lures on wires
Since his latest run-in with Hawkeye and Hawkeye, Brett had been thinking up an experiment. Something to get a better feel for the practical capabilities of his latest assemblage of trouble-makers. They were all very different people, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he felt like there was a certain kind of method to their madness: they all had some things in common which made them good at what they did.
Knowing what made vigilantes good vigilantes, the captain thought, when Brett happened to mention this experiment in the break room, could be very useful in locating, working with, and potentially dissuading up and coming vigilantes from their current course of action.
He approved. He told Brett to report his findings.
Brett was pretty sure that in order to get any real kind of findings, he was going to need to recruit the science guys at CUNY and Columbia. As such, he said that he would promise no findings, only observations.
The captain laid into him with a look and told him to report his observations then.
He had more faith in Brett than Brett had in himself, but that was basically an order, so now he really had to go through with it.
He decided that, for the sake of this first trial, he’d test two big, overarching themes he’d picked up on. The first test was an attention span test.
He’d noticed a trend with his resident vigilantes and supers and that was a stunning inability to focus on one thing for more than twenty seconds at a time. Nearly every one of the guys he bumped into shared a cat-like spectrum of attention; they leapt and skittered from hyper-fixation and playful attention to complete and utter boredom, disinterest, and dismissal.
Fogs corroborated this supposedly shared disposition and called it ‘capricious bitch syndrome’ outside the company of those involved. He was, however, willing to submit his beloved to be Brett’s first subject.
Subject acquired, the next thing to do was to find a complicated task which could accommodate multiple types of thinking patterns and, most importantly, focused attention.
He was going to get a Rubik’s cube or something but ran into the whole issue of certain folks being blind. He wondered if he could put braille stickers on the cube to deal with this. Fogs gave him a flat look when he opened the floor up for suggestions.
“Brett,” he said after a long moment of judgment, “You cannot actually believe that these guys will follow any direction you give them.”
A fair and valid point.
“Alright, then, Mr. Expert, what do you propose I do instead?”
Fogs cocked an eyebrow.
Fogs took him to a pet store and purchased a series of tennis balls. Fogs then took him home to the hardware store and spent an hour destroying those tennis balls with sandpaper and mulch. He cut them cleanly in half so their hollows were exposed.
He handed Brett a bunch of cracked microchips and box of empty plastic balls which usually came out of quarter machines.
“Water or glitter, it’s your choice,” he said.
Nothing made any fucking sense, but Fogs acted like he knew what he was about, so Brett picked water.
The chips were incased neatly in hot glue and dropped into the empty plastic toy balls, which were themselves then filled with water and carefully sealed with duct tape. Fogs dropped these into the waiting halves of the tennis balls, then heated the plastic on the sides and sealed those all back together so that they kind of sloshed and rattled when shaken.
This new collection of overblown cat toys was then re-scrubbed with sand paper, burnt a little bit, and placed back in Brett’s hands along with instructions to go bury them beside a dumpster for a few hours.
“Fogs, what the fuck did we just do?” he asked once the deed had been done.
“You’ll see,” Fogs told him solemnly.
Matt, when presented with one of the balls at the end of the day the next day as their office was closing up, just about lost his shit.
“I don’t think it’s that one, Matty,” Foggy clarified from where he was locking up one of the enormous filing cabinets behind their office manager’s desk.
Matt didn’t hear him. Matt was fucking stoked about this piece of shit dumpster ball.
He shook it and listened hard. Shook it again. Stared at it with huge eyes like it held the answers to the universe.
“I’m doing some tests,” Brett read from the mental script Fogs had texted him the night before, “Trying to figure out which one of y’all has the best reasoning ability.”
He now had Matt’s complete and undivided attention. His head snapped up and his body went frozen solid.
“Who else is playing?” he asked, dead serious. He did not relinquish the ball.
Not the reaction Brett was expecting, but okay, sure.
“Whoever I can get to sit still long enough to do it,” Brett told him. “Probably you, Spidey, Castle, Jones, Cage, the usual suspects.”
Matt’s face said that he now fully intended to win this motherfucking game, come hell or high water. He squeezed the tennis ball hard enough that his purple knuckles flexed.
“What are the rules?” he asked.
