Hand to Hand, Hand to Mouth

Chapter Three

The transport dropped me off at home. Door to door service is a pretty big perk of the job, especially since it's just a teensy bit impossible to take the subway to work when your office is a mobile, floating fortress. From the outside, my building in Brooklyn looks like a crumbling wreck of brick and stone. Inside, though, it's a shabby-chic marvel of original fixtures and vintage furniture. The apartments are all either owner-occupied or sublet and almost everyone knows each other by name. There's a lot of retired law-enforcement, so I fit in pretty well. In fact, my next door neighbor, Mrs. Hagherty's, late-husband was career SHIELD. She told me how proud he had been to serve with Colonel Fury, right up to the day he died in the line of duty – thirty years earlier. There was a picture of them, shaking hands. The Colonel in the picture was identical to the Colonel I knew. Pretty unnerving, no matter how used to that sort of thing I'd become.

I was happy to see Vedo clerking the desk in the lobby. He was my favorite. He had a look (tall, skinny, long hands) and a 'tude (street-smart and mouthy) that totally reminded me of Ange. His jaw dropped when I dragged ass into the lobby.

"Holy shit, girl," he said in his heavy Brooklyn-Puerto Rican accent. "What the holy Hell happened to you?"

I shook my head. "Long day at work."

"I got those, too, and you don't see me like a strangled cat." Vedo got up from behind the desk and offered me his arm. I declined with a weak wave of my hand. He sighed noisily and trotted to the elevator in front of me to hit the call button. The doors dinged open immediately, thank God. I couldn't have taken Vedo's disapproving headshaking. I chose my floor, leaned heavily against the back wall of the elevator and rallied my brain cells enough to ask him how his latest audition went.

He did a backwards slide with jazz hands as the elevator began to shut. "Apparently, I'm much too fabulous for them," he said in a singsong, the doors clicking together, separating us.

It was near-dark inside my apartment, dim light from the street casting a seedy glow. The place is small, but it's all mine. I bought it just over a year ago, before the second anniversary of White Day. It was after the mission to Malaysia, the one that had gone so totally, disastrously wrong. I was about to finish my second tour on board the Helicarrier; and, after I woke up from the coma, I realized that I needed to separate my work from my personal life if I was going to make it to my nineteenth birthday with most of my marbles still safely in my pocket.

The light on my answering machine was blinking. I pressed the play button and contemplated lying down on the kitchen floor. I had a message from Paige, which reminded me that the last time I had washed the kitchen floor had been the last time she had visited me, thereby totally negating my desire to lie down on it.

Paige drawled that she and Warren were going to be in the city the following week and insisted that my boyfriend and I join them for dinner. I snorted. It was hard enough to drag him away from work without throwing in an evening with those two. Paige had kept her powers while Warren hadn't. He actually seemed pretty stoked about the whole deal. Now he's just a handsome mondobillionaire, rather than a handsome mondobillionaire with wings. Lucky him.

Against all odds, Warren and Paige had stuck together and their level of happy, cutesy coupledom was enough to make me hurl. I deleted her message and made a silent promise to call her back when I was feeling less like freshly poisoned crap.

I was two weeks late picking up my dry cleaning, so sayeth Mrs. Wong from the machine. The sheets I had ordered--queen sized, red satin--were in, thus spoke Mandy from Victoria's Secret.

The answering machine beeped. I yawned.

I slouched into the bathroom and contemplated bath versus shower. A bath sounded better. Unfortunately, there was the very real possibility of my passing out in the water. While I'd die in my bathroom like a rock star, Doctor Makris would probably resuscitate me just to give me a lecture about undoing her hard day's life-saving work. Shower was the winner. I stood under the spray and rested my head against the wall. The water was almost hot enough to be uncomfortable. I breathed the steam in and tried to clear my head.

But I thought about Malaysia. I thought about White Day.

