A Piece of the Game

Melinda May didn’t always push papers in a bureaucracy, and she picked up her piloting skills a long while back. But there was an extended period of time, before New York, before Bahrain, hell, even before Budapest, when she worked undercover in the field – both short-term and long – a lot more frequently. A lot of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents do. Human intelligence remains one of the more reliable methods for gathering information, after all, even in this era of ubiquitous surveillance. Not everything is stored online.

And even though Nick Fury was selectively recruiting powerful metahumans for the Avengers Initiative that didn’t mean there was no place on his roster for individuals with less… overt… talents.

It’s 2009. May is in Hong Kong, and putting her particular talents to use on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s behalf tracing psionic Talents that the United States’ Federal Special Division would positively love to get their hands on. She is Emily Hu, a cover that is basically but not exactly what she is (American, expatriate, sniff, not spy, spook, S.H.I.E.L.D. operative). Not to recruit, necessarily, because although S.H.I.E.L.D. does its best to keep an eye on potential future threats not everyone is (or should be) a tightly leashed and controllable asset. Sometimes she’s there to intervene on the Talent’s behalf. Most of the time she’s just there to surreptitiously identify them for future surveillance.

Truth is, Division remains one of the primary reasons why Fury is having so little luck assembling a team – and they’re also the chiefest pain in May’s ass in Hong Kong. The long-running Machiavellian struggle for Talents between covert, military, and governmental agencies is beginning to test even her legendarily stoic resolve. So the day Nick Gant and Cassie Holmes walk through her door with an unlikely-sounding tale about a briefcase, well…

“You with Division?” May asks.

She doubts that’s the case; Division may be many things, but last she heard they didn’t risk adolescent Watchers in field operations. Not least because Watchers, of all the Talents, tended to be some of the most unpredictable individuals around; combining adolescence and precognition seemed like way too mercurial and incendiary a mix for Division to ever let out of an off-the-books detention facility somewhere. And a Watcher’s way of being unpredictable, in May’s book at least, can be downright unsettling – because you never knew whether the person you’re across the table from simply knows what you’re going to do, is manipulating you towards what they want you to do with what appears to be confirmable evidence, or is just a fantastic bluffer with a poker face Coulson would envy.

May’s reasonably good at recursive role-modelling and undercover work, but that kind of twisty doublethink is what made her head hurt when she first read Douglas Hofstadter.

“Look,” Nick says after they’ve laid out their hook, as the clock ticks over to eight forty-eight and the Watcher girl keeps that spooky, disquieting smile pinned in place. “We want Division out of Hong Kong just as much as you do.”

May cuts him a sharp look. Really, kid? Like I haven’t heard a line just like that a hundred times before? The whole situation, to her experienced eye, reads like seven shades of scam, and she’s half-tempted to throw them out the door without hearing the rest of their spiel.

“It’s gonna be a whole lot easier if you help us find the girl,” he adds hopefully.

And yet… there’s something about the look in Nick’s clear blue gaze that seems oddly familiar, something compelling, and it’s not the unsettling swell of emotion and false memory that May knows usually comes with a Pusher’s influence. Whatever it is, it’s something that teases at her memory, like an old faded photograph, or like baseball cards she saw a long time ago, and she tries to dredge the finer details up without being too obvious about it.

“You remind me of someone…” she trails off, the Cantonese syllables for once feeling unfamiliar on her tongue, “… I used to know.”

The girl, Cassie, smiles like she just got someone to fold a full house against her queen-high flush.

“Fine,” May tells them, and pulls out the bagged bead that her local fixer had passed along with a bounty high enough to make even May blink. She’s not sure why she believes them, exactly, but… well, it’s a hunch. May trusts her hunches almost as much as her rational thinking; her hunches have kept her alive and intact on enough occasions that she’s inclined to listen when they talk. And right now, her hunch is telling her that there might just be an exploitable flaw in Division’s defensive tangle of control and paranoia.

Long story short, that was how she got involved in helping Nick Gant and Cassie Holmes set up a confrontation that blew up half an under-construction skyscraper and broke the back of a particularly ruthless Talented Hong Kong triad.

The paperwork afterwards was a bitch.

It’s not until years later – after what was likely far more than her fair share of stitched-up wounds and secretive conversations, covert wars and coquettish infiltrations, vagabond scientists and venal politicians and vicious confrontations – that she remembers that day and figures out why Nick Gant’s cerulean stare looked so familiar. And at first, she doesn’t even realize it, staring tensely at the scattered, choppy footage coming out of Manhattan on the day Loki and the Chitauri come calling. Not until she sees a powerfully-built figure in red-white-and-blue, leaping higher than any normal man could, deflecting energy blasts, slinging a shield around like it’s a boomerang rather than some unwieldy disc that has no earthly business bouncing at the angles it indisputably is, and thinks:

Mover. With a Talent that’s untrained and instinctual, maybe, corresponding to what its wielder thinks he can do, but still: Mover.

After that, in the boredom of bureaucratic red tape and covert psidentification that straddled the long gap between the aftermath of the Battle of New York and when Nick Fury sits down at her desk to tell her Phil Coulson’s alive, it’s a puzzle to help pass the time. An enigma, a Gordian knot that needs to be untangled rather than cut through. Because obviously, obviously, Nick Gant and Steve Rogers aren’t the same person.

Most of the disparate bits of data are buried deep, hidden in dusty long-neglected archives that make May want to sneeze as soon as she gets the first sniff of a clue, but they are there if one recognizes that one is confused, and knows how to quietly ask the right questions. So many questions, in fact, just waiting to be answered, the things that most people forget to even wonder about.

Like:

What ever happened to all those blood samples that Colonel Phillips had taken from Steve Rogers?

Was Bucky Barnes the only soldier that Arnim Zola ever tested his experimental serums upon?

Why did all the psionic Talents apparently start to crop up only in the aftermath of World War II?

And not just in the United States, but in the shattered states of war-torn Europe trying to knit themselves back together, in the brutal authoritarian purges of the Soviet Union, in internecine conflicts that raged big and small, in wars declared and covert, in the shadows and alleys and gutters of dozens of villages and towns and cities across the world.

She’s heard about Soviet programs to develop or breed better psychics, and suspects that certain branches of the United States government and military-industrial complex had to have been just as fascinated by the possibilities. She knows for a fact that experimentation in genomics and cloning has been going on nearly as far back as Watson and Crick’s first dabblings with deoxyribose nucleic acid.

May can put two and two together.

She wonders (cynically, one part of her admits) (justifiably, another says), just how long certain factions have been trying to create another Captain America, another Red Skull. Wonders who might have subtly nudged Bruce Banner down particular avenues of research. Wonders who’s truly behind Division, since it gradually becomes clear that the World Security Council definitely isn’t.

A lot of those questions find answers the day the Triskelion falls.

Some days, she wonders whatever happened to Nick Gant and Cassie Holmes. If they ever found what they were looking for. Or if someone else found them first.

Most of the time, she just hopes they found a better life than this one.