Hey! We've finally reached the part of the fic that we've been building towards since we posted the prologue two and a half years ago. Enjoy!
-2022
I would love to say that I did a brilliant job of limping around the world and leading HYDRA on a merry little chase.
Unfortunately, that wasn't quite the reality, and I almost got caught on multiple occasions. Slightly less unfortunately, I managed to survive for a good six months without actually getting captured, tortured, or murdered, which was a plus (although I can't add 'shot' or 'stabbed' to that list, but we get what we can, right?). By my standards, this was one of the best trips abroad that I'd ever had.
And, bonus, my leg healed up pretty quickly as well, so I just carried around my nice braces in the knowledge that I would probably need them again (which I did after getting shot in the leg in rural Ukraine).
So, after a few close(ish) shaves, my limited ability to surf the dark web seemed to show me that HYDRA hadn't actually got a clue where I was, which was exactly what I wanted. There were cold leads popping up all over the place in Europe and North Africa thanks to my escapades, and a few more in the US (which I attributed to Coulson, even though I hadn't asked him to).
It seemed logical to me that I should head for South America then, to complete my world tour. I figured stopping in Colombia or Venezuela might be a bad idea, considering the large US intelligence networks in both, so I decided to make a beeline for Perú, specifically Lake Titicaca.
I'd always wanted to go there, and it might prove to be a suitable location for my most audacious stunt yet.
But first off, I'd need to find a coroner. With a bit of a cash nudge, I figured that I could get HYDRA off my back again by getting a real death certificate this time.
However, because my life is increasingly ridiculous and nothing (nothing) ever goes to plan, some stupid informant must have been a little loose-lipped, and next thing I knew, I was quite literally running for the hills to avoid no less than seven HYDRA agents on mopeds armed with machine guns.
Ah, good times.
I sprinted for the nearest building, a dingy looking house, and dived through the nearest window, praying that I wasn't going to literally die in the process. That or get sued by some poor Perúvian that wasn't expecting an assassin to perfenestrate himself in the middle of the Andes.
Okay, small mercies; the glass wasn't reinforced and shattered nicely, even if it did slash up my palms a little as I rolled through the fragments and jumped straight up again, slamming my way through a thin door that led back outside again (and attempting to close it behind me to vaguely cover my tracks), hurtling up a gravel drive towards another, equally dangerous-looking building that really should have a had a 'derelict, do not enter' sign instead of the battered sandwich board reading 'hotel' and 'vacancies'.
Just around the corner (broken windows in your immediate sightline make the chain of events rather obvious, even if you are a HYDRA agent with a brain the size of a pea), there was another ground-floor window that seemed to me like a decent victim, so I chucked myself through that one as well, rolling over into a minefield of broken glass with a slight groan (this window had leaded lights; they're hard).
"Fuck." I muttered into the dirty floor; that window was a lot higher up than I thought.
I swore again as I heard the sound of heavy boots, something skittering across the floor, and a gun clicking in front of me. This room was apparently occupied.
I twisted painfully over to look my attacker in the face before I got shot whilst cowering on the floor (kind of embarrassing; I hadn't intended to actually die in South Peru), and found myself in for a bit of a shock (and a stroke of luck, I supposed).
I felt my face split wide into my trademark grin, and raised my hands (well, hand; my right shoulder didn't really love me after the pounding it had just taken) into a sarcastic impression of a terrified surrender. "Long time no see, dude."
Clint stared down at me, gun hanging limp in his lowered hand. "What the fuck are you doing in South Perú?"
I let my hands drop back to the floor. "That's not a nice way to greet a long-lost friend now, is it?"
He rolled his eyes and proffered a gloved hand, hauling me unceremoniously to my feet. "Next time try being a little bit less long-lost, and we'll see," he retorted, holstering his gun while I brushed the worst of the glass off and surveyed the damage (shallow cuts and grazes, mostly). "Who's after you this time?"
I rubbed a hand through my hair, dislodging a fine rain of shattered fragments. "HYDRA; who'd you think?"
"How long?" He took the gun back out of his holster, and, upon scanning me briefly up and down, chucking me one of his spares.
"Oh, like twenty seconds, tops," I replied, casual as two friends just discussing the ins and outs of the autumn weather rather than the impending death-storm of seven (okay, six, one of them may have driven into a bridge) heavily-armed agents who really wanted to kill me.