“Well, you’re going to tell me what’s in that,” Brett tapped a finger on the ball in his hand, “Without opening it. If you open it, you lose points.”
“You gonna time me?” Matt asked.
“Yes.”
“Fastest wins?”
“Yeah, you start with 600 points. You lose a point for every second you take. Minus 200 for opening the ball.”
“Fuck yes. Let’s go.”
Brett pulled out his timer and braced himself.
Matt wanted a count down. Brett thought that was reasonable.
3.
2.
1.
Go.
Matt pitched the damn thing at the wall hard enough that the plastic ball inside audibly cracked. The ball rocketed around the office, ricocheting off the walls until Matt leapt up and caught it in mid-air. Karen swore at him from her own office. He didn’t respond.
He shook the ball and listened hard, then glared at it. Rinse, wash, repeat. Two times.
Whatever he heard, he wasn’t satisfied with, so at 20 seconds he threw it again and nearly broke a window.
At 22 seconds he threw himself bodily under the frame of the mercifully unbroken glass after it.
At 03:05, Brett, Foggy, and an angry Karen relocated him in an alley a few blocks over hurling the poor thing harder and harder against a brick wall without giving it time to connect with any other object, which was fucking eerie in itself. He caught the ball every time without fail, somehow knowing its exact trajectory—almost as though he could see it.
At 03:15 seconds, he paused to catch and shake the ball right next to his ear.
“Rubber, thin plastic—like an ornament, one of those Christmas bauble-things, the kind with the fake snow in them. Maybe a plastic snowglobe? Soft plastic, too. Not sure what that is. For sure something metal. Small, porous. Thin, not thicker than the bauble plastic—much thinner. Like an SD card or something. How am I doing? There’s another thing, but I don’t know what it is. Some kind of fabric? It cushions it.”
That shit was fucking insane.
“You wanna try to guess what the fabric is?” Brett offered in a bit of awe.
Matt’s face said that he now considered this his make-it-or-break-it moment. He held the ball in cupped hands and bowed his head in stillness for a few long moments.
The timer ticked away.
04:07
04:08
“Is it some kind of tape?”
Damn.
04:10.
Still though, he was missing the obvious.
“Anything else you want to add? This is your last chance.”
Matt did a little distressed breathing and rattled the ball a little anxiously.
“Going once,” Brett said.
More rattling.
“Going twice.”
“Wait—wait. Is it? There’s—fuck. What is it? What is it?”
C’mon, man. You can do it.
“WAIT NO HOLD ON—It’s the liquid! Water, some kind of water. Is it water?”
Brett cheered for him and it took Matt a second to realize what had happened before he joined in too. He then immediately wanted to know what his time was.
04:30.
Not bad at all. 330 points total. He was now the man to beat.
Peter was a little harder to find than usual because he was hiding from what he described as a ‘big fucker with mutton chops.’
Brett was not illuminated. But he was in a good position now because Pete was hiding low rather than high as was his usual preference. That put them on a flat roof in the Upper West Side and gave him a wide open space to conduct his experiment.
He produced the ball.
Peter did not look at him once while he explained he object of this game. Brett held the ball up higher and was gratified to see Pete follow it with his chin. His pale hands twitched where they poked out of his sweater.
“Matt did it in four and a half minutes,” Brett told him. Peter said nothing. His fingers flexed.
“You think you can do it faster?” he asked.
He got the barest of nods, so focused was the kid on his hands.
He kindly put the ball into those twitching hands. Peter held it like it was precious. He didn’t look up through the count-down either.
“Ready?”
A silent nod.
“Go.”
Where Matt’s first instinct had been to shatter the noise-maker to pick apart its contents, Peter’s first inclination was to check for seams on the tennis ball itself. He found them, then jerked his chin up to Brett.
“I lose points for opening it,” he clarified.
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“200.”
“Out of how many?”
“600.”
“And Double D got?”
“330.”
Peter hummed.
“Kay,” he said absently.
Then ripped the thing right in half.
“Tennis ball, plastic globe, microchip, tape, some kind of—this saline or water?” he licked his fingers. “Water.” He picked up the microchip and peeled it out of its plastic prison. “Hot glue. What’s my time?”
45 seconds.
