Some author's notes:
-This supposes a couple of things: 1) That D.E.B.S. and Stick It both happened at the same time, meaning while Amy and the team were being recruited, Haley was walking out on Worlds, and while she was returning to gymnastics, the team were facing Lucy Diamond. This then takes place after both Endgame and Nationals. 2) That the D.E.B.S. Academy is somewhere around Austin, Texas. (The film never mentions where it is).
-This idea basically came to me because like... Missy Peregrym in a D.E.B.S. uniform is all I need from my life.
-This is cross-posted on AO3.
I hope you guys enjoy it.
Mr Phipps's voice rang out across the landing of the house, "Good morning ladies! Up and at 'em. We need you at the Academy by 0800 hours. Do you hear me, D.E.B.S.? Up, up, up! Go! Go! Go!"
As usual, Max was the first one out of her room. Being upperclassmen, and sharing the role of squad captain with Amy, she always felt it was necessary to show some leadership in the morning. She saw that Amy's door was already ajar, and pushed it open with her toe, peeking around it.
"Downstairs in ten, Amy."
The blonde was pulling her hair into a ponytail, already dressed. She nodded at her reflection. Max turned on her heel, walked across the landing and opened Dominique's door.
"Dominique, get up, we have to get to the Academy. And if I have to tell you about bringing boys upstairs again, I swear…"
Dominique simply rolled over, sighed in her heavy French accent and slapped the lump of blankets beside her. "Out!"
Janet, proudly wearing her new stripes on her crisp white shirt, rushed out of her own room, almost knocking Max over. Max forced a smile on to her face. Despite being somewhat dim, Janet had earned her place on the team.
"Downstairs in five, Janet."
"Right," came the reply, accompanied by a clumsy smile.
Max quickly ducked into her own room, grabbing her rucksack, holstering her gun, and just catching the long-haired boy sheepishly leaving Dominique's room to scarper down the stairs and out the door. With the team ready, they piled into Max's navy Beetle, and made their way to the D.E.B.S. Academy.
Mr Phipps was waiting at the usual booth. As they slid in, he held up his hand to inform them, "no food today ladies. This meeting will be quick. Also, Ms Petrie will be joining us."
Janet couldn't control the gasp that escaped her. Despite everything that happened before and after Endgame last year, and the amount of time the team had subsequently dealt with Ms Petrie because of it, dealing with the head of the organisation was still a big deal. No sooner had Mr Phipps announced her coming then she was standing in front of them, blue bars still scanning up and down her thin frame.
"Good morning, D.E.B.S."
"Good morning, Ms Petrie," the four agents chorused.
"I know you'll be eager to know why you're here. So let's get down to it." Janet looked as if she was about to pass out as Ms Petrie slid herself into the booth beside her. The head of the agency opened her arms to her second-in-command, "Mr Phipps."
Phipps pushed a button on the device in his hand, and blue screens spread out across the space in front of the booth. A mug-shot of a tanned girl in a Ramones t-shirt filled the right side, credentials and figures filled the left. Small windows are filled with looped videos of gymnastics competitions.
"Ladies, this is Haley Graham. She's just turned eighteen, been to Worlds twice, is nationally ranked, and is often looked on as one of the most undeniable natural talents in gymnastics today. She got her GED at fifteen and aced her PSATs. She also has an impressive twelve juvenile arrests under her belt—B & E, trespassing, vandalism, destruction of both public and private property, and one drunk and disorderly! She is also the second person to ever get a perfect score"
Amy raised her eyebrows at the rest of the team. Quirking her head to the side, she asked, "if she's got such a big record, why are we recruiting her? I mean, I know none of us are perfect, but that seems like a hefty rap sheet."
"This girl's individual scores are enough to have a biting her hand off. The fact that she has some misdemeanours on her record won't put us off. This is not some super-villain-in-training, we all know that. This rap sheet reads more like a bored kid trying to rebel. In fact, her record may help us. She knows how to get into certain situations. She's not afraid of a little danger. We like that in an agent. Burt says he thinks—"
"Burt?" Max interrupted. Considering this is high priority and top-level, she's surprised to hear a name she finds so unfamiliar.
"Burt Vickerman. As you ladies know, D.E.B.S. has a long history of using elite gymnastics schools to recruit new agents. These schools are centres where there is a culture of militant rule-following, but also one where students are kept at pique physical condition. Through our secret testing, we have been able to identify candidates which suit the D.E.B.S. criteria for agents, and recruit them. It allows us to fast-track them through the first section of Academy training, and achieve upperclassmen status sooner. Burt Vickerman runs VGA, the Vickerman Gymnastics Academy. He has been a friend of the programme for many years. Unfortunately, he went through a… difficult period in which very few of his students were deemed suitable. Now, however, they are reaching an all-time high in the physical categories and scoring ever higher in the individual thought category. Burt reckons this is down to Haley's return to the gymnastics world, and his gym in particular."
