A/N:
This is the first episode of Agents of SHIELD season one, everybody! Hope you enjoy. I'm sorry for no shout outs, but it's because these are posted one after another with no time.
Disclaimer:
These things are oh so tedious. You know the stinking drill.
-:-
I didn't have to wait long for FitzSimmons to come aboard, lugging suitcases of personal belonging, but most of the bags contained weapons and experiments if I was willing to bet everything I had. They were struggling to get everything up the loading ramp, so I made my way down to help them."Ah—be extremely careful with that, yeah?" Fitz said as I picked up a black duffel bag.
"Sure," I replied readily, handling it even more gently than I had been before and picked up a suitcase in my other one. "I take it you're FitzSimmons." We stopped outside of the lab and I carefully set down the bags.
"He's Fitz."
"She's Simmons. I'm engineering, she's biochem." Both of them turned to face me, seeing my face for the first time, and froze in shock.
"You're Paige Willows," Jemma Simmons said in her British accent just like mine. "You came here in the middle of the Battle at New York by some unknown source. Do you have any idea what it was?" she started moving out to get more things. Yeah, I had some idea. The problem was, I wasn't willing to share.
"I'm not a scientist," I said. "I'm just an Avenger. And I'm assigned to this team for a while. Nice to meet you both. Do you still need me?"
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa—shit, that's the Night-Night gun," Fitz cried as he saw Simmons lifting up a rather large gun, totally forgetting about my question. He ran out of the lab and took it from her, cradling it to his chest like a baby.
"Well, it's on my stuff and it doesn't work and there's no way we're calling it the 'Night-Night gun,'" Simmons replied, lifting up her bags.
"The bullets work," Fitz insisted. "Non-lethal, heavy stopping power, break up under the sub-contentious tension—"
"Oh, and I'm supposed to do this with one-point microleaks of dendryl toxin? I'm not Hermione, I can't create instant paralysis with that," Simmons cut in. "You should've run the specs by me before you started building the model." They broke into an argument about the things I couldn't quite follow. And Fitz's accent was really throwing me off. Agent Grant Ward stopped at the entrance to the la, looked back and forth between the bickering scientists, and dropped his bag, which landed heavily on the floor and broke up the argument.
"FitzSimmons?" He asked, his voice irritated. Wow, he really did not like working in teams.
"Fitz." Simmons pointed to Fitz.
"Simmons." Fitz pointed to Simmons. "I'm engineering, she's biochem." They were so cute, honestly. About a head shorter than I was, with no physical evidence of muscles. They were adorable! It was too bad, really, knowing what would happen.
Ward's eyes turned to me. "Paige Willows," he said, and nodded his head in mutual respect. I nodded back.
"One of the few perks of being famous is that I don't have to introduce myself unless undercover," I sighed. "I like it. You're Grant Ward, correct?" he nodded and held out a comm receiver to Fitz.
"Agent Coulson said I needed my comm receiver encoded. I don't know if you've worked with that model before. It's—" he cut off as Fitz began hitting the comm with a hammer. "—brand new."
"He'll repurpose the IDIS chip," Simmons said, writing. She didn't even look up.
"You don't need the external receiver for the inner-ear comms anymore," Fitz explained, examining the chip.
"Well uh, how does it—" poor Ward had no idea what hit him as Simmons ran up to him with a swab, shoved it in his mouth, and collected his DNA.
"Embedded sensory neurals can match through your DNA," she said. "It's very posh."
"I need to upgrade your comm as well," Fitz said after he had set down the chip. I obediently handed my comm link over. He started smashing it with a hammer. At least I knew what was coming. It was one I had stolen from tech specifically for that reason. My real one was in my bunk, where it was safe and I could use it to contact Clint and Natasha.
"So, are you excited to be coming on our journey into mystery?" Simmons asked Ward, collecting a new swab and moving over to me. Again, I obediently opened my mouth, stifling my natural reaction to scrunch up my face at the strange taste and texture.
"Like Christmas," Ward said, and Simmons didn't seem to notice the sarcasm. She smiled happily and moved on. For a genius, she was sure oblivious sometimes.
