Three things I want to say:
1) A HUGE thank you to all of the people who visited my story, and an even bigger thanks to the two people who followed it: Marmite-1 and debatable-cerealkiller. Debatable was amazing enough to leave me a review and favorite! Thank you both so much and thank all of you sweeties who gave me a chance by clicking. You mean so much!
2) I completely forgot to mention the timeline of this story. Currently we're way back in the day. The main story kicks in when Amy's about sixteen, which you can say is about a month after the events of the first Iron Man movie. So our story is going to be set in like 2008. Currently Amy is eight, so if she's sixteen in 2008 and she's eight now then you can do the math to find our current year, I'm a writer not a mathematician.
3) This chapter is a little bit awkward for me. Like I said, I've been drafting this thing for years (since I was twelve) and the bits of this chapter have remained pretty much the same, but Monty's passing makes it a bit awkward because he died during what Amy goes through in this story (spoiler-ish: a coma).
Ok, now that I've said that and I've added like a hundred more words to an already nearly 3,400 word chapter, I'll stop.
Chapter 2 – Codenames
Latex and metal hung thick and smelly in the air. Wheels of a stretcher bounced and squeaked on linoleum. She never knew Oxygen had a taste until it was being forced into her lungs by a machine. It was heavy, dull, and stuck to the back of her throat like rice. The aura of the hospital wing watered down her head and a feeling of unease sat in the pit of her stomach. In her hand a cold, heartless crystal kept a tight grip that refused to release and she remembered horribly what she had been through near hours ago. Amy flickered her eyelids open as panic started beating her heart. With hazy vision she searched for anything comforting that she could find. When she spotted her mother clinging to her stretcher she felt her panic subside. Amy would have smiled if she had the strength. Having her mother next to her gave her a resolution that kept her strong and made her brave. It made her feel like she would make it, she just had to have Mom next to her.
But the doctors needed Catherine gone. They tried to coax her away and promised she could see her daughter after surgery, but Cat only shouted them down. Eventually doctors started shouting back. Amy swore at one point in the argument she had heard her docile mother scream profanities that Amy had never even known. It wasn't until her father stepped in that Cat let go. He tugged gently on his wife's shoulders until she released her grip. Cat fell from Amy's side limp and defeated, eyes dewy and worried. Amy didn't want her to go. She didn't want to face wherever the doctors were taking her alone.
Agent Hill sat in the waiting room with Catherine and Benjamin. She watched them carefully from across the room, studying Catherine the most. She had her profile on Ben, but Catherine was a new element and she seemed reactive. Maria had seen her treatment of the medical staff upon their insistence that she leave her daughter alone. It was vicious and dedicated. Dedication Maria liked to see, but the cruelty accompanying it didn't sit well with her. Now, Cat sat with her eyes set forward and stoic. Her husband tried to get her to eat something, but she never took anything and no words were spoken by her. Ben went back to fussing over menial things. He organized the magazine shelf by color and then by alphabetics, he aligned perfectly all the chairs in his row, he played with his food rather than eat it. When he found he had no more petty things to distract himself with he finally cried. It was soft and quiet with shivering shoulders and sniffles. Cat quietly rested a hand on his shoulder. Maria was polite enough to look away. She saw Coulson approaching her. Maria let him sit next to her and waited to hear a report.
"The surgery went fine. They didn't have to cut her hand off."
He was trying to be humorous. Maria didn't find it appropriate.
"Anyways," Phil continued, "They took the thing off of her and now the science division is analyzing it. There'll also be a few biochemists analyzing Amy's cells and looking for any inconsistencies."
"Tell the Mercads. Amy's father will want to be a part of the biochemistry."
"And her mother?"
"Will probably be a pain in our ass. But she's important, and even more so is her good side. Let her contribute however she can."
"What about security?" Coulson asked. Maria scoffed.
"It won't be a problem."
"Letting a civilian in on what could be a very sensitive case seems risky."
"Civilian?" Maria chuckled. "That's rich. Do you know anything about her family? Every woman with her maiden name can be found throughout the intelligence community. Her mother died under suspicious circumstances while working for the CIA. Her great-grandmother was actually in SHIELD when it first kicked up, and met Peggy Carter herself. Her two sisters are in the FBI and her aunt is still working for the CIA. Catherine may be a housewife but with a family background like that and the training her mother no doubt gave her you can hardly call her a civilian. I bet she knows more about our organization that most of our own low-level agents."
"I didn't know that," Phil said after some silence. Maria nodded her head once in a matter-of-fact way. "What do you know about Agent Mercad?" Phil asked, wondering if Ben was as interesting as Cat.