Clint shook his head slightly. "You're an asshole," he declared, turning around and heading out of the room and back into the main hotel.
He didn't need to say anything or even make a gesture for me to fall into stride behind, keeping my eyes on his six while he surveyed in front of us, making for a back exit that he'd thankfully scoped out beforehand.
"You're fucking lucky we ended up in the same remote part of Perú." I could literally sense his eye roll.
"Hey! Puno isn't that remote!"
Clint spun around to glare at me. "The only two flights from the airport here go to Lima, which, in case you haven't brushed up on your geography, is in the same fucking country."
Okay, so maybe he had a point.
"Who says I flew here? Money doesn't grow on trees, you know."
"No, but it does come your way when you decide to play mercenary, doesn't it?" I was glad that he wasn't looking in my direction as I winced slightly. He lifted his head sharply as he pushed the back door open, but there wasn't anything nasty waiting for us outside this exit. The muffled pop-pop-pop of machine gun fire sounded behind us, presumably as the agents discovered my entrance route.
Clint hopped onto the motorbike parked in the dust outside and gestured for me to get on the back, passing me his gun as well. "You're on deterrent duty," he snapped, not saying any more of it due to the slight 'mortal peril' of our current situation, but I knew that I was going to be in for it if we survived this.
He shook his head as if to say 'here goes nothing', and revved the engine. We blasted out of the car park in a swirl of dust, nice and fast as we alerted everybody in a hundred-metre radius to exactly where we were.
As Clint blasted through the streets of Puno, I trained my gun on our Nazi pursuers. It wasn't the best shot, considering the fact that I didn't have a sniper rifle and we were going at 70 odd miles per hour, but by the fact that two of them fell to the ground within two shots, I'd say I wasn't doing too badly. Clearly I hadn't lost my touch as much as I'd thought.
Clint took a tight turn way too fast, and I had to drop the gun in my hand in favour of grabbing onto him and not falling off. I had a second, though, so, while a blow, it wasn't going to be the end of the world. One more HYDRA moped hit the wall that we'd narrowly avoided and burst into flames. Three down, three to go.
We slowed down a little as Clint skillfully threaded a path through the narrowest streets, weaving between market stalls, pedestrians, cats, motorbikes, baskets of fruit and other random debris. Gunfire sounded behind us, and a bullet burned a searing path just over my left shoulder.
I turned around in my seat and fired three more haphazard shots. None hit the mark, but one bike veered into a fish stall and had to stop, back up and start again, so my efforts weren't completely for naught.
After another few whiteknuckled minutes, one more agent had fallen off our trail, and Clint careened onwards, now making for the main road, when he took yet another sharp bend at just the wrong angle.
The front wheel skidded on a patch of oil at the very tightest part of the bend, and he completely lost control.
I grabbed the back of his tac vest and hauled him backwards, throwing myself off the bike and dragging him with me, even as the doomed vehicle crashed through the nearest wall and exploded in a searing fireball of heat (I didn't want to know what was in that warehouse, I didn't think).
The two of us skidded and rolled on the filthy asphalt, coming to a stop in a tangled heap just as the last two bikes came flying around the corner, both of them already slowing down to come in for the kill (although neither tried to run us over, for which I'll admit I was grateful. Small mercies, right?).
I felled the first with a bullet clean between the eyes, but I don't think anybody would actually have been able to simultaneously shoot the pair of them with a single shot, which was unfortunately all that I had time for.
Even as I was wheeling around to aim at the last agent, I was throwing myself to the side in case he went for Clint.
The bullet entered just below my left collarbone, sending me crashing to the ground as my final shot found its mark in the agent's thigh. Clint seized his momentary distraction to take the gun from my slightly-slack fingers and finish him off before he could prove any more of an inconvenience.
I curled into myself on the ground and tried to relax, silently terrified as my breath hitched slightly.
Fuck, that stung.
Clint swore. "You fucking self-sacrificing idiot. Why the fuck would you do that? Especially in the middle of fucking Perú."
I grinned weakly up at him. "I'm already legally dead; there's going to be less paperwork for Coulson if I die and you don't."
Clint glared at me as he pulled a bandage out of his pack. "That's such a stupid fucking statement. You have no fucking idea." As he pressed the bandage onto my wound, he paused. "Wait, Coulson sent you here?"
