THE COPPER COIN
OLIVIA’S EYES SCAN OVER THE LEAKED INFORMATION ON HER PHONE SCREEN. It’s all the Internet’s been buzzing about for the last two days. Granted, a lot of the leaked info was scrubbed from the network before anyone could grab it. Still, about half of it has been making its rounds through the Internet, shocking many.
Curiously, SHIELD’s file on her almost seems to have never existed at all. No evidence whatsoever, even now that their data has been leaked.
Funny how that works.
“So again, let me get this straight,” Tony sighs. “SHIELD and HYDRA were the same thing. Now, you want to get the band back together, and… what, root out whatever’s left?” Natasha nods.
“Thought you’d be the one to talk to about that,” she replies. “You know, now that you’ve apparently got two of us living in your tower— and you hired Agent Hill.”
“Speaking of people living in the Tower,” Steve interjects, not even trying to pretend he hasn’t been staring directly at Olivia for half the meeting, “you never did tell us anything.”
Olivia looks up from her phone, finding the whole room’s eyes on her. She sighs, exhausted from spending the last three nights trying to dissuade Loki from coming down to kill her old boss himself.
It should be illegal to have to say “no Loki, I cannot just move to Asgard” so many times.
“Yeah,” Tony agrees, “you know what? He’s right. Why don’t you tell me why I’ve got a bag of stolen weapons in my office and my security turned up to eleven?”
“Stolen weapons?” Steve echoes, turning his head to Tony in concern.
“Returned weapons,” Olivia corrects, pulling Steve’s attention back immediately. “And for the last time, I was not the one who stole them. From you.”
“Can we focus?” Natasha interrupts. “You said SHIELD’s intel was wrong. You didn’t work for the Masks. But I’ve seen the data, I’ve seen the mask. You were Fox; so start explaining.” Olivia takes a deep breath, and then pushes it out in the deepest sigh of her life.
“Well,” she relents, “I guess if they’re trying to kill me anyways, I might as well get into the details.” Bruce sits up, keenly interested.
“Who did you work for?” he asks, like he’s been dying to for a very long time.
“Shhh, Bruce, it’s my story, let me tell it my way,” she dismisses. She fishes into her pocket, pulling out a small object, which she keeps so tightly enclosed in her fist that nobody can see it.
“So,” she starts, “it all started when I came to New York for college. My scholarship didn’t pay for food, so I had to get a job so I could eat and therefore live. Except, y’know, nobody would hire me. In hindsight, I know that it was because they had their eyes on me already, but at the time I just figured it was a big city thing.”
Olivia’s eyes unfocus as she gets into her story, her attention on some phantom of the past.
She continues, “well, one day when I was at the store using up the last of my savings, they finally approached. Some guy, don’t remember what he looked like, gave me their business card and told me they were interested. I wasn’t stupid, I knew what it was about, but I wasn’t desperate enough to take the offer yet. It wasn’t till two weeks later, when the fridge was empty and I was listening to another rejection voicemail, when I realized that there wasn’t really a choice.”
She can still remember that night; she spent about half of it in a state of complete despair. She wore knots into her hair from all of her stress— this was back when it was still long.
“So, obviously, I joined,” she states, a faint, sober smile ghosting her lips for a second. “It was really shitty at first. General training was rough at the best of times. Then, they cycled me through pretty much every department. Took three years total. Interrogations was my least favorite. Physically the easiest, but mentally?” She grimaces, and some of the room’s other occupants cringe.
“Anyways,” she sighs, returning her face to a neutral expression, “I ended up being chosen as the new ‘enforcer’. I chased down traitors, tied up loose ends, helped out pretty much everywhere. Still had to do interrogation sometimes; didn’t like it, but apparently I was a natural. Cannot tell you how many gallons of blood I saw. Most of them were spilled by my own hands.”
Steve looks like he regrets asking more every second. Natasha’s expression is solemn as Olivia has ever seen it— not that she’s looking.
“It was shit,” Olivia states. “Obviously. But y’know, it was that or starve, and I didn’t really have anywhere to run when they came after me if I left. Which they always do. I should know, I used to be the one chasing. But then one day Bruce shows up, knocking on my door, and finds out what I’d managed to hide for years. Tells me to quit or be turned in. I figured quit would give me more peace of mind— and time.”
She leans back in her chair, releasing the item in her hand and letting it clatter noisily onto the table.
“The organization I worked for was called MEDUSA,” she announces, the pitch of her voice dropping a little, as though she didn’t really want to say the name aloud. “There are snakes in every garden. That was their motto.”
Finally still on the table is a large copper coin, a stylized image of a woman with snakes for hair raised from its surface.
“Any questions?”