“Minus 200 for opening it,” Peter ruminated, doing the math. “That puts me at 355. So I win.”
Matt was going to have a fucking breakdown.
“Yeah, I guess you do.”
Brett found himself all over the city over the next week or so, pissing off and delighting the resident wildlife with the task. He had to hand it to Fogs, the man really knew his clientele.
There was only one incident which didn’t make the cut and that was Danny Rand chucking his ball at the dock and subsequently sacrificing it to the ocean gods. He was devastated.
Replacement of the ball costed another 200 points.
Boy was in the negatives by the time he’d gotten it open.
“I hate this game,” he declared loudly, after Jessica Jones asked who made the ball, and, based off her knowledge of Foggy and his background, guessed at least half the materials from the get-go before having to stoop to make the crack.
This people were fucking wild.
They scored along a huge spectrum, with some folks like Danny getting wrapped up in the excitement of the competition, and other folks, like Castle who asked no questions and smashed the thing from the start, purely to remove Brett from his doorstep.
Brett wasn’t entirely sure what he’d gotten from this test, but he could safely say now that if competition was involved, a good 80% of his new friends presented with keen, prolonged, and single-minded focus.
He found himself in the increasingly familiar dilemma of producing a list of results and a prize for the top three, however. The station was fascinated by these and suggested booze as the prize.
Peter had gotten second place to Castle’s first, however, and Brett was dead certain that booze would result in another polite (although probably much less polite) letter from Colonel Rhodes, so they had to think a little more creatively.
Castle was suspicious of receiving such a nice bottle of whiskey from a cop. He made Brett drink two fingers worth before he deemed it not poisoned and safe for consumption.
Peter received bragging rights and a small tub of something he was apparently not old enough to purchase on his own. Brett could not pronounce the chemical name taped on the tub’s exterior, but technically it wasn’t resin. So as far as he was aware, it was fine. Peter accepted it and stuffed it down the front of his suit in a hurry before demanding that Brett keep him informed of all future tests.
Jessica, who’d also received bragging rights and who had immediately called Matt to exercise them, also requested to be kept in this loop. She thanked him flatly for the booze and returned to her den with the clack of a closed door.
That was an improvement. She’d never not slammed the door on Brett before.
The other test was an agility thing, a teamwork thing. A tracking game, if you will.
It wasn’t Fogs who made this one up, rather it was Wade Wilson of all people who requested it.
“I,” he’d forcibly dictated to Brett, who found himself scrawling this nonsense out in his notebook for later distribution, “Wade Wilson, officially declare, once and for all, that y’all are fucking weenies and no one is a better tracker than me.”
Brett didn’t even need to work for that one. He barely got through half the statement before every party spoken to was in uproar. He had to bring the captain and other detectives in on this one because Fogs said that he wasn’t touching it with a ten foot pole and most of the other people’s associates shared the sentiment.
The station decided that the best ‘trackee’ would someone who was already impossible for they themselves to track down.
Frank Castle agreed and said he’d like to see someone just fucking try to catch him.
Brett made a note that they needed a whole team of psychologists to study this man.
The issue was now that Matt notoriously had a nose for Castle like no one else in the city. He would, without a doubt, find and try to maim Castle in twenty seconds or less and that would surely alert the others and give them the unfair advantage of just following him to the destination. They had to combat this.
“Okay,” Brett told his motley crew of over-excited, costumed sniffer dogs who had gathered for the occasion just outside Battery Park around sunset. “Who here has played Sardines?”
Every hand but two went up.
“Alright, well, for those of you who haven’t: unlike your usual game of tag or hide-and-seek, in Sardines, when you find your mark, you hide with them. Castle will record your time if you find him and when you do, it is your job to stay with him. So what are we going to do?”
There was a children’s chorus of ‘stay with him.’
“And what are we not gonna do?” he asked, wondering if he shouldn’t just hand in his badge now and apply for that position at the nursery around the corner from his mom’s.
“Murder him?” Matt’s voice piped up from the back.
“Intercept these other fucks?” Wilson offered from somewhere back there too.
Mental note, those two needed to be separated.
“Can we work together?” Rand asked.
Rand was shoved out to the side of the group and was declared an idiot by a trial of his peers.