I coughed out a weak laugh, and my chest rattled. Not a good sign. "Not to Perú exactly, but yeah, he facilitated my escape from the hellscape that is America right now."
Clint scowled, and rummaged in his deep pockets for a phone. "I'm calling this in. Don't go anywhere; oh, wait, you can't, because you've just been shot when I was wearing a goddamn vest, you absolute moron." He dialled the number. "At least, you can't get away from me this time."
There was a tinny click as the call connected. "We need a medevac ten minutes ago," Clint snapped, still glaring. "Can you do that? Yes, of course my tracker's on; I'm not a complete idiot. No, I'm not going anywhere. Yes, I know I'm on a busy road, but what part of need a medevac makes you think I'm able to just up and move to a more convenient location?" Clint huffed a sigh. "Of course I don't sound injured; I'm not the one that needs it. Besides, what does 'sounds injured' even mean? Yes, I know it's not protocol to take in civilians, and no, I'm not going to argue with you. If you want me to stay on this line then I suggest you shut up and get a team on their way, now." He hung up the call after another five or so seconds and pushed it deep into his pocket.
"That didn't sound like Coulson," I remarked, trying to not talk too much, as the adrenaline of the situation was beginning to ebb, replaced by the furious stinging of full-body road rash and the deep, debilitating throb of an injury that was really quite serious.
Clint rolled his eyes. "That's because it wasn't. Coulson's pretty much gone to ground. Something about trying to protect the kids he'd been working with over the last couple of years." He saw the slightly confused expression on my face, and continued. "Fury allocated him another team and transferred him to keep up the pretense of his death, you know? We've not been in as close contact with him as you perhaps thought, but he still texts me or Nat periodically with a status update and to sappily say that he misses us."
I nodded, a little breathless and not desperate to waste words when simple body language would do.
Clint sat back onto his haunches with a wince, and brushed a fine dusting of soot from the explosion from his trousers. He glanced warily at the road beyond the bend, and I shared his concern. We were very exposed here, should any more agents be on their way.
"We should get off the road," I ground out, trying to psych myself up for it and look a little less like I was five minutes from death.
Clint raised a single eyebrow. "Be my guest. If you can get yourself off the ground in the condition you're in, then I'll think about it, but I'm not going to risk making that worse and in my personal, medical opinion, you should stay put. We'll work out the rest if we have to."
Challenge accepted. I closed my eyes for a couple of seconds, took a few sharp, shallow breaths, and then rolled over onto my non-injured side, curling one leg beneath me and driving my good arm into the ground to push myself up into a sort of half-kneeling position.
"Woah, woah! Jesus, I was kidding! Lie down, you absolute imbecile!" He lunged at me, giving me a brief shove (which hurt almost as much as my efforts to stand), and easing me back down into a recumbent position, his pale eyes filled with concern.
"Imbecile is a big word for someone that never went to college." I smirked up at him from my position on the ground.
Clint flipped me the bird instinctively, but he was still anxiously scanning the road. "For fuck's sake, you dropped out after, like, a semester. You're not exactly a shining example of a college graduate, are you?"
I laughed slightly, which morphed into a painful, rattling cough that shook my whole frame and left me turned over onto my side again and curling into myself. I shivered a little, despite the sultry heat.
Clint very gently eased me back into a lying-down position, taking off his tac vest and using it as a lumpy pillow to prop up my head and chest (despite my protests that he should probably continue to wear it). After a couple of minutes in which I continued to cough despite this, he changed tack and sat behind me, propping me up against him in an awkward half-sitting position to try and make it easier to breathe.
He unholstered his gun and held it loosely in one hand. I could tell he was nervous from the slightly forceful way that he exhaled, trying to keep his sniper's calm.
I could tell that I was getting weaker; it was getting harder to focus, and my breathing was getting slower with every passing minute.
"Hang in there, dude," Clint muttered. "Don't you even think about going and dying on me now, yeah?"
I nodded slowly, my head lolling a little.
I startled as I heard a car engine in the distance. Fuck. That better not be HYDRA.
There was a soft click as Clint armed the gun.
A black sedan (sort of fancy, but in a cheap way) appeared, shimmering on the horizon like a mirage.
"I think that's the medevac," Clint sighed, obviously relieved.
