Day 3

After a couple of showers and a new set of clothes, Grant's general appearance and odor roughly met the standards of free society. With one exception. "Your hair is disgusting," said Hand.

"Not a lot of salons on the cell block."

"Just give yourself a buzz cut and start over." She handed him a clipper set, but he didn't take it.

"I don't want to." Grant's upper lip curled. "My head gets cold," he grumbled.

"Perhaps you've heard of the 'hat', an exciting new invention."

Grant turned his head to the left, still maintaining an intensely sour look on his face. "There's a tattoo," he mumbled, too quietly to be understood.

"What was that?" asked Hand.

"A tattoo. On my head. Under the hair."

"Ah," she said with recognition, as if this were a common problem she faced in her line of work. Maybe it was. "A swastika?"

"No! I'm not a Nazi!"

"But you did get it in jail, didn't you?"

"Prison," corrected Grant. "And no, it was when I was in pretrial detention. In juvie."

Hand held out the clipper kit again. "It's going to be seen when you do your SHIELD intake, so we might as well handle it now."

Grant took the case this time, went into the bathroom and shut the door. He used the scissors to cut off big, irregular chunks of hair. Then he pocketed them – never know when they might come in handy. He set the clippers to a #2 and began passing them over his head, trying not to meet his own eyes in the mirror as he did so. Hand was playing mind games now. Put him off balance. Break him down. Humiliate him. He wasn't going to play. Shave his head? Sure. No problem. He wasn't going to lose it over something so stupid.

When he was done, he brushed as much of the hair as he could into the trash can and rinsed the rest down the sink. He splashed his face with water for no particular reason and walked back into the living room to face Hand.

"Here," he said, holding out the clipper case, and determinedly avoiding her gaze.

She shook it as she grabbed it, then, having not heard the exact set of clinks and thuds she expected, held out her hand. "Give me the scissors." She sighed. "If you were being smart, you would have taken something from within the clipper mechanism. Much harder to detect."

Grant ceded the scissors without argument. Hand still hadn't confiscated the knives he took from the kitchen.

"Well, come here," said Hand. "Let me see." She was still seated sideways on the couch, propping up her broken leg, so Grant dropped down on one knee. She didn't touch his head – he appreciated that – but leaned over so she could read the uneven lettering. "I ALONE AM THE GREAT WHITE HUNTER." She snorted. "Where'd you come up with that?"

Grant stood so his head wasn't at Hand's eyeline. "I heard it on the radio. It wasn't like I agreed with those guys. It was just a matter of finding a group to ally with."

"And you allied with the skinheads."

"Well, it wasn't like I was going to fit in with La Nuestra Familia," snapped Grant. "I wasn't one of them. I didn't believe it, that's why I picked some song lyric instead of a swastika or an eighty-eight. I just needed backup."

"You chose to join up with skinheads to protect yourself."

"It didn't matter. I got convicted and sentenced pretty fast, and then I wasn't with any kind of crew."

"It did matter," answered Hand, "because your fake belief strengthened others' real belief and, if for no other reason, because you allowed them to tattoo you."

Grant's shoulders dropped very slightly. "I'm not proud of it." He straightened again, scowling. "But it's not me. It's not like I wanted it. I did what I had to do."

Day 10

There was no schedule. Hand assigned Grant various tasks. She seemed particularly keen that he master geography, refine his French, and start learning Polish. When he passed a test, he got M&Ms. She didn't stop him from doing strength exercises, but said there was no point in bulking up.

"You should be doing endurance work," said Hand. "Go for a run."

Grant tipped his head meaningfully toward the front door that was supposedly secured with much more than a deadbolt.

"You never tried it? It opens normally from the inside."

She also gave him a book to read on the history of SHIELD. Hand herself spent a lot of time on the phone and in front of the computer, doing…something. Grant couldn't figure it out and Hand wasn't forthcoming. Once, it sounded an awful lot like hostage negotiation, but she was far too blasé for that to be the case.

The only constant was the one-two-three not-quite-a-harp music played on repeat every night as Hand went to sleep and Grant fiddled with the backlight on his watch.

Over a week had passed since Grant left the Massachusetts prison system, when Hand asked another one of the questions they apparently had to discuss at some point:

"Did you have any sexual contact with other inmates?"

"No. That's why I was in segregation. They put minors in seg for their own safety."

"How about with the corrections officers?"

Grant furrowed his brow, as though he didn't quite understand the question.

"I'll take that as a yes," said Hand.

"I didn't say yes," hissed Grant.

"Was there force?"

"No. It was a trade."

"For what?"

"You really want me to say it?" Grant grimaced. "It's stupid. It would be better if it was something bigger."

Hand waited.

"Salt and pepper. Since I didn't eat in the mess, I didn't get salt and pepper. The food was bad. I wanted it to be less bad. So I had sex with a guard for little shakers of salt and pepper."

"Man or woman?" asked Hand.

"Woman. I'm not queer."

"Were you attracted to her?"

"No."