There have been a few serious markers in my life, events that so totally changed my direction that they stand out. The first was when I realized I was a mutant. The second was when my parents died. There was Australia. There was White Day. And then there was Malaysia.

Before Malaysia, I was part of a team - second-in-command to a Cape, an ancient necromancer named Vatinius. After Malaysia there wasn't a team left. There was only Vatinius and I. He came back half-crazy. I almost didn't come back at all. Malaysia changed me and it changed my status at SHIELD. The mission that destroyed my team and many others, that murdered my friends and broke a leader I respected and cared about, made me more valuable to the organization. It still makes me feel sick.

More than that, though, Malaysia was the last nail in the coffin that held my old life. It had been way over a year since White Day but I was still clinging to hope that I'd be able to somehow reclaim the life and the family that I used to have. After White Day, I found myself in Westchester, human, with memories of my own life and a life that wasn't really mine. I barely knew who I was, anymore. It wasn't long before Emma told me that I couldn't stay at the mansion, that I would have to make my own way in the world. That was a week before my seventeenth birthday.

I had nothing. The world was in chaos. After I left the mansion, I spent a month looking for the one person I thought would always accept me, would always love me. He didn't want to be found. I almost choked to death on my grief. I missed him. I missed my purpose. I missed my life.

And, oh God, I missed Jean. I missed her so much. Even more than I had before, if that was even possible. Jean had been my one real constant. After Logan left, she had asked me if I would allow her to become my legal guardian. It was exactly what I needed – to feel wanted without Logan around to insist. She had a genius for helping people. For making them feel at ease. For showing them how much she loved them. Jean encouraged me. Scolded me. Cajoled me. She accepted my decision to go to the Academy and insisted that I spend all of my vacations with her. She accepted my wandering ways and when she thought I'd gone too far or too long, she brought me back. She made me know that nothing would ever change how much she cared about me. Her death had left a vacuous hole in my life that seemed to gape even larger after White Day. Jean had been my mother. My sister. My comrade-in-arms. My friend. I sometimes wonder if that's why Emma kicked me out.

And sometimes I wonder if I would have ended up at SHIELD had Jean still been alive. I'm not sure. I was still a minor when I went to the Colonel for a job. While legality doesn't exactly apply to SHIELD, he asked me if I needed my guardian's permission. I told him that I didn't know, but the next time she resurrected herself, I'd ask. He seemed genuinely surprised. I think, when he'd mentioned it, he was talking about Logan. Totally ridiculous.

The shower was making me light-headed. I quickly washed my hair and body. The lather smelled like peppermint candy and Christmas. I wrapped myself in a big, soft towel and sat on the edge of the bathtub. I hugged myself with my arms and leaned forward, resting my forehead on my knees.

I thought about my life.

I thought about Des Moines.

I went to bed.

My pajamas were the softest pink flannel and had cartoon pictures of candy on them. I slipped into bed, grateful for the luxury cotton sheets. I curled my body against a pillow, clutching it to my chest and slid quickly into a dreamless sleep. It was nine o'clock.

I woke at ten to my Sidekick ringing at a deafening level.

"Fuck," I muttered and willed it to stop with the Jedi powers of my mind. The phone vibrated across the bedside table. I fumbled for it, my hands clumsy and thick feeling.

"Lee," I answered the phone, my voice all rough and croaky.

"Where are you?" was my boyfriend's brusque greeting.

"Home," I replied, not entirely able to keep the whine out of my voice.

"Well, get your ass back here," he said, ignoring how totally shitty I sounded. That really torked me off.

"Dude, I'm on med leave, which you would know if you had bothered to..."

"Transport'll be there in ten," he interrupted me. And then he hung up.

Fucker.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to quit. I wanted to smash my cell phone and go back to sleep. I wondered about the feasibility of kicking a man who was well over a foot taller than me in the face.

An hour before, I had been under strict orders to rest and recuperate. An hour later, I would be back on the Helicarrier and back to work.

Because that's just how my life is.