He didn't put the gun down, though; not until the car had stopped and a couple of harried-looking junior paramedics jumped out.
"Who's this?" they asked, prepping a stretcher. I rolled my eyes; they could have just lifted me up; I wouldn't have minded. "You know that we can't take civilians back to base. Best we can do is get him to a local hospital for you."
Clint stood up as they got me on the stretcher and into the (surprisingly spacious) back of the car, holstering his gun. "This is Agent Perseus Jackson, and you will take him back to base with you, even if I have to shoot your junior driver to get there. Understood?" He placed his hand on the butt of his gun in way of a threat.
They nodded nervously and got out of his way as he jumped into the back of the car to sit with me on the journey.
"That was surprisingly pain-free. What have you done to them in the past to scare them into submission like that?"
"Stop talking!" The entire car snapped back at me. Great, now there were three of them.
I gave Clint my very best pleading expression, keeping my mouth shut this time around.
He rolled his eyes. "I think news spread of that one time I threw a junior doctor through the plate-glass window back at HQ when he wouldn't let me in to go and see Nat."
I almost started laughing, but even the thought of it made pain spike in my chest, so I settled for grinning broadly instead.
You know, I could really picture that (and I'd always wanted to break that huge window. You know, for science and all that).
But I restrained myself and didn't mention it, as I didn't want to be denied medical attention whilst kind of bleeding out. Angry medics were not the best people to be around, especially when dying.
"Which base are we even going to? I don't remember SHIELD even having a Peruvian base."
"It doesn't," the driver snapped, as we lurched around another corner (concerningly fast; almost as if they wanted to finish me off in a blazing inferno before we got there).
"Where are we going then?"
Clint frowned at me. "Do you not remember the Chilean base? Because we've run at least two missions from there before."
I definitely didn't forget that Chile bordered Peru, no.
"Of course, I remember the Chilean base." I paused. "That's quite a long way."
"Fortunately for you," Clint commented, "We've got a safe house not far from here that I've been operating out of the last few days. The medics will get you patched up there, shoot you full of drugs, and then we'll drive back to base to get some proper medical care. You know, usual procedure when you're feeling underfunded and helicopter evac is overkill."
I mean, the procedure didn't have that exact title, but yes, I remembered.
"Excellent." I slumped against the seat of the car. "Is there at least a bed? Because I've only slept on, like, six or seven beds in the past year and a half."
Clint winced. "There is definitely a bed for your poor back. Mine is aching out of sympathy for your spine." He shook his head. "Ouch."
o0O0o
The Chilean SHIELD base was surprisingly nice in spite of the fact that I was almost certainly going to be shot (again) for entering it.
Sure, I only saw the infirmary for the best part of three days, while white-coated lab rats took the opportunity to run every single test they could possibly think of, while Clint smuggled in chocolate cake and coffee when they weren't looking.
Clint stretched out in the chair next to my bed. "Care to explain why Maria Hill wants to murder you?"
I flinched. "Hill's here?"
Clint laughed, very freely and cheerfully. "No, she's not here in Chile. But she does phone people occasionally and moan. A lot."
I breathed a sigh of relief.
"Also, she's due in on the flight tomorrow."
That's it. These were my last hours on this Earth. I wouldn't even get to see Annabeth again before my impending doom.
"So I might have driven multiple SHIELD agents off of the edge of a glacier." I held my hand up (the other was tangled in a very complicated sling). "But, in my defence, they were trying to kill me. And I'm like 68% sure that they were actually HYDRA operatives."
The EyebrowsTM went up. "Yeah, that would do it."
"She's gonna kill me, isn't she."
Clint shrugged, seemingly very casual about the whole thing. "Well, you know Hill. She'll feel better if she gets to verbally eviscerate you whilst giving you the most terrifying death stare of your life. But she will lord this over you for a very long time, so if I were you I'd get ready for several thousand coffee runs." I must still have looked worried, because he kept going. "Just give her your best pathetic face, yeah, that one," rude, "and you'll be fine. I think even Hill would feel bad when you look quite like you do now."
"Like what exactly?"
"Like roadkill? Or maybe like everyone who has been waiting to punch you for like the past five years finally did."
So maybe I deserved that.