"Then it doesn't really matter if you were attracted to her gender or not." Hand paused to let that sink in. "Joining SHIELD means erasing most of your past records. You won't get any chance to prosecute her."

"I wouldn't anyway. Her word against mine. Who'd believe me?"

"Any sex between a corrections officer and an inmate is rape in the eyes of the law. Consent is not at issue."

"Where's the proof we had sex? She gave me a condom. It was over a year ago."

Hand considered this. "Unfortunately, you're probably right."

"In books," said Grant, "people break down about stuff like that. They cry and shower with their clothes on. It was…I didn't like it, but it wasn't – I don't know – it wasn't terrible." Grant's upper lip curled. "I know that sounds like I'm being defensive, but I'm not. I don't have bad dreams about it. I don't feel scared or angry or numb when I think about it. It's just a thing that shouldn't have happened."

"Believe it or not, you're not the first person to have that reaction to sexual victimization. People vary from one another in their general level of resilience, and within themselves in how resilient they are to particular stressors. If you're not upset, you don't have to force yourself to feel that way."

They were both silent for several minutes.

"I know legally, it's one way, but," he inhaled silently, "in a way, I wanted it. Not exactly. Not with her. But solitary was like being in the ocean, when you're maybe a hundred yards out. It's not like you can't find the shore, but you don't have to see it. You can just float there and you stop knowing where you are because you're not touching anything. You're not touching anything, so you don't even know where your body is. You're unconnected to the map." Grant was looking out the window now, fingertips resting on the glass. "Have you ever been in solitary?" he asked.

"I've never been incarcerated for a crime," said Hand, "but yes, I've been in solitary confinement. About a year ago. I led a tactical squad that went after," she sighed, "you haven't heard of him, he's utterly unimportant, he called himself Carrion, like a dead animal." Hand rolled her eyes. "Anyway, I was captured. He intended to use me as a bargaining chip to convince SHIELD to give him access to 'secret cloning technology' which literally does not exist. He stuck me in a shipping container for twenty-six days, left me food and water. There was no torture. Like I said, he just wanted me as a hostage." She paused to briefly make eye contact with Grant. "SHIELD trains us on how to handle capture. It's a known risk. But sometime around the end of the first week, the isolation produced…I can't quite describe it. I started to feel very diffuse, as though I were more than one person. You know those little disagreements you have with yourself? Is it better to wash the dishes now, or watch some television? Did I really like that movie, or just the book it was based on? I felt as though two distinctly different people were there, one taking each side, and that I wasn't either one of them."

Grant thought Hand's eyes seemed closer together than usual, her brow forward and furrowed. She looked uncomfortable, like someone with a bad back who couldn't find a painless posture. "How did you get out?"

"It's not very exciting. SHIELD tracked Carrion down and arrested him. He gave over my location pretty much immediately. He never wanted me to die."

"What happened to Carrion? Does SHIELD operate prisons?"

"We do, for hostiles who can't be contained in civilian facilities," said Hand. "Carrion could have been housed in a regular jail, ("Prison," muttered Grant) but it didn't matter. He was dying, some kind of longstanding organ failure – he had hoped this imaginary cloning tech would save his life. He fell into a coma within a few days of his arrest, and he died not long after that."

"Do you hate him?" asked Grant.

"No, some of the people I've tracked deserve hate, but Carrion was more pathetic than anything else."

"But he hurt you."

"Well, I can't go around hating everyone who hurts me," said Hand, pleasantly indifferent. "I'm an agent. I get hurt a lot."

Day 15

"Ice that for fifteen minutes, twice a day, for the next week."

Grant nodded as he backed out the door toward Hand's SUV. He should have known that SHIELD would have a tattoo remover in their employ. They were an undercover agency – their agents probably got unwanted ink all the time. Still he glared at Hand and growled, "You did that on purpose," as he got in the vehicle.

"I certainly didn't take you to a appointment because I tripped," answered Hand crisply.

"You didn't tell me it was going to be a black guy." Grant's hands curled into fists so he wouldn't scratch the unbearably itchy spot on his head. And because he was pissed off.

"Agent Nickerson is a top-notch appearance artist. Adding or removing tattoos, scars, birthmarks. I've worked with him many times before."

"You picked him to humiliate me!" shouted Grant. "I told you I didn't mean it and you made me sit there with that guy staring at me, probably thinking I'm some kind of, of…"

"Skinhead?"

Grant said nothing.

"You may have chosen under duress, but you did choose. Not everyone who goes into juvenile detention affiliates, even loosely, with a hate group. You did. I wanted to make sure you understood the consequences of that choice."

"Bite me."

"You are responsible for your own actions and you are not blameless. It's not so long ago that you threaten to rape and murder me."

"I wouldn't have done it. I've never raped anybody."

"Yes, because empty threats of sexual violence cause no harm whatsoever." Hand paused. "Your actions have consequences."

Day 17

"I've been thinking," said Grant. "You said you hated a law my dad worked on. I don't know every vote he ever cast, but I know that legislators don't do anything alone. Every bill has a thousand fingerprints on it. And most of those guys have kids." He briefly looked Hand in the eye, to ensure she was following his argument. "You could have picked any of them. Why me?"