"First of his family to graduate high school and to go to college. He's not a genius with a high IQ by any means, hard as that is to believe. He doesn't let that stop him. He's spent years of studying and now he's one of our prominent biochemists because of his hard work, but you knew that. That's all anyone knows about him that's noteworthy. The remarkable thing about him is that he never lets you know anything remarkable about him. Nothing more than the basics that you wouldn't find anywhere but a job application. It's a shame he didn't get into spy work. His ambiguity would have made him perfect for it. I guess he's too soft for it. Mercad does visit the field sometimes though, when his skills are required, and agents always come back from his missions with reports on how well he kept his head and got the job finished. He's a valuable man to have in a crisis," Maria finished her summary of Ben and Coulson nodded in understanding.
Since he had no more questions, Phil got up and walked to the worried parents. Ben sat up with his back erect and his face void when he saw his higher-up approaching. Cat stared with harsh eyes and ice in her chest, holding a cup of untouched ramen noodles. Maria gauged the reactions and saw they were exactly what was expected. Ben stood hurriedly and urged Phil to let him on the biochemistry team. Catherine rose too, but slower. She stared down at Phil despite being inches shorter than him. She made it clear without having to say more than a sentence that she would be getting every status report, would be attending every meeting, and would tolerate little fuckery when it came to her daughter's well-being. Phil nodded his head at her demands without much protesting. Maria sat up and went to fill out her report to Director Fury. She let out a tense breath. At least it isn't a difficult case, all things considered.
Almost as if Maria's thoughts were a bad jinx, things took a turn for the worse. The anesthetics wore off but Amy wasn't waking up. The doctors declared it a coma and they had no idea how she had fallen into it. There were no allergic reactions, the extraterrestrial mineralogists and forensics team found nothing contaminated on her meteorite, and the biochemists turned up no inconsistencies in her cells. The days turned into a week and Maria's director was impatient with their lack of progression. Then the biochemists, with their most recent sample, found something.
Away from the research labs, upstairs and in the hospital wing, Amy Mercad laid in her hospital bed. Tubes stuck down her throat and IVs stuck in her arms. For once her mother wasn't by her side; she had gone down the hall to microwave a frozen dinner.
Catherine punched the numbers she needed in the microwave, probably overcooking the meal slightly. She sighed and tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for the seconds to tick by. A medical officer ran past her. She paid him no mind, assuming he was hurrying to some patient someplace in the building and nowhere near her daughter. As her microwave counted down three other medical officers ran past her. She followed them with her eyes down a ways and then looked back at her food, a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. She gnawed on her lower lip apprehensively, foot tapping out of nerves rather than impatience now. What if they were going to her daughter? Cat stole a glance down the hall and saw no one. She sighed, ran long fingernails through the roots of her blonde mane, and stood by her food.
Then the shouting began. Catherine abandoned her meal immediately and began running at break-neck speed down the hallway. She heard the crashes and bangs grow in volume as she rushed around a corner. And then-
A doctor was blasted through the wall. His body landed with a smack on the hallway floor, dust swirled in the fluorescent light, debris and rubble laid about the floor. Catherine didn't go into the door to her daughter's room, but rather peered through the hole that blew out almost the whole wall.
Her daughter lay in her bed, still in her coma but convulsing severely. Sparks thick and powerful like lightning flung from her body and ricocheted around the room, zapping anything metal at all.
"We have to get out of here!" A nurse shouted.
"We need to help her!" A doctor responded as they ducked a bolt.
"If we stay she'll blast us through the wall too!"
"And if we don't do something soon she could die!"
"Goddammit, you can stick around and get killed! I'm getting out of here!"
The nurse ran out of the room and Amy's doctor was left alone with a girl mutating right before their eyes. To add to the chaos, Ben and his bio-chem team came rushing down the hall and stopped in front of Catherine.
"We found mutation in her cells," Ben said excitedly for reasons Catherine could not comprehend. "It's amazing! We think it has something to do with the crystal, but whether it does or doesn't her cells are mutating! They were vanishing and reappearing and there were little sparks all over the place and tiny force fields. Cat, our kid has superpowers! It's- Whoa!" Ben ducked as a lightning bolt lashed out into the hallway. He took a look at his comatose daughter and nodded. "Oh, so you already know."
"Yeah, I already know!" Cat shouted. "What do we do?"
"There's nothing to do really. We have to wait out the storm. Her cells should stabilize themselves. They did in the lab," Ben shouted just to be heard over his daughter's new powers blasting the room she was laid in to pieces.