"Seriously, dude." He rubbed a hand tiredly over his face, and I felt pretty bad. I didn't think he'd slept since we met, almost as if he feared I'd slip away without saying goodbye. "You've gotta stop jumping in front of bullets. It'll only land you in the morgue, and most people aren't worth that."
"What, and you're including yourself in most people now, are you?" I retorted, not liking where this was heading.
"We've established that I was wearing a fucking bullet-proof vest. If you stopped being so fucking noble very now and then-"
"As if you didn't do almost the exact same thing, when you got captured by a goddamn immortal Titan with power over fucking time!"
"Boys, what on Earth has got into you two?"
Our heads spun simultaneously to catch sight of Nat.
"God, it's like both of you have forgotten everything you've ever known."
My mouth opened and shut a few times, silently. At last, I managed to stammer out, "I didn't know you were here in Chile."
Nat gave a characteristic wry smile. "I wasn't. And don't change the subject." She pulled up a chair from the corner of the room and sat down on the opposite side of the bed to Clint. "Now, I believe you two were having an argument about how the other is irritatingly hard-headed, correct?"
Both of us nodded dumbly, like scolded schoolchildren.
"Well then, imagine how I feel when I have to deal with two of you. I know you're frustrated, Clint, especially as you think this could have been avoided if our idiot friend here," she waved a dismissive hand in my direction (thanks, Nat), "had used a scrap of logic in the situation, but I think we just need to accept that none of us ever use logic when the other people in this room are in danger." She sighed. "But, I think you'll find that I am the only one that hasn't been an absolute idiot and jumped in harm's way when the other was perfectly capable of dealing with the problem." She leaned back in the creaky hospital chair, putting her combat boots up on the edge of my bed. "So maybe you two dumbasses could shut up and listen to me."
We shut up and listened to her.
"We've already established that Percy is a fucking idiot." Clint and I nodded in unison. "However, I think we should be enjoying the fact that Percy is actually in a SHIELD base for the first time in literal years instead of just yelling at him, tempting though that might be."
She glared at me, and I rolled my eyes, suitably chastised.
"Also," and here she gave a devilish grin which suggested that whatever came out of her mouth next would not bode well for me, "Hill is due in on the next flight so we'd best enjoy what time we have before she eviscerates him."
"Verbally, I hope," I cut in dryly.
Nat smiled. "We'll see."
"Is she really that mad?"
She shrugged. "You did humiliate her reasonably publicly."
"There were, like, six people and a polar bear left alive to witness the event. It was Alaska."
Nat rolled her eyes. "The fact that there weren't any witnesses left makes it worse, Percy. It was a fully-staffed base before you came along with your friends and decided to trash the place." Okay, so I can see how that might have been bad for Hill, but at least I got rid of some (probable) HYDRA goons.
I held up my hands in my best surrender stance. "Look, I don't know what Hill has told you about the event, but I think we might have different stories on that one. We didn't trash the place, that's for sure."
Clint rounded on me. "Oh, so you admit that you had accomplices?"
I eyed him in my periphery. "I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of accomplices on a classified mission."
Nat snorted. "Classified, my ass. You told us yourself that you've been at a summer camp for the past five years."
"Just getting into character," I argued back. "Besides, you spend enough time in your own company and you do start referring to yourself in the plural." This was true; I'd taken to wondering aloud what 'we' were going to do next in the months I'd spent globetrotting to take HYDRA for a merry little trip.
I paused. "Also, don't mention the camp when Hill is here, or she'll torture its location out of me so that she can bomb it."
Clint frowned. "I don't think even Hill is heartless enough to bomb a summer camp full of twelve-year-olds." I raised an eyebrow at him. "Hey, I said I don't think, not that she wouldn't! I don't pretend to be able to read that woman's mind."
Fair point; I nodded sagely enough to let him know that I was taking the piss by the end. "She's an enigma."
The three of us sat in the ensuing silence for approximately two seconds before simultaneously bursting out into slightly hysterical laughter.
"But, where have you been since last year anyway?"
"Oh, everywhere." I waved my hand flippantly. "Name a country; I've probably been there in the past year."
Nat grinned. "Mali?"
"Pfft, yes. It's easy to get lost in the chaos of a war near Timbuktu."
"Bhutan?" Clint furrowed his eyebrows. "That is a country, right? I haven't just made it up."
"Nah, it's definitely a country; I went there in September."
"Norway?"