I moved over to stand next to Ward and whispered, "Never let techies mess with the stuff you really like. Next time, steal one from the labs and give them that." Before he could reply, the sound of squealing tires made us turn to look. It was Coulson pulling up in Lola, an antique convertible with hover wheels.
"One of Coulson's old SHIELD collectibles," Fitz said. He rambled on about a GPS, but I was too busy watching as a worker came up, put his hand out, only to be reprimanded by the man in charge.
"Don't touch Lola."
"And he calls it a girl's name," Fitz laughed, slapped Ward on the back, and walked away. I had to resist laughing at Ward's obvious discomfort. I knew his people skills were horrible (and that Maria Hill has drawn what she thought to be a porcupine, but Coulson had translated as a little poop with knives sticking out of it).
"You two follow me," he said. Ward and I did as we were told, following him upstairs. "Lola's not just a collectible, you know. People confuse old and improved." The plane, as I said before, was beautiful. Gorgeous. Nice decorations, full bar (even though I was underage), very homey. Coulson was still talking, but I tuned him out. This was supposed to be the mobile command, but then they got the Hellicarrier. More space, more agents onboard. Ward didn't get Coulson's joke about a man who was afraid of heights.
And then we were joined by Agent Melinda May. "If you plan to unpack, make it quick. Wheels are up in five," she told Ward before talking to Coulson. "We may have a hit on one of the Rising Tide's routing points." She handed him a binder.
"Good," Coulson said. "We need to do some catching up." May started to walk away. As she passed me, I slipped the note Fury had given me to inform her of my additional help on keeping an eye on Coulson.
Ward watched her walk away. "Is that… who I think it is?"
Coulson barely glanced up from the binder in his hands. "She's just the pilot," he said before going back to reading. I nearly laughed out loud at Ward's incredulous expression. I knew May, I had met her on my first day at the Hellicarrier, where she looked me up and down in a way that said she thought I wasn't going to make it more than a month. I politely told her that she could believe what she wanted about me, but I was going to make it through SHIELD training and one day be on her team. Needless to say, I had been right.
"Melinda May is just the pilot," Ward stated disbelievingly. "Come on, sir. What game are you really playing?"
Coulson just said, "Better stow your gear." Before walking away, motioning for me to follow him to his office. I did, leaving behind a stunned Ward. Once inside, I looked around to see all of Coulson's collectibles already in place. The Bus powered up and was getting ready to move.
"Agent Willows," Coulson said.
"Sir," I acknowledged, retaining my manners. Technically he was still my superior, as I was only a Level Six agent and he was Level Eight.
"Director Fury assigned you last minute," he informed me. "As one of the Avengers, I was surprised by this. Especially since Agent Barton was your SO."
"I can keep secrets, sir," I said. "Even from Clint and Natasha. Plus, I wasn't there when you died. I came a little bit after that. Director Fury seems to think I need to work on my teamwork skills."
"You don't agree?" Coulson asked, setting the binder down on his desk and sitting down.
"No, I completely agree," I said. "I know they need work. I'm willing to do whatever it takes to become the best agent I can be."
He nodded. "Directory Fury has informed me that you have a temporary Level Eight badge and that you will not stay here full-time. You will be pulled off for other assignments, yes?" I nodded in confirmation. "Good. I assume you've already unpacked and chosen your bunk. Here is everything we have on the Rising Tide." He handed me a file, which I took and turned to leave. "Oh, and one last thing, Agent Willows." I waited. "There is a piano onboard." I smiled and left. Fury knew me well and made sure there was something to keep me occupied so I didn't get into mischief.
-:-
"May, you're going with Fitz and Simmons to check out the explosion site," Coulson said after we had touched down at our location. I had changed into my uniform, which was a black catsuit with blue accents and, ugh, heeled combat boots, and pulled my hair back into a severe high ponytail. "Agents Ward, Willows, you're with me. We're going to find the routing point and whoever is running it." With our orders, we all climbed into our respective vehicles and left. I had called shotgun before Ward could say a word, and Coulson had me enter in the coordinates into the GPS.We parked behind one of the buildings that created the alley that Skye's van was parked in. "Ward, only use force if necessary. We're apprehending. Paige, make sure no one sees." We nodded and climbed out. I followed them to a point where I could see both ends of the alley and still see what was going on with them. After Ward had picked the lock, Coulson flung the door open, cutting the Rising Tide hacker woman off mid sentence.
