if he'd been struck.
And in return, Mielke spluttered, thoroughly annoyed. "It's not my fault," he shot back at the higher ranking Trooper. He pointed an accusative hand toward Crase. "He's the one with the new mother-in-law."
Two sets of eyes glared at Crase, and the latter curled his fingers around the rim of his helmet, uncomfortable.
"We've been dating four months... She wants me to meet her parents..."
Both Mielke and Bartos groaned in unison, which caused three suited Intelligence Agents sat across the room to turn around. Bartos shot them a filthy look and, feeling that her sentiments weren't adequality expressed given her current situation, flipped them the bird for good measure. They soon turned around.
"Some trooper you are," Bartos grumbled, returning her attention to the traitorous subordinate stood three or so feet to her left. "You could have at least warned me earlier, you fuckstick."
"So you'll come with?" Mielke asked, hopefully. He knew Bartos well enough that her objection wasn't necessarily a refusal. Not yet, anyway.
Bartos set her mouth into a line and growled. "I'd rather be violently stabbed to death, personally."
Someone made a stranged noise behind them, and all three Troopers jerked around and slammed into a salute in unison when it turned out to be Agent May and Field Commander Coulson. The latter wiped his mouth with his free hand, having apparently very nearly choked on the coffee he held between three prosthetic fingers, arm outstretched to keep it away from the shirt he wore. Clearly at risk of dropping it, May took it into both hands and regarded Bartos, sternly, if with some amused fondness.
"Knowing your record, Agent Bartos, I certainly wouldn't hope so."
It was a swift reprimand as well as a humored observation. Caught out, Bartos flipped both hands up in submission and scuffed the toes of her left boot against the carpet below. "Yes, ma'am." She agreed half-heartedly. "Of course not, Ma'am."
It's the kind of response someone gives when they hold the SHIELD Medical Department record for the highest number of admissions for serious trauma caused by bladed injury in the whole Infantry Division. It was also a record that tended to go hand in hand with the Agent Bartos' black belt in Angampora.
Standing in sulky silence as May handed back Coulson's coffee and both took their leave together, Mielke sighed out slowly and Crase brought his hand to the back of his neck, thoroughly embarrassed. Bartos, having already established long ago that she had some form of death wish, narrowed her eyes and grumbled at May's turned back.
"At least a knife's quicker than fucking sleep deprivation."
The Caverly jerked her head over her shoulder with such speed that all three of the Troopers turned at once and ran.
▸ Prompt One: "So will you come with?" - "I would rather be violently stabbed to death."
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AGENT DORSEY, 2014.
Nobody wants any heroics; that's what Agent Webb said. He ordered them to keep their heads down. Keep out of the fight until someone arrived. Let the qualified Agents do the shooting.
The problem is, David is all too good at that. He's been at SciTech for nearly a year now, after being picked up at college by a couple of suits who told him that he can do better, and he's a man (well, boy really) of few words. Good with a spanner and wrench, true, but there is little else. During any forced interaction he answered whatever questions thrown in his direction both quickly and concisely. There was no need for excessive details or fabrications or gregariousness, and for the most part, he was good at being overlooked.
It meant few in the way of friends, but then, David was used to that. He didn't care.
And when... whoever they were, people he used to see across the compound, faces he recognized and trusted who suddenly just turned and opened fire for no other reason than something snapped, David was as safe as he could be. Nobody looked for David. Nobody really cared. He wasn't one of those students who died because they ran back for someone else and got caught in the crossfire.
Nobody wants any heroics, Agent Webb told the others. So they'd locked the door to the holoengineering lab and hunkered down behind some of the more stable machinery and waited. And waited. Then they came.
Not reinforcements. HYDRA. HYDRA came. Reinforcements would come, they later realized; they were practically on HYDRA's heels at the time, but HYDRA came first.
Nobody wants any heroics.
And maybe that's true, but for the first time in a long time, David spoke up when the enemy came, he did something other than stick to the sidelines. He wanted to help, and he did. Nineteen-year-old Probationary-Agent Dorsey gave the fourteen students and three Agents the crucial time to escape by turning to straight to the face of HYDRA and standing up against them.
He got nine bullets to the chest for his trouble.
After all, nobody wants any heroics.
But he got the job done.
Even if nobody really remembered him afterward.
▸ Prompt Two: "Ok, this is the only time I've ever gonna do this. So pay attention"
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AGENT ALBERTYN, 2016.
The evening before had brought at least six inches of snow on top of the original four, so when Agent Albertyn stood on the only clear patch of gray slab concrete amidst a sheet of endless white, shovel in hand, he knew he was in for a very long day indeed.
Honestly, if you'd have asked Albertyn, the punishment was not worth the crime. So he'd installed some background script the desktop computers aboard the Zephyr to make them randomly double click. It wasn't that bad. It had been funny to watch, and it was only a little thing; most of the computers were holographic anyway. It wasn't like Albertyn had moved all the furniture a couple of inches or crazy-glued swastika stickers to the walls or something totally insane.
But, it was also one in a long string of recent behavioral 'concerns' so Albertyn found himself reprimanded for an offense worth a sigh or withering look at best, handed a shovel and told to clear out the carpark so the team could move out by tonight.
Canada would have been fun if it wasn't for the snow, and the cold — and the terrorists harboring some wild alien technology. Ordinarily, Albertyn's job did not involve active participation when it came to undercover missions. His experience was deskbound at best. But sometimes there were problems a satellite and copious knowledge in the arts of tactical reconnaissance couldn't fix. From a distance, that is.