I paused. "No, actually. That's weird. But I did go to Finland."
"Have you just been crossing places off your bucket list with the bail-out cash that Coulson definitely didn't give you?" Nat asked, sounding a little affronted if I was being perfectly honest.
"No; I have been leading HYDRA on a strategic world-wide chase in order to tie them up in knots before faking my death in extraordinary style and pissing off back home, where I could hopefully lay low for a while before they noticed that my body was never found in Perú. I was on my way to actually get a death certificate. Unfortunately, I met this idiot," here I pointed at Clint with a casual, flapping gesture in his vague direction, "and my plan went down the toilet."
"Okay, but if your plan had gone to plan, then you wouldn't have needed to bribe anybody for a death certificate," Clint pointed out, "because the coroner would have done their job and issued one for your dead body riddled with holes caused by HYDRA agents with large guns."
"I could've taken them."
"You dove straight through a window into some random-ass hotel to try to avoid them, and you were on foot when they had bikes. It was a trap."
"Fine, so you may have had a point there. It would have gotten them off my mom's back anyway, though." I fell silent.
Clint rolled his eyes, and reached into a bag tucked underneath the bed, grabbing a stiffened brown envelope, from which he drew a rather fancy-looking document stamped with a couple of nice Peruvian watermarks. "Will this do, then?"
Now, before anyone goes getting any ideas, the fact that my best friend could read my mind and that he went out of his way to bribe a random coroner did not make tears well up in the corners of my eyes. That never happened, and anybody who tells you otherwise is lying.
Okay, fine. But the drugs were strong and they screw with your emotions.
I reached for the certificate, but Clint drew it back, tutting. "You've been so concerned about Mom's safety with you out of SHIELD, but you do realise that I've been visiting her the entire time, so it wouldn't really help anyway. Besides, Fury wiped all records of her off of our systems like four years ago." He handed me the certificate. "But if you still want your certificate, go ahead."
"They knew, Clint. If they didn't find it in the data dump then I don't know how, but they knew."
He sighed. "I believe you, Percy. You've always had good intuition when she's involved. Anyway, did I do good?"
I had a quick look at the certificate (copy, actually, just on nice paper - the actual certificate was presumably in some Peruvian coroner's office); he's used one of the slightly-thin aliases that I'd spent some time travelling under (and under which I'd entered Peru, which made sense). "I suffered four knife wounds, significant spinal trauma and superficial injuries consistent with being pushed through a second- or third-floor window after a fight. Nice; I like it. Not too mundane."
"Did you tell Mom that you were intending to run around for a year and then fake your own death?"
"She doesn't know about this alias," I said, confidently (more confidently than I felt, if I was honest).
Ice ran down my spine as I thought of Annabeth; I'd told her a few of my aliases before I left (after she'd threatened to stab me herself if I didn't give her some more information). But I was fairly sure that she hadn't known about this one.
There was a brief knock on the door, and a nurse poked her head around. "Out, you two. Visiting hours ended forty minutes ago."
Nat and Clint stood up with identical shrugs. Clint patted my hand gently as he turned to go. "You should rest. Get your strength up for the battle to come." He winked, and I gave him a glare to say exactly what I thought on the matter.
And just like that, they filed out without a complaint.
They never ever left a SHIELD hospital room when instructed to without dragging their feet, and, from her somewhat gobsmacked expression, word of their customary aversion to authority had reached this nurse's ears and she was very surprised to see them behaving.
"They're right, you know," she told me wisely. "You should really try to get some rest."
o0O0o
Hill turned up about six hours later, probably.
I say probably because I was asleep when she turned up, so awoke with a bit of a start to see her sitting, all severe and everything, in one of the uncomfortable chairs next to my bed, and the clock had moved on six hours since I'd last looked at it (well, it was possible that they were messing with me, but whatever).
"Jackson." Hers was not the tone one customarily uses to greet somebody with a gunshot wound in a hospital bed.
"Hill," I greeted, trying to sound a bit chipper to try and hide the apprehension that I was feeling.
"I wondered when you'd next show your face. You keep popping up where you'd least expect, like some sort of New York whack-a-mole."