Brett reminded them all that this was not a contact sport and that no, they were not allowed to work together or fight Castle at the end of the line. Matt asked what the fucking point was then and was shouted down like his compatriot.
Once they’d settled down a bit, it was dark enough to unleash the beasts.
Castle had hidden several hours earlier and had sent Brett a message from a random, probably highly secured, email account around six saying that he was in position and had no intention of being located any time soon, thanks.
Brett sent him a quick message on the spot and then stood back to the sidelines with the group of associates who had come along to watch the masses. He went to whistle, but Wilson got there first and fired a shot straight into the air and in a blink everyone was gone. Scattered to the winds.
Belatedly, Brett thought that maybe this was a bad idea.
The crowd of normals remaining migrated off towards the nearest subway station and then headed over to Karen’s apartment, where she had helpfully made Castle turn on his skype so that they could all witness the impending bombardment.
Castle was pretty blasé about this all. Wherever he was, it looked like a bunker and he waved to them all dismissively from his makeshift bed. Man had a highly suspicious collection of notebooks over there that Brett was 100% certain Homeland Security would be desperate to get their hands on.
Castle took the moment of quiet to glance their way and say,
“Gonna be a long wait, friends.”
It was.
Almost.
Fogs and Karen stopped their abysmal game of poker to cheer as the window above Castle on the screen jerked and shuddered open and Matt fell in, right into Castle’s lap.
It had only taken him an hour.
Brett had kind of anticipated that.
Castle shoved Matt off, but Matt, ever a stickler for not following the fucking rules, pounced on him and agitated him until Castle lost his patience and damn near choked him out. Matt, like a juvenile puppy, saw this as a challenge and fought hard until Castle sighed and let him go. He shoved him off the edge of the bed and attempted to go back to his researching.
That lasted maybe a minute at most before Matt pounced again—now having completely forgotten about the game. It quickly, and naturally became a cycle.
Bucky Barnes skidded into the room twenty minutes later, failed to anticipate the drop through the window, and landed right on top of the other two.
Steve and Sam booed him from the back of Karen’s living room.
He proved to be a good distraction for Matt, at least, to Castle’s relief.
“Sit down and shut up,” Barnes swore at him, after yanking him off Castle for the third time in ten minutes. “Papa’s gonna tell us a fucking story while the rest of these chumps get ready to fucking lose.”
Bucky Barnes ignored the skype audience in order to tell Matt a story about a World War II campaign which was almost certainly made up.
It was something insane about a time when the Howling Commandos had all gone hunting for a cigar so that Sergeant Dugan could take a picture with a French gal they’d met while looking like Winston Churchill.
Matt, having been forcefully placed on the floor by Castle’s bed in a cross-legged position across from Barnes’s own, kept interrupting to ask questions which set Barnes back in his story. He’d be making good headway, talking about how him and his scraggly, future patriotic icons had once found a bathtub, a box of peaches, and a rubber duck when Matt would ask something like ‘but wasn’t it winter? How could you find peaches in winter?”
“Well, they were canned.”
“Then why were they in a box?”
“How else do you move cans, asshole?”
“So you found a whole crate of canned peaches? In the French countryside? In winter?”
“What part of this is hard for you to understand, pal? Yeah, there were fucking canned peaches in the goddamned ice wasteland, alright? Anyways—”
“But wouldn’t they have been rationed? Was fruit rationed?”
“Listen, you—”
“He has a point,” Castle chimed in. “Sounds fucking fake if you ask me.”
Barnes sneered at him and crossed his arms. The metal one glinted in the dim light on the screen.
“Fine, you wanna tell the story, big guy? You tell the fuckin’ story.”
Castle, to Brett’s surprise, stopped chicken pecking at his tablet and cocked an eyebrow back.
“I will,” he decided, then set the tablet aside and laid his chin into his palm. “I bet what really happened is that y’all went out at night to some bombed out inn and found a single can of peaches and a hunk of soap y’all decided looked kind of like a fuckin’ duck. And I bet you didn’t find a single cigar, so y’all smashed together a couple of cigs just so your buddy could take the damned picture. That’s what I think.”
Barnes huffed.