"This isn't a lab and it's not just a small sample. This is her! This is our Amy. How do you know it will work?" Catherine was begging for a clear answer on this one. Ben didn't give it to her at first. He watched as sparks flew from his daughter's body, force fields were thrown up and deleted, she shifted in varying degrees of visibility, and her seizure worsened. He looked back to Catherine with something steady in his eyes.
"I believe in her," Ben said surely. "...And the science behind this."
"My suspension of disbelief isn't that flexible."
"Has it tried doing stretches? Perhaps yoga?"
"Ben," Cat said irritably.
"Sorry."
The churning chaos came to a stop. Ben, Cat, and the extras in the background turned their heads to see her, Amy, laid on her hospital bed. Her body was still like a lonesome lake as she slept soundly. Her skin glowed purple and shimmery as her powers found their home in her body. Slowly the coloration faded and Amy returned to her natural skin tone. The only sign she had ever been through this ordeal was her hair – it was now fluffy and rippled and entirely electric in itself.
The last remaining doctor took a step up to Amy. They reached out a hand, poking and prodding gently. When they found that no electric shocks were being unleashed they relaxed and began a small checkup. Once complete they looked up and faced the crowd.
"She seems to be fine."
A sigh of relief. Cat and Ben approached their daughter hurriedly and stood next to her, not knowing what to do except be by her side.
"What the hell..." A voice came from behind them. Catherine and Benjamin turned. Stood before them was a man draped in darkness from his trench coat to his pants to his shirt to his boots to his eye patch. Ben's lip became a thin line and nervousness was in his eyes.
"Director," he addressed, not looking at the man but at the rubble the hospital wing had become.
"What happened?" The Director gestured to the mess around him, a real testy flare in his eyes. Do you know how expensive this motherfucking program is? Do you know how hard it is to get funding and grants? And now there's a motherfucking wall blown out. Do you see this shit? Do you see it? Why the fuck is it happening? That would have been the monologue everybody guessed was playing in Director Fury's head as he glared at his agent, although some may argue there wasn't enough use of the word 'motherfucking'. It was an annoying mis-characterization, really. Ben fidgeted with his hands.
"Well, sir," Ben began, avoiding eye contact. "It would appear that my daughter - Miss Amy Mercad - has mutated."
"Mutated."
"Yes, sir."
Director Fury's demeanor changed to one with piqued curiosity. He walked with his heavy steps to Amy's bedside. She remained unconscious with her doctor fussing over how they needed to rehook machines and how anything metal just wouldn't do anymore with this new electrical thing. Director Fury looked only at Amy's sleeping face for a brief moment before whipping around and strutting out of the room without a word.
Catherine didn't like it. She knew the intelligence community, and silence was never anything positive in her book. Her eyes narrowed as she watched Director Fury's escaping back. No, whatever he was thinking of doing she couldn't allow it. Never.
Director Fury called for a meeting the next day. Ben and Cat sat through it, listening to the director drone about Amy's medical condition. But then he got into the crystal and what it had done. Then he got into Amy's mutation and what it must mean for her future. Ben gave a nervous glance to his wife as his boss spoke. Cat sat with her bottom lip being gnawed in frustration and a glare on her face aimed at the director. Ben laid a hand over her clenched fist. Cat rolled her shoulders once and relaxed her posture, but she still glared as Fury spoke.
"...and so that's why I believe it is in Amy's best interest for SHIELD to keep a security detail on her. But it shouldn't end there. She has new, volatile powers that she couldn't hope to control. Not without training. I propose that she be taken into SHIELD – but only as a trainee, not an agent at all. We can assist her in learning how to use her new abilities and teach her how to defend herself without them," Director Fury finished. He waited patiently for the Mercads response. It was quiet for a long minute as Ben and Cat spoke with each other through eyes and facial expressions. Eventually Catherine leaned forward.
"No," she said simply. Ben sighed.
"I think we should leave it up for Amy to decide," Ben said. Director Fury nodded once in agreement.
"Right," Cat began with sarcasm wet like freshly applied nail polish. "Because eight-year-olds are known for their amazing ability to make informed, well-thought out decisions regarding their entire future." She turned her attention to the director, full of hostility and bad memories. "I know exactly how this game is played. First it's just training to 'defend themselves' while they're young and then as they grow up and people like you, Director, silently pressure them to join the agency until they can't take it anymore! Then it becomes missions and danger and the risk of dying constantly. I know about this shit and I'm not letting my daughter go through it too! You that you can't have her! Not you or anyone else!" Catherine' outburst cruised through the room and wrapped all its listeners in a dense fog like those on winter mornings. Cat sat quietly, almost regretting her statements after some time of silence.
