Ryoko, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Disclaimer: The characters being used are the copyrighted property of their respective owners. The following fan-fiction is for entertainment purposes only, no profit is being made.
A/N: Not much to say, except I did 26 drabbles because I was too lazy to come up with a full-fledged story. If anyone finds inspiration in this mess, and wants to use it as a springboard, be my guest.
Warning, no betas were used in the writing of this fan-fiction! I did proofread it several times though.
Summary: A disjointed collection of alphabetical non-chronological A/U drabbles. Tenchi didn't find Ryoko first, SHIELD did, and now she works for them.
AWAKE.
It takes a whole month for her body to regenerate: for skin to become supple and pink, for muscles to fill in between skin and bones, and for her hair to return to its wild and spiked form.
The room is white and sterile and reeks of ammonia and metal, machines beep in the background.
Ryoko panics and rips wires from nose and arms. Her legs are wobbly/weak from disuse, her mind is confused/disoriented.
Her gems are gone.
Ryo-ohki is gone.
Her powers are gone.
She is all alone in a strange place on a strange planet.
She runs.
BROOM CLOSET.
Ryoko hides in a small room that smells of must and cleaning products. She huddles in the farthest corner, squeezes her eyes shut, and tries to block the blaring klaxon of the alarm that's alerting everyone to her escape.
She doesn't notice Natasha's entrance into the room until she feels a cold hand on her shoulder.
Ryoko jumps, and her eyes snap open. She stares at the other woman fearfully. She's still weak from her long sleep.
"No one is going to hurt you."
Ryoko believes her instantly, takes her hand and follows the Russian into the corridor.
COULSON.
In the office, Ryoko likes to tease Coulson just to see if she can get a rise out of him. Outside the office, she likes to drag him to bars where they match each other shot for shot until she is nothing more than a quivering mess going on about a demon named Kagato, and he's still that infuriating calm.
He then gathers her, pays the tab, brings her home where he lays her on her bed.
The next morning she awakens to a bottle of water, a bottle of aspirin and the lingering effects of too much sake.
She still likes to tease him, but she calls him Agent Coulson or Coulson-sama when she's feeling particularly Japanese.
DOCTORS.
Ryoko hates going to the doctors. (The smell of ammonia and metal reminds her of time before her memory was fully formed.)
No matter how injured she is, she'll grit her teeth, and stumble home after her debriefing. She'll then fall onto the nearest flat surface (floor, sofa, table, it doesn't matter).
When she wakes up hours later it's to Natasha or Clint or both tutting at her reckless stubbornness. They wipe dried blood from her skin and keep her company marveling quietly as her bones slowly knit themselves together.
God, how she wishes she still had her gems.
EMPATHY.
Ryoko's first instinct is to scoff at Steve, seventy years is nothing compared to nearly 700 years.
But he once told her, that there are times when he dreams of being conscious/paralyzed, in the ice. He hates the cold and confined spaces just as she does, but he's a soldier just as she is, so they muscle through and ignore the creeping fist of fear/panic.
At the tower, she keeps the curtains opened wide so they can always see the sky, and the room is always kept slightly warmer than necessary, especially during the winter months.
Steve knows why she does this, it's as much for him as for her, and it's their little secret.
FORGETFUL.
Even after nearly a whole decade, Ryoko occasionally forgets that she can not fly anymore. She'll get her body in position, give the mental command, and wait for something to happen, only to stumble as nothing happens.
Out of all her missing powers, flying was her favorite, the one she misses the most. The ability to touch the clouds with her bare hands, the feel of the wind through her hair – all of it, gone.
Nobody knows of her secret pain, or her secret jealously of Iron Man.
She's learned to hide her tears of dejection well.
GATES.
On his 15th birthday Tenchi finally musters the courage to steal the unguarded keys from his grandfather's desk.
He was finally going to see once and for all whether the legends of the demon were true.
When he got there, he saw the inner gate was swinging back and forth with a ripped seal, and a rock with a hole in it.
Down the smooth, steep hill he was greeted with an empty crypt and a tunnel that stopped in a dead-end.
Disappointed, he left and lived a long, quiet life.
HAWKEYE.
Barton is not a particularly Japanese surname, but somewhere along his bloodline, someone slept with the self-exiled prince of Jurai.
So now he has just enough royalty to touch the Tenchi-ken without being electrocuted, but not much else.
(How they knew about his great-great-grandmother's indiscretion should not have come as a shock to him, but it did. A little.)
The useless hilt with its dull, dead, red gems that can't be removed, resides in a heavily fortified safe deep within the bowls of S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters.
Ryoko doesn't want it (can't touch it); Hawkeye prefers the dependability of his bow and arrows.
IMPRINT.
Natasha is the first person she sees when she awakens from her 700 year slumber. (She doesn't remember the little boy who visited her cave.) The Russian's face is hard/unforgiving lines and cold duty, but Ryoko bonds with her.
Without her gems she is nothing more than a child. She follows the agent around base like a duckling, asking questions, wanting to go on missions with her, and just being a general pain in the ass.
Clint likes to tease, call her mommy. At least til she punches him in the gut.
Natasha doesn't push Ryoko away, she see in her amber eyes what she sees in her own: death, blood, a killing-machine.
JERK.
Tony is a jerk.
He's a cocky bastard, who thinks he's the greatest genius on earth.
He took one look at her spiked black hair and nicknamed her Goku, or any number of anime characters that he had at his mental disposal.
Yet, there are times when she wants to grab him and hug him for all he's worth. There are things he says, phrases that trigger deeply buried memories, and they take her breath away. In these moments she sees a flash of red hair and everything freezes.
They think he's gone too far with his teasing, they're wrong.
It's a memory, a name... mother.
KAGATO.
Ryoko awakens drenched in her own sweat – again.
Afterimages of her nightmare flicker and fade into the surrounding darkness, and she takes deep breaths to regain her equilibrium.
She dreams of being on the Soja, of Kagato's hands wrapping around her throat telling her how she'll never escape him.
She is an imperfect monster, his little marionette, his little death-dealer, he coos almost lovingly into her ears.
(He's wrong, she's so much more now.)
Kagato is worse than Loki, not that anyone would believe her. But so long as the gems stay hidden, she'll never worry of being proven right.
LIGHT-YEARS.
Princesses Ayeka and Sasami have traveled light-years from their home planet on a wild goose chase to find their older brother, and bring him home.
Ayeka wants to rescue him from the monster-woman who nearly killed her sister, destroyed her planet, and ruined her life. She wants to drag Yosho home, marry him and at long last have her happy ending.
But without the sword's activation, there is nothing for her tree-ship to lock onto.
The sisters remain in peaceful suspended animation, the thrum of Ayeka's ship's engine the only sound as they sail past our Solar system ever further in to space.
MUMMY.
Natasha gathers the bony body up and runs to their makeshift entrance in the back of the cave. It – she (she can tell by the soggy remains of her clothes that the package is female) is ice cold, and barely weighs 25 pounds. She doesn't understand the big deal over a mummy, but then again she's not paid to think, just do.
Hawkeye is halfway up a steep incline where he'll retrieve a seemingly equally useless item.
They have less than two minutes to make the extraction before they are caught.
They make it in under 90 seconds.
An explosion marks their exit, closing the tunnel so they can't be followed.