“Man, if you can’t turn a hunk of fuckin’ soap into a good story, I don’t know what to—”
Wilson crash-landed into home base and managed to miss Castle to take out Barnes with his momentum. Matt lit up.
“Wade, when you were a soldier, did you ever find a can of fruit?” he asked the writhing mass suffocating the most senior member of the troop.
Wilson, once extricated from Barnes and done being pissed off that he’d come in third place, hummed in thought, then lit up as well.
“Actually, now that you mention it, me and a couple buddies earned some lemons once.”
There was a long pause on the other side of the monitor. Castle leaned forward on his palm.
“Well, go on then,” he said, before waving dismissively at Barnes, “This guy’s trying to tell us he found a whole crate of peaches back in the good ole days.”
Wade addressed Barnes, gave him a good once-over and then said, “It was just one wasn’t it?”
Barnes threw his hands in the air.
“Y’all ain’t got no imagination, that’s what this is,” he declared.
There was a brief argument over the veracity of this statement which was ended by the swift arrival of Hawkeye the elder. He arrived only to the door of the little room with a disconcerting thud, but he did manage to lodge his whole hand under the door, so, technically he was in the room at the two hour mark, even though he was definitely stuck with no hope of savior. There was another brief, far too casual debate about whether or not to chop off his hand at the wrist.
Barnes relented eventually and opened the door into the guy’s face before congratulating him on attaining fourth place and dragging him in by the back of his shirt. He was dumped on the floor and the fruit question was posed to him as well.
“Nah man, I wasn’t around long enough to find any fruit,” Barton said, nursing his now-abused hand, “Found a whole lot of scrubbin’ though. Every officer in that place decided that what I needed was a good scrubbin’.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re a fuckin’ scrub,” Barnes observed.
“You don’t even know what a fuckin’ scrub is,” Barton snapped back.
Brett could not believe that this was the city’s first line of defense after hours.
“Do to.”
“Do not.”
“What’s a scrub?” Matt asked Wade and Castle who flinched back in shock.
“You not listen to music or something, Red?” Castle asked.
Matt made a gesture encompassing his entire being.
“Catholic school,” he said.
“I mean, yeah, but Catholics are allowed to listen to music, you know? I listened to music,” Castle pointed out.
“You’re Catholic in name only and anyways, I was like ten or something when that song came out.”
Silence in the auditorium. Followed by groaning and anguished writhing.
“Christ, I’m so fucking old,” Wade moaned.
That carried on for long enough for Matt get good and annoyed and demand to know where the fuck Danny or Kate or Peter was so he could be freed from this new burden of being the youngest person in the room.
His prayers were answered by Kate who cried out in triumph upon hearing their voices through the door and came into the room with her arms up for high-fives from her mentor. Barton celebrated with her and asked her to pardon the overflow of masculinity happening.
Jones was hot on her heels. And hot on her heels was a handful of others.
Most everyone was in and fiercely debating scrubs by the three hour mark and that was coincidentally the same time they all realized that the only missing body was Spiderman.
Things got quiet. The room on both sides of the skype call settled down and waited.
And waited.
And waited?
Wade and Matt got antsy for their lost team member around hour four and eventually it was decided that Peter was going to be in last place anyways, so it was fine to call him and give him a hint.
Peter didn’t need a hint. He needed an army, they were informed over speaker phone.
“I know we’re supposed to be like, playing this game, but there’s like forty guys over here trying to break the Brooklyn Bridge in half and I think I’m kind of shot?” Peter gritted through his teeth over the phone.
The place was abandoned far quicker than it had been filled.
Brett’s observations, which found their way to the captain written out on a piece of computer paper the following Monday morning, were thus:
- Vigilantes have, on the whole, very strong reasoning and critical thinking skills. These skills are frequently augmented by their abilities and/or choice of career.
- Vigilantes are, on the whole, extremely proficient at tracking (especially each other). They are capable of finding a person within hours, even if provided with an extremely limited set of information at the start.
- Everything above may be magnified by the added element of competition.
- The Howling Commandos had, in fact, found a wax peach in France at one point during World War II [information obtained from Steve Rogers, 2 hours post-Brooklyn Bridge incident.]
- Bucky Barnes is a lying liar who lies and is currently being shunned by the greater vigilante community.