"Hey," she said after a brief pause. "What up?" In one swift movement, Ward had a bag—where on earth did he pull that out of?—over Skye's head and was pulling her out of the van. I covered the three as Ward settled her in the SUV.
When we had parked, Ward pulled Skye out of the van and led her into the Bus, the bag still over her head. Coulson ordered me to stay out of the Cage and wait for any news from May. While I waited, I watched the video feed on a tablet. Ward yanked the bag off of Skye's head and sat her down in one of the metal chairs.
"You guys are making a big mistake," she said as soon as she could. She was panting a little bit from having the bag on.
"You don't look that big," Ward replied, and despite his lacking humor, it was a pretty good comeback.
"Sorry for the lack of finesse," Coulson said. "Agent Ward here has had a little history with your group, the Rising Tide."
Skye tried to deny that she knew what that was, but Ward cut her off. "Okay, there are two ways we can do this."
"Oh, and is one of them the easy way?" Skye quipped, using deflection to try and hide the fact that she was nervous and scared. None of us bought it.
"No," Ward said, making Skye deflate a little bit. Settling back further into the comfy chair, I pulled my legs up beside me and rested the tablet on them.
"What's your Name?" Coulson asked.
Skye hesitated for a moment, obviously trying to come up with a fake name but coming up empty. "Skye."
"What's your real name?" Ward clarified. Skye turned to look at him.
"It can wait," Coulson decided. "It's another name we need. A certain hero." Despite the angle of the camera and the darkness of the room, I saw recognition flash in Skye's eyes at the mention of the Hooded Hero. Mike Peterson. And if I saw it, ward and Coulson definitely did.
"What makes you think I know that?" she asked, deflecting again.
"Well, you made a little mistake," Coulson said, sitting down in the second metal chair across the metal table from the self-proclaimed hacktivist. "The phone you filmed the "Hooded Hero" with had the same cryptographic signature as a few of the Rising Tide posts." He dropped a file in front of her.
"Wow," Skye said, looking between the two agents. "Yeah, was that a mistake, or am I now sitting in the center of your secret headquarters? What is this, a plane? I got inside. And by now you've discovered that you can't beat the encryption software on my equipment so… you got nothing." While I wasn't a computer genius, I bet I could give her encryption software a run for its money. That I had been trained to do by Natasha, who specialized in everything from assassination to espionage to hacking. Some of the very few perks of being trained in the KGB, I guess.
"We have a fairly strong coincidence," Coulson corrected her. "You being on the scene right before it went up in flames." He showed her a picture in the file, but I couldn't see what it was. "Want to tell me what my team is going to find there? How did you know the hooded man was going to be there?"
"Did you blow it up? To draw him out?" ward asked, cutting Coulson off.
"Did you?" Skye asked accusingly, offended.
"That's not our style," Coulson said, shaking his head slightly.
" I was just kidnapped by your "style." SHIELD covered up New Mexico, Project Pegasus, of course you'd be covering up Centipede," Skye said. Coulson glanced at Ward, who scratched his temple and mouthed back, "Centipede?" Skye looked back and forth between the two, before coming to a conclusion.
"Holy no way," she said smugly. "You don't know what that is. Billions of dollars of equipment at your disposal and I beat you with a laptop I won in a bet?" Now she was pushing it.
"You need to think of your friend," Coulson advised her. "We're not the only ones interested in people with powers. We'd like to contain him, yeah, but the next guy will want to exploit him, and the guy after that will want to dissect him."
Ward moved up and leaned on the table to look into Skye's face. "What is Centipede?"
Skye stood up and began to move around while she talked. "Centipede. It was chatter on the web, and then it was gone. I tracked the access point back-address to that building."
