Still Not Quite Justice
Yvette Ramsey was the smartest kid in her graduating class—the smartest kid in a lot of graduating classes. She won a full-ride to MIT, and blew through most of their bio-engineering programs in three years. She'd have a doctorate if she had bothered to show up to defend her thesis, which she didn't. Too much else to do, and not enough time.
She was only 21 years old when she tried to murder the Supreme Court. It ended poorly—Captain America's mighty shield broke her nose. She got him back, though. Called him an enabler of the problem, a paragon of a broken system, etc. He must have listened, though, because he got her out of SHIELD custody and into the private sector. A job at a Stark-funded non-profit. A way to help.
She decided to give it a chance.
That lasted about a year.
((()))
It is a Tuesday night in July when she hears the knock at her door. The Apartment de Ramsey is not large—just a bathroom and combination kitchen-living-bedroom—so she barely has to stand to get the door. She figures it's her DoorDash. She's wrong.
"You don't knock like a cop," she says.
"How do cops knock?" says Captain America.
"Y'know." Yvette demonstrates. The flat of her fist smacks the door three times in rapid succession, hard. "Like they own the place."
"Ah," says Captain America. His costume is bright, his shoulders are broad, and at 6' 2", he feels like a giant to her. Add in the bulk of the shield on his back and he seems comically out of proportion with the rundown hallway around him.
"Do you need something?" she says.
"I was hoping I could come in."
Yvette opens the door the rest of the way. Captain America enters. He doesn't look any less ridiculous in her room.
"Do you drink water?" she says.
"Come again?"
"Like, do you drink water? Does your body even require it, or do you just flex away the dehydration?"
"I'd love some water, Yvette."
She gets him water from the tap. There is a homemade filter on the faucet, just something she made on a whim one night; New York water gets worse every day. She hands him a glass. He's taken his cowl down.
"Thank you," he says, and in the raw light from her one lightbulb, she can see the dark circles under his eyes, the hair rendered stiff by dried sweat. He looks like he's been through it. He looks exhausted.
"Are you alright?" she says.
"More or less," he says. He sips his water and looks around her apartment. There isn't much to look at; her bed is a futon, presently bungeed to one wall, to make room. Her counter is covered in glassware—mixing beakers, a rack of graduated cylinders, an Erlenmeyer flask on the drying rack—and the window to the fire escape is half-blocked by her workbench.
"As you can see, I don't really have the room to entertain company. Not many visitors in Poorsville."
"I grew up in Brooklyn during the depression," he says, smiling. "I'm used to it."
"That was really more my way of asking what you're doing here," she says.
"Stark tells me you quit." He walks across the room, toward her workbench.
"If you wanna call it that, sure," she says. "Not sure why you care."
"I vouched for you." He runs a big, red finger along the rim of one of her square planters. It's made of purple plastic, sunbleached by long proximity with her window. In it, a soil mixture unique to her specifications. "And I made a deal that kept you out of prison for the rest of your life."
"You want a thank you?" she says. He ignores the sarcasm.
"That deal was contingent on keeping you gainfully employed and under supervision. The Stark job handled the gainful employment. I still had to handle the supervision."
Yvette raises an eyebrow. "Captain America is my parole officer?"
"In a manner of speaking," he says. "More that I'm responsible if you do something criminal."
"Wouldn't want to face any blowback?"
"More like I wouldn't want to find out I'm wrong about you."
Yvette frowns at that. She feels suddenly embarrassed, like she's disappointed her parents, though she doesn't have a memory of ever disappointing her real parents. It's hard to disappoint a dad who was never there and a mom who never put down the pills.
Cap looks back at her. "Why'd you quit your job at the nonprofit?"
She shrugs, arms crossed. "It wasn't doing anything," she says.
"That non-profit does a lot of good work," he says.
"Not enough, it doesn't," she says. "Not where it counts."
"I'd like elaboration on that," he says.
"Okay." She joins him at the planter. "See this?"
"The dirt."
"Yeah, the dirt." She turns on an overhead lamp and swivels it into position over the planter, then turns the soil with her hand. The light catches on clusters of particulate matter in the dirt which radiate a diffused, green glow. "I used a molecular bonding agent to accelerate the nutritional value of the soil. It retains more moisture per cubic inch than any other soil on the planet and trebles the lifecycle of any micro-ecosystem within it."
"It grows things faster," says Cap.
"It doesn't just grow things faster," she says. "It grows crops at three times the normal rate and increases the density of the yield. Take apple trees, for instance. With the proper mixture, I've seen apple trees grow to fruit-bearing size in a single month. Then bear apples the size of your fist. It's incredible."
"Stark told me about it when you created it. Says you call it HyperSoil."
"No, Tony Stark calls it HyperSoil," she says. "He can't help himself. Never turns off the capitalist in him long enough to see that not everything needs to be branded into oblivion."
She catches a smile on Cap's face. "So that's why you quit?" he says. "Branding?"
"I quit because the government wouldn't approve the soil." She brushes her hands together, knocking off the clingy dirt. "Their first excuse was that it could lead to invasive speciation, which was bullshit. Their second excuse was that its implementation would 'contribute to the destabilization of the American foods industry.'"
"Are they right?"