"Well, I can think of many other New Yorkers that I would more gladly thump with a mallet if you're looking for a line-up. The asshole in the red Chevy that I swear to god tried to hit me every single day on my way to school on that one crossroads, like, jeez that guy had issues. Or-"
"I'm fairly sure that driver wasn't responsible for a major glacial collapse and the deaths of almost half of the team that I was supervising whilst in Alaska, so I'll stick with you if I want to hit New Yorkers with mallets, I think."
"In my defence, they were trying to kill me, and in light of the current situation, were also probably HYDRA. What were you even doing in Alaska anyway? Seems like a punishment posting to me."
"Observing suspected defectors." Hill frowned. "You got me there."
"Why send you, of all people? Surely somebody considerably more junior could have done that job."
She rolled her eyes and mumbled something unintelligible.
"Sorry, didn't hear you on that one."
"Fury found out that I made a joke about how the light catches on his head when he's making a speech and makes him look exactly like an egg."
Okay, I really tried on this one, but I burst out laughing so hard that tears welled up in the corners of my eyes. "You see it too!" I gasped out, completely beside myself.
"I'm going to kill whichever backstabbing bastard told him," she deadpanned.
"Wasn't me."
"Well, that means one name that I can cross off my list, doesn't it? Because I seriously thought that the rogue agent who is utterly terrified of Fury issuing a kill order just rocked up to HQ one day and said 'sir, Agent Hill thinks you look like an egg'."
"Well, I'm glad to have been of service and wish you all the best in your search for the perpetrator."
We sat there in silence for a couple of minutes. Eventually I butted in, because it was getting awkward. "Are we good then? Or do you still want to remove my intestines with a spoon?"
"That would be very inefficient," she noted, and paused (just to see the look on my face, undoubtedly). "We're good, Jackson. Glad to see that those years wandering the wilderness have done absolutely nothing to dim you incredibly irritating personality."
"Well, I aim to please."
Hill shook her head with a slight disbelieving sigh. "Never change." She bent down to pull a manila folder out of her bag. "Anyway, the real reason that I'm here is in fact not to castrate you." I took the folder and opened it. "Fury wants you to re-sign your contract."
"I'm getting promoted?" I stared down at the imposing LEVEL THIRTEEN stamped on the front of the paperwork. "I've done shit all over the past two years since my last promotion."
Hill genuinely smiled. "Maybe so, but this is the same level as Jason Grace. You'll be working together as partners for the next six months or so, clearing up some divine business, whilst Romanoff and Barton work with Fury's so-called Avengers to try and save the world on occasions, clear up this HYDRA shitshow et cetera. Now, this is just going to be a trial. We've never employed people to use their powers before, and we want to see if indeed it works, and if it works, then how best individuals such as yourself or Grace would be best deployed within the organisation."
"I thought that there wasn't really an organisation anymore?"
Hill sighed. "No, SHIELD is still alive and kicking, but we're making some reforms. It's not often that you can completely transform a huge organisation, but since we've just retired most of our staff, I think it's time for a bit of a shake-up. Starting with using demigods for their power rather than the fact that they tend to come with some basic training already attached."
I took the paperwork from her, glancing down with horror at the far-too-many pages of legal jargon. "Can you do me a summary of this shit? Am I passing over my soul or anything?"
Hill laughed. "No more than any other SHIELD contract."
"Oh, okay. Just the first born then?"
She handed me a pen. "No agent lives long enough to have kids, so I wouldn't worry."
I shrugged, too aware of that fact, and scrawled my name inkily on the line. "Hopefully I can buck that trend as well."
"Not if you keep leaping in front of people wearing bullet-proof vests, you won't." Okay, she had a point there.
"Touché. Anything else?"
Hill gathered up the folders. "Not particularly; we'll send you the details of your accommodation and missions once you're out of the med bay." She stood up. "Is there anything else you need before I go? We're trying to get Grace to obtain some ambrosia and nectar to help with the healing, but is there anything else that can heal you? Because I know that Grace actually got better after being properly electrocuted once, like, millions of volts electrocuted, so clearly you guys possess the ability to defy nature."
"A bath. Like a really long bath." I stretched (painfully) in the hospital bed. "It could probably handle like a week's worth of healing by itself."
Hill raised an eyebrow, but didn't object. "I'll get something arranged. Welcome back, Agent Jackson."
The word perfenestrate (used earlier in the chapter) is a word meaning to go through a window. We couldn't find a word that was the opposite of defenestrate, so through the power of Latin we created one ourselves.
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