The Boiler Room
An Agents of SHIELD fanfic by Aisling Yinyr Ngaio
After the superstorm, life at the Academy went back to normal. Or at least as normal as can be.
Donnie and Seth never returned. The lack of investigation subsequent to the superstorm led many to believe that either one or both of the absent cadets were responsible. One of their former classmates, Callie Hannigan, frequently recalled her conversation with the weird Ops agent just before the catastrophe to others, especially the last part of it, leading many to suspect the two had been expelled. But none of the students knew the truth about the ultimate fates of their classmates, and the faculty were unsurprisingly silent on the matter.
Given the circumstances, Agents Fitz and Simmons were urged to complete their lecture on potentiality to the Academy of Sci-Tech before leaving again, but the second time around was a much more somber occasion than before. There was no more laughter, nervous or otherwise, only the memory of the shaking Academy buildings fresh on the minds of each attendee.
The one most changed, though, was the Sci-Tech boiler room.
It didn't happen right away, and on the surface it was business as usual, but underneath the waves, the impact of the storm remained. It rippled throughout the student body, colouring their enjoyment of their sanctuary. That day was never forgotten. It could never be forgotten.
The faculty had known about their underground club all along. They knew long before the legendary Fitzsimmons had brought two unknowns into their secret hideout. It probably helped that there were a few among the faculty who were graduates of Sci-Tech themselves, but at least there had been a thin illusion about the Boiler Room being kept secret, given that none of them ever visited before that fateful day. One of the attractions of the Boiler Room was the very clandestine nature of the location, of having a secret clubhouse right under the noses of the faculty that tickled the cadets' fancy.
That mirage was gone now.
Officially, nothing was announced, and nothing would be. In a few years, Donnie and Seth would no doubt be soon erased from the Academy's memory, lost under the stream of other cadets, freshmen and graduates. They would probably be nothing more than a byline in an administrative document somewhere in connection with the incident. Disavowed and forgotten, defined by the man-made disaster that had literally shaken the foundations of the Academy of Sci-Tech.
The only remaining legacy was their everlasting presence in the Boiler Room, in the hushed, whispered legend passed around, of the hail superstorm conjured by two over-ambitious students in way over their heads, and the day the Boiler Room ceased to be a safe location by the student body.
The Boiler Room bar didn't move, not really, but the warmth and joy and energy previously abundant from the visiting student body slowly drained away. Cadets no longer hung around to socialise for longer than the beer they still came down to partake, forever haunted by the stark reminder of what had been in their midst, what they'd experienced, and the story that passed on from generation to generation, a better warning to the perils of potentiality than any subsequent lectures could impress.
- Finis -