"I agree," her husband finally said. She looked at him with bright hope, so glad that he would back her up. "But do we really have a choice?" He added. Cat was crestfallen, and so was Ben, because they both knew what the answer to that was. "She needs to be trained, she needs to protect herself, and she needs people to watch out for her. We can't give her that. We just don't have the resources. Nobody does except SHIELD."
"That's the thing I guess. No matter how you twist it, she really doesn't have a choice," she told her husband quietly. Cat gave a cynical bark of laughter. "Asking for permission is just a formality, isn't it?" She said, locking eyes with Director Fury, and for almost a second she thought that he looked slightly regretful about drafting a child into this world of spies. But no, that would defy everything she knew about spies, and she knew everything about spies. With gritted teeth she said to him, "Fine. Recruit her."
It had been a month, one full month since that meeting, when Director Fury's office phone rang. He picked it up and put the receiver to his ear, still filling out paperwork he had.
"Director Fury of SHIELD. This had better be important," he answered.
"Director," Maria's voice spoke, "It's Amy."
"Did she knock out another one of my walls, Hill?"
"No, sir, she's awake," Maria's voiced crackled over the line.
His long trench coat whipped about him as he marched down the hallway of the hospital wing. He took one sharp turn, stepped through a door, and stood intimidatingly in the frame. The conversation of the room ground to a halt. They all stared at the director. Cat with a distrusting glare, Ben with the respect he was expected to give, and little Amy with utter confusion and slight nervousness.
"Hello, Miss Mercad," he said with the authority of a leader but with the gentleness to appeal to a child; a well-made cocktail for manipulating kids. Catherine would guiltily admit she'd used this type of thing to get Amy to eat her vegetables. Director Fury stepped inside and sat on the end of Amy's bed, comfortably away but still close enough to matter. Amy looked at him with curiosity more than anything now.
"Are you a spy?" She said in an almost-whisper.
"Yes, I am," Fury responded.
"Cool."
"Yes," Fury said mildly. "Amy, do you know why you're here?"
"I done goofed up," she said simply and without any regret. Fury let out a well-timed chuckle. Catherine rolled her eyes at him.
"Yes, you 'goofed up'. Now the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division has to step in."
"That's a mouthful."
"Yes, it is-"
"Like di-"
"Amy!" Her father reprimanded.
"-ll pickles," she finished hastily. Director Fury chuckled honestly this time while Ben crossed his arms and gave his wife a distinct wonder-where-she got-that-from face. Catherine returned with a bite me look on her's.
"So," Director Fury began again, "My agency is now going to be on the task of protecting and training you. I will be assigning-"
"Does this mean I get to be a spy too?! Will I get to be a spy?" She asked, jumping up and beaming at him.
"Stop," Director Fury commanded. Amy stilled, but kept her giddy smile. "Whether you become a spy or not is up for you to decide. We will only be training you how to defend yourself and use the abilities you've acquired. You could call them something like superpowers. I'll be assigning agents Barton and Romanoff as your instructors. They will be in charge of your well-being while you work with us. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir," Amy said in mock-seriousness.
"Any questions?"
"What are my superpowers?" Amy asked.
"Ah," Director Fury pulled out a file from inside his coat. "That would be electrical generation and manipulation, force field casting, and invisibility. Basically," he added because he could see Amy was about to interrupt again with another question, "you can shoot lightning, make shields, and disappear. That's just what we've discovered this month. We don't know if more powers could develop." Fury closed the manila folder and put it back in his coat.
"Cool," Amy whispered to herself.
"If that's all..." Fury got up to leave.
"Wait!" Amy urged. Director Fury stopped and stared down at her. "Can I get a codename? Because, I mean, I think I should get a codename. And I learned this vocabulary word yesterday- er, a month ago. Sorry, its weird, like, time travelling by sleeping for a long time," she said with her perspectively-correct definition of a coma. "But anyways since you mentioned invisibility and stuff I figured that if I got a codename I'd want to be called it and that it would be the vocabulary word," she rambled on with her brown eyes shining.
"And what would this codename be?" Director Fury asked.
Amy took a small breath, exuding her excitement for her new future and the codename that would carry her through it. With a set tone she learned from her mother and with eyes full with hope that she learned from her father she spoke it.
"The Mirage."
[cinemasins voice] Roll credits!
I'll see you guys soon! I already have the next chapter written (just about this whole thing is pre-written) so I think I'll post it in about three days.