"So, why are we here? Field agents don't normally have a say in the recruitment." Amy looked at her mentor, chewing her lip anxiously. She could feel the weight of the responsibility of being D.E.B.S.'s poster child bearing down on her already.
"Well, being such a free spirit, and someone with an aptitude so high, I felt her best placement for training would be with our best team. Putting two perfect scores together seems like the only logical conclusion."
"With us? We never train new recruits," Max couldn't seem to manage to swing her mouth shut, shock evident on her face, "we have bigger fish to fry, bigger things to deal with."
"I understand that. And that is exactly why I'm putting Haley on this team."
Ms Petrie sat looking at her best team. Amy, who had so very nearly been lost not six months ago, was pushing a smile through what was obviously doubt and confusion. Dominique, looking as though if she understood a single word of the conversation which had just transpired she did not care, was inspecting her nails. Janet stood, feet together, hands knotted in front of her, a lost look on her face. Max was standing behind her best friend, looking defiant as ever, and trying not to scan the credentials which were being displayed on the monitors before them them.
"The gymnast recruitment is also handled slightly… differently than our normal agent recruitment. We like to go and meet the girls personally, explain the programme, explain what we do, and how they'll be fast-tracked. It's important that they realise how crucial the work of a D.E.B. is. That being said, Amy and Max, I want you to come with me to ask Haley to join us. Burt has nothing but good things to say about her, but some of those good things do not fill me with confidence that it will be easy to get her to drop her life to come with us. I have a copy of Ms Graham's dossier for each of you, I expect you to be fully familiar with her by the time we leave for VGA tomorrow morning—" The tail-end of the sentence hung in the air as she pushed out of the booth and pushed the button on her wristwatch, beaming herself out of the Academy cafe.
Mr Phipps looked thoughtfully at Max and Amy before handing over the dossiers. "A perfect score hand-picked by Ms Petrie. She could change the face of the agency, ladies." Then he stood up and walked to his office at the end of the corridor.
The two friends looked at each. Amy raised her eyebrow, "Haley Graham, huh?"
Max scoffed, "whatever. Let's eat."
When Max goes into Amy's room later that evening, she finds the blonde pouring over the dossier.
"She walked out of the World Championships before her floor event. She lost the USA their chance at gold. Then a year later, she came back. That's pretty admirable."
Curling herself into a chair beside the window, Max picked up her copy of the dossier. The folder is thick and heavy. Max scanned through the details of Haley's return to gymnastics.
"Uh, it says here she went to VGA instead of going to juvy?"
"Still. She didn't have to compete. And she did. Which is pretty cool."
Max rolled her eyes when she opened it on the picture of the gymnast. Strong jawline, long dark hair, brown eyes. Amy was nothing if not predictable.
"Have you seriously got a crush on this girl already?"
"What? No. I mean, I just think her scores are pretty impressive. And her gymnastics career is definitely nothing to be sniffed at. That shows determination if not sheer force of will. Elite gymnastics is hell. Have you seen some of the stuff they can do? Seriously Max, take a look at this girl's scores. She scored in the top five percentile in logistic reasoning. And she's had basic firearms training since she was fourteen because she's from a Texas God-and-Country-NRA family, at least on her mother's side. Don't shut her down just because she's cute."
"So you do think she's cute?" Max looked up and smiled, thumbing through to Haley's scores. She's just about to take her best friend's advice when a pillow hit her in the side of the head.
Max spent another hour or so looking over Haley's file—and okay, she'll admit it, her numbers are impressive.
"I'm beat. I'm going to bed. Ms Petrie said we're leaving at eight; it's at least an hour's drive to VGA. See you downstairs to go for a run at seven?"
"You know, I think I'll skip tomorrow. Sorry. Maybe Janet will go with you?"
"Sure. Don't stay up too late."
Amy spent the next three hours watching Youtube videos of Haley, and told herself it's purely for the purpose of getting educated on the new recruit. Amy knows very little about gymnastics, their team has never had to deal with new recruits from any of the gymnastics schools. At any rate, once the gymnasts joined D.E.B.S., their training became a secondary concern to their cases. Watching Haley's routines was captivating though; the power in her tricks was something that seemed to be lacking in her competitors, and even to Amy's untrained eye, it was easy to see the natural flair that everyone talked about.