"Six years ago, Helmut Province, Afghanistan. My CO got an emergency call from a neighboring squad, bomb scare in their ER, and I, being one of the only bomb technicians for miles, he sent me up.
"Technically I wasn't supposed to be there, women are not allowed on the front line of battle, but a job is a job, and I got four men from a Marine Recon unit stationed with us to escort me to the base. They were armed to the teeth, the nastiest looking Devil-Dogs I had ever seen, and we were going across this potholed piece-of-shit road in a Humvee when we hit an IED. Needless to say, we blew right the fuck up. I should have seen it, I was trained to see it, but Taliban snipers were blasting away at us, and we were all a little too preoccupied trying not to be killed in the face.
"The next bit is all a blur. I remember crawling out of the wreck, I remember staring into the eyes of my dead buddy, I remember the heat, and I remember incredible pain. I couldn't breathe. Everything smelled like diesel smoke and the next thing I know is that there is a great shadow over me and somebody is yelling at me in Pasdu, telling me to get up or something. I passed out not long after that.
"The next thing I remember some doctor talking to me in English, and explaining that if my government did not hand over two million dollars or five of the Taliban leaders in Gitmo, then I would be tortured and executed. The Taliban are nasty fuckers, that treat their women like cattle, and white women even worse, it's not healthy to be an American girl in Afghanistan, I can tell you.
"Of course, even with the government's grandiose postulating and mantras that 'no man gets left behind', they neither sent the ransom nor mounted a rescue mission for me. As soon as it became apparent to the bad guys I was of no use to them, they went nuts. I don't remember half of the torture, and I don't want to. All I remember is pain; and sitting alone in a cold cell, crying my eyes out over the never being able to see the new Batman movie, of all the stupid things to cry about . . .
"I don't know how long I was there exactly, all I know was that it felt like an eternity, and I hear explosions above me. I didn't know if that was a bad thing or a good thing at the time, but anything else was better. There was gunfire, and it got closer and closer, until the iron door was busted open and a guy in full combat fatigues knelt beside me. It was Willis, Captain John McLean. He made a team, unsanctioned, and against orders from the Sec-Nav to get me out. They're the only reason that I am alive.
"The Navy doctors had me under in some sort of coma for about three weeks when they amputated my right arm and tried to fix up my chest, which had been mostly crushed. They lopped off my right calf too, the bone shattered beyond repair. They were in way over their heads, and when I finally woke up, I saw Fury.
"He said he wanted me for SHIELD, some ultra top secret agency or something, and had a friend that could fix me, and that's how I got linked up with Tony Stark. Has the mental age of twelve, and mental capacity of Einstein. He's smarter than most of the assorted geniuses I have met, and once you get past his excessive jerkiness; he is a really nice guy. He designed this thing for me, a partial titanium skeleton to replace the ribs and part or my shoulder that got busted up bad, and a metal arm and half of my leg. It runs on arc reactor tech, and needs a recharge every once in a while, but it is keyed into my electrical impulses so I can move it like a normal part of my body.
"But the rehab, it took a lot out of me. For a long time, I couldn't control the tech keeping me alive, and my mind lashed out. I started getting these freaky powers. I could always tell when somebody was lying, but now I could move things with my mind, or reach into people's minds. Fury kept a close eye on me, of course.
"He tried to recruit me when I was mostly fixed, but I told him that I wasn't finished with the Corps. Parris Island took me back as a trainer, and that's where I was those six years, living on base, mostly. Sure, I had a flat out in Beaufort, but I hardly used it.
"A few months before New York, Daniel filed for divorce, tried to take me for all I was worth, of course I was an enlisted Marine, and had next to nothing. I was so scared that he would take Soph, but the courts awarded her to me instead. We had a big party when it went through, I burned all the shit he left behind in the backyard, and my friends and I toasted marshmallows and drank beer. Coulson was there, originally to try to recruit me again, but he stayed for the party and we kind of became friends.
"So to New York. I was one of the closest to when the massacre started, and so me and a heap of guys, mostly trainers and fresh graduates got together and decided to go in to try to save people. They would have gone even if I had told them not to. We fought those alien motherfuckers until the last man, which was me. I met Hawkeye when I saved his ass on a roof with a well aimed sniper, and when everything was over, I asked for the Avenger dudes to give me a lift to see Fury, and I joined SHIELD.
"Sometimes I wish I could change it, but if I did, all those people I saved in New York, with the training I gave, they would be dead."
He understood now. If those terrorists hadn't have tried to kill her, she would not have ended up saving so many lives, and he got to wondering, how would the universe have been different, better if he had never fallen from Bifrost?
She sensed his thoughts, "don't over think it, Loki, you'll drive yourself insane," he cast her a cutting glare, "is insane-erer a word?" she patted his shoulder, "what's done is done. Think of now, because in the end that's really all we have."