"Oh, they're one hundred percent correct," she says. "HyperSoil would eliminate the concept of a food desert. Inner city neighborhoods could reform the community gardens of the early twentieth century. In fact, those gardens would be incentivized. They would occur naturally just as a byproduct of the yield. One backyard garden with HyperSoil could provide enough tomatoes, watermelon, and cucumbers for three families of four at once. Multiplied out, it would give food security to anyone who wants it. It would functionally solve nationwide hunger."
"What was your plan?"
"Give it away for free to everyone who wants it. Use the nonprofit and Stark Industries' infrastructure to distribute it nationwide. Put out a PSA campaign explaining its use and buying trust in its efficacy. Staying vigilant against any conspiracy theories that are liable to crop up."
"You think that'll happen?" he says.
"That always happens. The theories will either develop naturally due to people's distrust of something big and new, or they'll be cooked up and injected into social media by the corporations that stand to lose the most. Sysco, Roxxon, Tyson. Whoever."
She expects some naive response from him, but instead he nods, listening. She decides to continue.
"But none of that can happen, now, because Stark wanted to get it approved. He wanted to be able to slap a label on it, then a pricetag, and sell it. It wouldn't have been prohibitively expensive, of course, but it still would have been a product." She leans against her workbench, looking at the ground—at her bare feet next to his heavy, red combat boots. "'Just enough to recoup our investment,' he said, but I already knew what that meant. I knew exactly what his nonprofit was for. Just a testbed for more profitable ventures. No charity without an asterisk, no heroics without a footnote."
"And then it got shot down anyway," Cap says.
She shrugs, as much to say, And here we are.
"So what's it doing in your apartment," Cap says.
She looks right into his absurdly blue eyes. "What do you think?"
He takes a breath. "I think you're planning to manufacture and distribute an unapproved substance illegally from your tenement."
"Yeah," she says, "how does that sit with my parole officer?"
She watches him consider it. He doesn't frown in thought or scratch his head or rub his chin. He simply stands there, eyes on her little setup on her workbench. She feels the dirt under her nails and the tiredness at the corners of her own eyes. She sees him breathe, slow and steady, each inhalation flexing the bulletproof material across his chest, and waits for the other shoe to drop—already letdown by the personification of American industry, she's fully prepared for the personification of its military to crush all her plans.
"If you're not selling it," he says, "then you arguably don't need it approved by the FDA."
She blinks. "What?"
"If you're caught distributing it, then you're still on the hook for manufacturing and distribution, but not for sale," he says. "And unless I'm mistaken, a substance being unapproved does not make it illegal. So there's a gray area there."
"I'm not really much of a lawyer, Cap."
"Neither am I," he says, "but I know a few."
He reaches into one of his many pouches and pulls out a stack of business cards. He flips through them. "I used to be a cop," he says. "NYPD. This was just after I was thawed, before the world knew I was Steve Rogers. I really did it because I wanted to get a sense of the law enforcement system on the ground level. How does it work, who does it help, that kind of thing."
"Learn anything from it?" she says.
"A lot," he says. "Things aren't always black and white. That there's a gray to everything, and often the laws aren't put in place to protect anyone but the men who made them. I quit after a year. Not long enough to pick up the knock, I guess."
He smiles at her, and she smiles back. Then he hands her three business cards.
"The first two are local lawyers. One does pro bono work out of Hell's Kitchen. If your community garden idea catches on, I imagine there will be some issues with property claims. I would refer the people affected to him. The second is a trial lawyer out of Midtown."
"This is She-Hulk's business card," Yvette says.
"Yes."
"I fucking love She-Hulk," she says.
"Okay," he says, not sure what to do with that. "If you get picked up or something, she's your girl. The last one is for a Supreme Court trial lawyer out of Arizona named Bernie Rosenthal. You get in trouble that needs to be appealed that high, you call her."
"I once tried to kill the Supreme Court," Yvette says.
"Bernie is a very good lawyer," he says, as if that will be enough. Listening to him, though, she half-believes it. He steps toward the door. "That last card is mine, for if there's anything you think I can help out with."
"Like what?"
"Like if Arnim Zola tries to use your HyperSoil to grow Hydra pod-people."
Yvette laughs. "Yeah, right," she says, and then sees that he isn't laughing. "You're serious?"
He shrugs. "Stranger things, Ms. Ramsey."
She walks him to the door, which doesn't take long. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Is it 'Why are you helping me?'" he says.
"Yeah. Why are you?"
"Fair question. Maybe I just want to give my buddy Iron Man a hard time. Maybe I just don't like being wrong about people, and so I want to see you stay out of trouble. Maybe I'm actually a self-interested jerk, and I don't want you to get caught because it'll reflect badly on me, like you said." He stops just outside the door. "Or maybe I just remember what it was like to grow up hungry, Ms. Ramsey. Maybe I just miss the way the world was when people helped each other."
Yvette doesn't quite know what to say to that.
He pulls his cowl up. "Anyway, thank you for the water," he says, and gives her a nod before heading off down the tiny hallway.
"No problem," she says, when he's gone.
((()))
Author's Note: That concludes my twelfth annual Cap one-shot. This one is a sequel to last year's Not Quite Justice, as I realized that I didn't love how that story ended. I hope everyone has a great 4th of July.