And, initially, Albertyn had been happy to come along. Until he realized that the actual mechanics of an undercover mission were as dull and uninteresting as they had been the last time, and suffice to say, his lesser talents had come in full swing to make up for the lack of action.
"Well, well, well. If it isn't Agent Bertie-boy," at the sound of her voice, Albertyn internally relaxed and turned at the waist. Sure enough, Agent Johnson was stood in her cold winter gear, grinning. "Let me guess, you got snow shovel duty too?"
So he wasn't the only one. Albertyn shrugged. "I guess it was going to happen to someone." He gestured to the copious amount of snow way yonder. "Why, what did you do?"
Johnson mirrored his shrug and ambled down the two set of icy stairs, an identical shovel clasped loosely in one hand. "Nothing, really. But Coulson knows what I get like if I'm," She waves one hand exaggeratedly. "Unoccupied. So he sent me out here." A grin. "Guess I'm not the only one with a problem keeping out'a trouble, huh?"
Albertyn grunted in noncommittal agreement and squinted at the surrounding carpark. The cars were okay, for now; they could be dusted off before they set out, but they'd need to shovel away a route to get to the nearby road. He sighed. "Wher'd you want start?
They both end up starting from the road and making their way up, taking their minds off of the physical labor by concentrating more on the conversation at hand. Such as how much winter sucked to how polite Canadian terrorists might be to what Johnson might do to get them back for this to what Albertyn might GM on D&D Friday (he's thinking 5th Edition, maybe Shadowrun — they used to play Age of Rebellion until they got a complaint from "someone" about the Empire being eerily similar to SHIELD itself, and sadly Emperor Coulsetine and the whole campaign was encouraged to end, much to Darth Tremors' dismay) and for the most part, the whole thing goes okay.
He's just about to start loose feeling in his fingers when Johnson shouts his name. "You're burying the car!" She calls once he looks up, tromping over a nearby snowdrift to examine his work more closely.
Sure enough, in his intense digging spree, Albertyn hadn't watched where he'd been shoveling and had half buried one of the cars. He groaned. It wasn't much; just a big lump on the windscreen and hood, but it was more work than what he strictly wanted to put in, which was minimal. He's just about to scrape the end of his shovel along the paint when he glanced across at Johnson. She had an odd look on her face.
"Uh oh," he mumbled, knowingly. He had a half a second to save the shovel she threw at him from being lost somewhere in the endless drifts of white, and turned to see her spread both hands out a few feet off.
He'd seen Johnson use her powers before, of course; he wasn't as surprised as he was when he first realized that she could shake stuff around with her mind or hands or whatever, but it was still unusual. It was something that, generally, Albertyn did not tend to experience on a frequency high enough to become used to. He was one of those agents who saw the more regular sort of business; paperwork and mission briefings, looking in from the outside and only really knew his way around a handgun because it was part of his quarterly training. Really, he'd only really ended up in the Playground because he had stuck with SHIELD through the entire war and the criminal phase, by simple virtue of having nowhere else to really go. It merited keeping close, but nothing else. It was how he and Johnson fell on the same radar. They only really mixed due to the similarities in age, where the invisible lines during downtime split the population.
Other than that, their work took them in different directions. This was the first time in at least a month or so that he'd spent any time at all with Johnson.
In a freezing car park, no less.
Gripping the shovel with his stiff fingers, he grimaced. "You should have done that before."
"Shut your face," Johnson snips back as she pushes several feet of snow up against one of the cars. "Come help me!"
"You want to bury the cars?" Albertyn asked in disbelief. Johnson groaned and crunched back over, swiping the shovel from his hands and sticking him none-too-gently in the stomach with its handle.
"You see anything else better to do here?" Johnson countered with a smirk.
Albertyn thought about it for an impressive one and half a seconds and decided that she was completely right. As she pushed up the snow with her freaky earthquake powers, he did the heavy lifting until all three of the saloons were completely buried under at least a few inches. In a way, it was sort of what Mack had wanted him to do. He did tell Albertyn to clear the carpark so they could drive out, and they had.
Anyone could drive in an out of here if they so pleased. If they had a car, that is.
Snickering, Johnson threw her shovel off to one side and tapped his leg with the underside of her snowboot. "We better clear off before they send someone out to check."
"I don't know about you but I could go for coffee." Throwing his shovel onto Johnson's in a dejected pile, Albertyn gave her a nod before running off beyond the perimeter. Johnson followed, hot on his heels.
And when Agent Mack stepped out twenty minutes later, they were completely out of sight.
▸ Prompt Three: "Imagine while on an undercover mission, it started to snow. You and Dasiy couldn't help it; you buried all the SHIELD cars in snow before running away" - Courtesy of AoS Imagine.
››› | HYENADA | ‹‹‹
So what the hell is this thing?
This, is a project I've been working on to use up the 400 long list of prompts that is currently sitting unused on a document folder somewhere on my (D:) Drive. The principle behind it is simple: for every prompt, I'm going to write a short anecdote about an "unnamed" SHIELD Agent.
The Agents can be from anywhere, anyplace, anytime. Some may be from 2015, some may be from 1996. Some may involve with AoS characters, some may be completely out there and have nothing to do with them at all. It's important, in my opinion, to flesh out the characters behind the scenes, even if they are only seen for a short moment. Side/back characters flesh out main characters. So feel free to suggest any ideas for an anecdote!