"What are you after?" Ward asked.
Skye turned to look at him, annoyed. "The truth. What are you after?"
"World peace. You psuedo-anarchist hacker types love to start things up, but you're never around for the fallout. People keep secrets for a reason, Skye," ward ranted, moving to stand in front of the woman.
"Well, just because you're reasonable and—" Skye poked Ward's chest a couple of times. "—firm, doesn't mean you're not a cruel, faceless, evil government toolbag." I chuckled out loud at that.
"Just give us your guy's name," Ward said, exasperated.
"He's not my guy," Skye said, irritated now.
"You understand he's in danger," Coulson cut in from his place, still seated in the chair, making the other two turn to look at him.
"Then let me go," Skye insisted. "Me, not the T-one thousand here." Again, I laughed out loud. I loved Skye so much.
"You want to be alone with him," Ward said, irritated himself. "Of course. She's a groupie. All this hacking into SHIELD, tracking powers, she might as well be one of those sweaty cos-play girls running around the Stark Tower."
"What?" Skye asked. "I would nev—it was one time." For money, no doubt. And I don't really think she would've done it if it weren't necessary. Coulson stood up and headed for the door.
"Ward," he said before leaving. The specialist followed. I looked up from the tablet in my hands as they came out, standing up with the tablet in my hand.
"No news from May," I told Coulson s I headed for my bunk. He nodded. As I passed Ward, I murmured, "Nicely done, tiger. Next time, why don't you just kill her and be done?" he had completely blown that interrogation, and I knew Coulson was now going to question him about it. I settled myself in my bunk, closing the door as Coulson and Ward came back into view.
"This is QNB-three-sixteen," Coulson said, holding up a vial of clear liquid. "It's the top-shelf martini of sodium penthonal derivatives. It's brand new and extremely potent truth drug." Ward made sure Skye stayed in her seat. "Don't worry. The effects only last about an hour."
Ward was entirely too smug. "Then you'll have a nice little nap, and we'll have all the answers we nee—ack, hey!" Coulson had plunged the needle into ward's arm, and I decided to head back out. I couldn't pick up calls to the Bus from my bunk, and I did have orders to wait for news from May. "Gah, what the hell?" Ward demanded, holding his arm and staring at Coulson incredulously for the second time today. I sat down in my previous spot.
"I'm sorry, did that hurt?" Coulson asked calmly, and I laughed again.
"No," Ward said loudly, letting go of his arm. "But you've lost your mind. You should never do that to a member of your team and yes, it did hurt a little bit but I always try and mask my pain in front of beautiful women because I think it makes me seem more masculine—my god, this stuff works fast." He sat down in the second chair.
"Don't trust us?" Coulson asked, capturing Skye's attention. "Ask him whatever you like." And with that, he left, ignoring Ward's words of protest. "Paige, you're free to do what you want," he told me and I nodded, not moving just yet.
Skye had slid off her jacket. "You seem nervous, Agent Ward." I saw his eyes flicker downward before back up to her face.
"I'm calling to mind my training," he replied as she stood up and began circling around the table to stand next to him. "There's no way I'm going to reveal classified secrets to a girl who's hell-bent on taking us down."
"Have you ever killed anyone?" Skye asked.
"Yes, a few," Ward said before realizing what he did. "High-risk targets. But they were terrible people who were trying to hurt nice people. I didn't feel good afterwards."
"And does your grandmother know about these things?" Skye asked. Ward's face and voice were comical as he said,
"Gramsy?" Laughing, I disconnected the feed and turned off the tablet. Leaving it on the coffee table, I headed off to find the piano. It was beautiful. Glossy black and a baby grand at that. Fury was really trying to keep me out of mischief for him to spring for something like this. Sitting down on the bench, I ran my fingers lovingly over the ivory keys, loving every minute of it. Calling to mind a few pieces I'd memorized. As I had taken piano for nine years in London, I began to play, notes and tones flowing and turning into music. It was the theme for the Phantom of the Opera.
I played for the next hour.
