Your mission, should you choose to accept it
There were eighteen definitive ways to kill someone with a cart full of groceries and Maria considered all of them as the woman in front of her yelled at the cashier for some unspecified insult, holding up the line for her and the three trolleys behind her. Stay calm, Rambeau. She can’t scream forever. Maria tried to give the poor boy her most sympathetic smile, but he just grimaced. Jeez. The poor kid looked like he was gonna cry.
“Hey lady. Pipe down, and move it. I gotta get home to my cat before my ice cream melts, and you’re making this routine trip unpleasant for everyone.”
Ms. I'd-Like-To-Speak-To-Your-Manager actually seemed to puff up with rage. She looked like an angry blonde pufferfish.
“How dare you! This young man’s disrespectful conduct—”
“I don’t care,” she said, enunciating each word sharply. “You are making everyone around you miserable. I don’t know what’s going on in your life that you have to take it out on a teenager, but it must really suck. Please find another way to express yourself.”
A vein in Blondie’s forehead popped out.
Oops.
Four minutes later, Bitchy-the-red-faced-PTA-mom finally stopped flapping her gums and got around to huffily pushing her cart away, giving Maria the stink-eye. She knew it was exactly four minutes because she was staring at the clock on the far wall the whole time, wondering what she did in a past life to deserve this. The cashier, Peter, actually sighed in relief.
“That was so badass. I thought she’d never shut up.”
Maria just shook her head and started loading the food onto the checkout area. Some people.
Early the next morning, she was buttoning up her snappiest suit jacket while Goose maneuvered for the slice of PB&J toast she had clenched between her teeth. For a feline, he had an odd fixation with peanut butter. Feeling particularly bold, he hopped onto her dresser and took a swipe for it. Maria leaned back and caught his grabby paws.
“Nice try thief, but unfortunately for you, I’ve got … cat-like reflexes,” she smirked, her incredibly hilarious pun only slightly muffled by her breakfast. Striding out the door, she grabbed her keys, wallet, and gun before hitting the sidewalk to her car.
For keeping up broke millennial appearances, Maria had been issued the ugliest, least functional vehicle known to man. She lovingly referred to it as “Photon,” though it struggled to maintain speeds over fifty. She never used Photon for work, seeing as her agents wouldn’t be able to carry out their tasks if they were too busy giggling at her. Besides, she got to use fancier tools than a dilapidated roadster on duty.
She drove through the streets of Manhattan, head-banging to the Mary-Janes and struggling not to scream at the asshole who nearly caused a three-car-pile up with his shitty driving. It took five more minutes than usual to reach West 49th street, and she was already feeling grumpy. She turned left at the ugly statue of President Ellis, and pulled up to the toll booth at the entrance of the “parking garage.”
The com unit in her radio crackled to life. “How was the drive in from Istanbul,” Agent Coulson asked.
“The weather left much to be desired.”
The bar rose, and she drove in. Ten minutes later, she flashed her badge at an agent and walked into SHIELD HQ and the stream of agents rushing around base like a hive of busy, busy bees. The base wasn’t loud exactly, but everyone talking into headsets and typing commands into keyboards provided a pleasant background noise as she hiked to her assigned briefing room. She said ‘hiked’ in jest, but as HQ was underground, during the building process, the architects apparently decided to err on the side of more space and Maria was huffing and puffing by the time she placed her hand on the biometric scanners and stepped into Pod 199998.
A secret organization wouldn’t be a secret organization without its own lingo. Notable examples included Pods as non-residential rooms, roots as corridors, stems as escalators and chutes as elevators. Maria wasn’t quite sure when or why the SHIELD specific dialect evolved, but it certainly established a sense that its speakers were a part of something, an exclusive club, perhaps.
This pod, in particular, was reserved for level six clearance and above. Maria’s level eight got her in the door and a space between Black Widow and Hawkeye at the briefing table. Barton smiled at her and signed; New Q has my ears. He says he can make them invisible. He rolled his eyes. He needs to spend less time messing with my senses and more time making horizontal stems for exhausted assassins. A quarter-mile from here to the cafeteria. Hungry.
Romanoff frowned and signed back without taking out her earbuds. Wheels.
Maria shook her head. Barton’s rollerblades got shot out. I rescued his ass.
Nat smirked. Ambushed?
Sort of. Hydra meanie—
“Ahem!”
Agent M walked in and pulled a remote out of a pocket. She turned and hit a button and the glass wall and door fogged up. Maria, Nat and Clint stood at attention. With short, silver hair and a suit snazzier than Maria’s, she cut an imposing figure.
“Strike Team Delta, 007, nice to finally make your acquaintance. I hear you’ve been asking for a mission?”
Barton grinned. Finally, he mouthed and mimed an arrow being shot.
M ignored him and hit another button on her remote. A projection of a woman’s face sprung up from the tabletop. “This is Carol Danvers. Former Air Force, reported KIA after being shot down by the terrorist group Blue Angels while transporting an experimental energy core, known as the Tesseract. New intel revealed that she survived the crash, and was taken and coerced into working with them. She escaped, and took the Tesseract with her, and has been living under the radar ever since. We received word that the Blue Angels found her, and is currently planning to take her and the weapon back into their custody. Your job is to keep that from happening.”
Maria raised her hand. “Tesseract, energy core, whatever, what kind of threat level are we talking here?”
“In Angel hands? We’d be lucky if we got out with the East Coast above water.”
Nat whistled. “How stable is it?”
“As long as it’s properly contained? You’ll be fine. Touch it on the other hand…”
“Clint, did you get all that,” Nat asked.
Rescue lady, don’t touch the bomb.
Maria turned back to M. “He’s good. How time-sensitive is this?”
“We have about three weeks before the Angels locate the core and cross her off. 007, you take point, charm her, get her to trust you. Hawkeye, eyes in the sky, as always, don’t let anyone get the drop on your team, Widow, gather anything you can on her, make 007’s job easier.”
What’s our time frame? When do we make contact?
“Saturday, at the absolute latest.” M clicked her remote again and what appeared to be a 3-d loading bar flashed before hundreds of tiny scans of documents popped through. “This is what we have on her life pre-crash.” She hit another button and a single two-page Person of Interest report took center stage. “She goes by Vers, works at Pancho’s bar, and lives in a tiny apartment that just so happens to be a subway stop away from yours, Rambeau.”
“Wait, really? I’ve never been to Pancho’s, ‘cuz I have a social life that doesn’t involve getting drunk and doing bad karaoke.”
“Now you do. We need your interaction and connection to seem organic, both to her and the Angels, or we’d send in Romanoff. I trust you three with the fate of the world. Get to work. You have an ex/pro to be completed in less than 144 hours.”
Nat raised an eyebrow. “This is way too casual. Shouldn’t there be more people on this?”
“You guys get Q and all of our satellites at your disposal. I’m updating your clearance to level nine. As soon as I walk out the door, radio silence, this meeting never happened. We cannot risk a Blue Angels attack now, not with Operation Theta so close to completion.”
M turned. I couldn’t read lips.
Q’ll give us fancy shit. We get satellites. Keep our mouth’s shut.
Thanks, Nat. Why not go in guns blazing? Grab woman get bomb go?
“For starters, the Angels appear to be afraid of her. They aren’t angling for the core specifically because she’s in the picture. If we bring her in, and we don’t immediately snag the Tesseract, they’ll move in. We don’t know what they know about its location. For all we know, we’d be playing into their hands.”
“And if she’s hostile? Threatens us with the Tesser-whatever?”
“Than you do whatever you can to preserve the safety of your team and civilization at large. Any means necessary, 007.”