Hand nodded approvingly, as though she had been waiting for him to ask this question. "If you're accepted into SHIELD operations, you will very likely be asked to work on classified projects, undercover, even deep cover. You have to separate from your previous life. No one can know what you really do, who you really are. That's easiest, of course, if you don't really have a previous life. You've got no girlfriend, no children; you're estranged from your family; you didn't even have friends in jail."

"Prison," Gran corrected automatically.

Hand continued as if she hadn't been interrupted. "There's no one to notice if you just disappear, which is exactly what you're going to do. We already have paperwork in place that says you were transferred to another facility on the other side of the state. Of course, they'll have no record of your arrival. Meanwhile, we're creating a paper trail that shows a pattern of malingering on your part, faking sick for the attention, or just to get out of your cell. That will lead to documentation showing that you died of sepsis from an unmanaged burst appendix – shouldn't have cried wolf so often. On the very unlikely chance your family takes an interest, investigates, cares about the outcome, and decides to sue, we've set aside money to reimburse the state for their payout in a wrongful death lawsuit, but you and I both know that's not going to happen."

By the end of Hand's speech, Grant's mouth was hanging open, stunned. Offended, maybe. "I'm the right man for the job because – literally – no one cares if I live or die?"

"It wasn't the only criterion, but it certainly helped."

Grant didn't know how to feel about this. It wasn't as though he had failed to notice his unusually constricted social circle, but there was something so blunt about hearing his isolation was to be commodified. His throat felt tight and his face curled into a scowl. "God," he spat, "you are such a cunt."

Hand fixed him with a stare so piercing, he was unable to look away. "That was your one free pass. No matter how angry you get, you will not call me that again."

Day 21

"If we're not going to talk about the arson itself, let's talk about your older brother," said Hand.

"He used to make me suck his dick," said Grant, in a forced-casual tone.

"Mm-hm," said Hand agreeably. "How did he make you?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Did he hold you down, threaten you, bribe you, take advantage of you?"

"Threats. He would say that if I didn't do it, he'd make Thomas instead."

"So you were protecting your younger brother?"

Grant nodded.

Hand scratched her chin, as if considering this information. "Did your older brother ever protect you, do anything nice for you?

Grant furrowed his brow in though for several moments. "Our house was built into a hill, so you were farther from the ground in the back of the house than the front. My parents' bedroom was on the second floor, but from the back, that was at least thirty feet up. They had this balcony. It was, I don't know, maybe three feet wide, twelve feet long. Sometimes when our mother got mad at Christian, she would shove him out there wearing whatever he was wearing, no coat, and lock the doors. She'd leave him there for a long time. All night, even. She did it to me too, but not as often." Grant raised his hand as if to scratch his fading tattoo, but he resisted and returned it to his side. "One time, I was maybe nine or ten, she put me out there and it was late Fall. It was cold. Must not have been freezing, because it was raining. I wasn't out there that long. Maybe an hour. But by the time I came back in, I couldn't stop shivering. So I ran a bath, steaming hot. And I was just about to get in when Christian knocks on the door. He says, 'Put a towel on,' so I do. And he comes in and he says, 'You have to do it gradually or it's a lot worse.' He lets out some of the hot water and adds in a lot of cold. It's barely tepid. He says, 'Lay in that for ten minutes. Then add a little hot and wait some more. Don't go any faster than that.' He didn't say anything else. Just left."

"He was right," said Hand. "If you'd gone straight into the hot bath, you might have lost some fingers or toes."

"Hunh," said Grant.

"Was there any gain for him in helping you?"

"Keeping the family secrets under wraps. He's going into politics, you know. He wants to use our parents' legacy, not be the subject of some sordid tell-all."

"You think that's why he did it?"

Grant sighed. "Why do you think he did it? You want me to say that it had happened to him before so he had sympathy or something, so he helped me out of the goodness of his heart and he really is a good person and should be sorry sorry sorry I tried to kill him."

"That's the first time you've admitted that you were trying to kill him."

"I- I meant that, everyone thinks that-"

"Grant, I'm not stupid. Don't insult me. I've known since the minute I picked up your file."

They were both quiet for almost a minute.

Grant broke the silence. "He's a terrible person, and the world would be a better place without him."

"A lot of people say that about you."

"I'm not the one who broke me out of prison to join some secret paramilitary force."

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"I'm sorry I threatened to…sorry I threatened you. I wouldn't have done it, but I shouldn't have said it. Don't give me M&Ms for apologizing."

That night, like every night, Grant could hear the same plinking waltz play over and over again.

Day 22

"I thought you said you couldn't cook," said Hand, eyeing the pan of chicken and rice simmering on the stove top.

"Yeah, but I can read. And I'm sick of frozen pizza." Grant pointed to the cookbook that was open on the counter. "I just flipped through it until I found something you had the ingredients for.

Note: Grant's tattoo is a line from Nightwish's Tenth Man Down, and in context, the "great white hunter" probably refers to Death, but Grant doesn't know that.