-:-
I was with Coulson when Skye emerged from the Cage, Ward passed out with his face on the table. She told Coulson what she had learned from Agent Ward, how he'd been to Paris and yet never seen it, wished he'd stayed in Tahiti, and that he didn't like Coulson's style. Coulson showed her the newsclip of Mike assaulting the foreman in the factory he had worked at.
"This isn't right, he's…" Skye trailed off briefly. "He just needs a break."
"The give him one," Coulson told her. "What have you got?"
When May and FitzSimmons had returned, Coulson placed Mike's driver's license that Skye had produced on the table and scanned it.
"Michael Peterson, factory worker," Coulson said as we gathered around. "Married, one kid. Gets injured, gets laid off, wife jumps ship. Good guy, bad breaks. Best guess is, somebody tells him they can make him strong again, make him super."
"Who has the tech to do that?" May asked. "And why would they want to?"
"Fitz, what do we have from the security footage before the blast?" Coulson asked the engineering genius. With a few taps, an image came up on a screen.
"What are we seeing?" May and I asked at the same time, our faces and stances identical. I hadn't meant to do that, and I typically tried to avoid doing it.
"Well, the mean is angry… at the other man," Fitz said, and I wanted to roll my eyes and say, "excellent work, Watson!"
"The data was very corrupt," Simmons cut in, seeing the looks on our faces.
"Yeah, like Cold War Russia corrupt," Fitz added. "I can't sync the time code without—"
"What if you had the audio?" Skye cut in. "I was running surveillance on the lab. I had my shock pointed at the window before the blast. The digital file's in my van. There's too much background noise for me, but you could prob—" Simmons cut Skye off, and the two scientists had a brief conversation that none of the rest of us really followed.
Finally, Fitz said, "That would do very well, thank you very much."
Coulson looked at Skye. "Your van's here, but you were right. We couldn't decrypt the files."
"The encryption's coupled to the GPS," Skye said. "Get my van back to that alley and then I'm in business."
"Agents May and Willows will escort you," Coulson said and May and I led the way out. "And on your way out, wake up Ward." I smirked, remembering where the specialist was and how he had gotten there.
-:-
Once in the alley, Skye set to work. She was using a borrowed comm to talk to Fitz, yammering on in a technical language I only half understood. May was waiting outside, keeping watch, while I was inside behind Skye. She knew what she was doing. When she thought neither of us was looking, she grabbed a SD card and hid it in her bra.
"That should do it," Skye said, closing the laptop.
"Let's head back," May said. Suddenly, a figure dropped down and knocked May out of commission.
"Mike," was the last thing I heard before the man slammed my head into the floor of the van and everything went black.
-:-
When I woke up, I was immediately sitting up and looking at my surroundings.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," a voice said, and I whipped around to see Simmons coming into the lab. The movement caused a sharp pain to shoot through my skill. "Easy! You took quite a blow to your head. Very lucky you don't have a fracture in your skull." She pushed me back so I was laying sown. She looked at a screen, checking my vitals.
"Mike!" I realized, sitting up again and wincing at the pain. "Skye, May!"
"What did I say?" Simmons chastised, staring at me until I laid back down. "They're fine. We created something to stop the Centipede serum. Skye is fine. So is May. Just—lie—still, would you? I'll give you something to cut the pain." She pushed a needle into my skin, and I felt the drug rush through my bloodstream and start to take immediate effect. I sighed.
"Okay, you can sit up now," Simmons said. "The rest of the team is out here." I followed her out to where Ward and Fitz were. "Skye and Coulson are dropping Mike's son at his mother's." Suddenly, an alert came up on the laptop. Simmons grabbed a beer (nasty stuff. I much preferred wine, but as I was underage, I didn't drink unless on a mission).
"It's a mission," Ward said, opening up the file. "An oh-eight-four."
"Call Coulson," I said, snatching a few fries from the table. Ward pulled out his phone and informed our team leader.
Oh yeah, this was going to be fun.
-:-
Oh my goodness, this took FOR-FREAKING-EVER to type up! My Kindle kept dying on me so I'd have to plug it in and wait for an hour to get some life back! Next chapter on Friday!
Love,
Angel