samantha logan. she/her. cis woman. › spotted at the met steps , HAYDEN SULLIVAN , most likely listening to swan song by niki + saweetie with their airpods pro . the twenty-four year old gained quite a reputation , known to be -taciturn yet +dextrous to anyone who knows them . you'll easily spot them when you hear about the feeling of reassurance when a bow and arrow are in hand , collecting and restoring first edition books , ambient noise in a coffee shop , followed by their aqua di gioia by armani beauty . latest nepoupdates article talks about retirement announcement soon ? hayden sullivan spotted walking out of a lecture hall instead of training at columbia , but i guess any reputation is good reputation .
[ ! ] WANTED CONNECTIONS.
[ ! ] ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS.
penned by HECATE ( she/her , pst , 21+ )
OVERVIEW .
STATS PAGE .
FULL NAME: hayden vera sullivan
NICKNAME(S) / ALIASES: hay , hadie , den , denny
DOB: 03/18/1999
AGE: 24
HEIGHT: 5′6″
ZODIAC: pisces
GENDER: cis woman
PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: biromantic
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: bisexual
LANGUAGES: english , spanish , french , latin , italian
AESTHETICS: the feeling of reassurance when a bow and arrow are in hand , collecting and restoring first edition books , ambient noise in a coffee shop , spontaneous visits to museums , oversized cardigans , color-coded book annotations , yelling at espn as if they can hear you
CHARACTER PARALLELS: allison argent ( teen wolf ) , jesper fahey ( six of crows ) , darcy lewis ( mcu ) , gabrielle kinney ( marvel comics ) , oliver queen ( dc comics )
BACKGROUND .
born the youngest in washington d.c. to a legacy spanning back generations with the sullivans tied to royalty and the munroes heavily tied to politics . her father is an archaeology professor and her mother ? a financial reporter . unfortunately , being the youngest meant that she wasn’t doted on a lot by her parents . with two older siblings , she suddenly became their responsibility . they were the ones babysitting while their parents were at work . and when they couldn’t , hayden was often in the care of her grandparents .
just after her mother lands a new gig as a financial reporter for cnn and an assistant professor position at columbia , the family relocates to new york when hayden is four . she’s only eight when her family discovers her penchant for archery . she’s gifted . a prodigy , one of her coaches said . it was only a matter of time since her older siblings each had something they were gifted in . since that discovery , her focus starts to heavily shift to archery . she continues training and by nine , she starts competing in archery tournaments . she’s ten when she makes it to the junior olympics and continues making it until she’s scouted .
her life hasn’t always been calm . she’s hit with news of her parents divorce in her final year of high school . right before she finds out she qualifies for the olympics . hayden is now on the road to the olympics . no time to process the divorce . she medals at the 2016 olympics and she couldn’t be more proud of herself .
hayden is thrust back into reality when she gets back from rio . coming down from the high of medaling silver at the olympics , hayden starts to focus more on school whilst still juggling her training . reality really comes crashing down when her father breaks the news that he’s seeing someone .
she makes her reappearance at the 2020 olympics , placing gold . after the 2020 olympics , hayden is back in new york to finish up her final year of college . unfortuantely during training , she suffers from an injury . nothing major but also not minor . most definitely hidden from the press . nothing better than news of an impending wedding to top it off too ! the sets her training back and makes her realize that she needs to have a backup plan . so what does she do ? she doesn't decide to retire from the sport she loves but she decide to obtain her masters in art history and further her experience in art conservation .
PERSONALITY .
despite spending her formative years training , she’s not socially stunted . hayden’s social , enthusiastic , charming and independent . however , she can come off as a little scattered . her attention tends to shift when she gets bored with her surroundings . it’s not done intentionally though ! hayden can be seen as a bit of a jock given how she initially presents herself to others . she tends to thrive in settings with spontaneity , knowing that she can get bored by details and repetition . ironic given the fact that she’s training in a sport that requires precision and detail . regardless , others see her as talkative . easily connecting with people with warmth and enthusiasm .
HEADCANONS .
this section is a wip and will be updated when i think of more things ! <3
the sullivan family comes from a lineage of dukes/duchesses
the munroe family is a family ��heavily rooted in american politics ( senators , governors , think vanderbilts in og gossip girl )
her father and step-mother recently got married making her and henri step-siblings
graduated from nyu with a degree in chemistry with a minor in art history
currently roped in as an archery advisor for season two of hawkeye ( and yes henri absolutely does NOT like it )
collects and restores first edition / rare collectable books as a hobby
has a white labrador retriever named thor that’s basically her bff
recently just finished her graduate internship at the met and is looking to eventually apply for the graduate internship in objects conservation
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You Say “Mad Scientist” Like It’s A Bad Thing
Based on my own tumblr post: 3am thoughts… Has anyone written Jane Foster as a mad scientist, I mean like a villain?
Chaotic neutral Darcy and Jane featuring modern/human SHIELD Agent Bucky.
Available on AO3.
Content Warnings: Implied/Referenced Torture, Aftermath of Torture, Amnesia, Memory Suppressing Machine | The Chair (Marvel), Dark, Sort Of, Ambiguous/Open Ending...
In a world full of megalomaniacs, straight up supervillains, and fricking aliens, mad scientists were a dime a dozen. Dr Foster was one such scientist who was quickly moving from mildly irritating to SHIELD’s Most Wanted.
Dr Foster’s gimmick was portals. She first gained international attention when she claimed responsibility (via an untraceable Instagram account, @dr-mthrfckng-foster) for diverting LA’s 405 to a dirt road in rural Australia. Then came a string of impossible robberies – bank vaults and the private collections of the world's richest assholes stripped bare in seconds. Then she created a portal that caused an Indonesian typhoon to bear down on Wall Street, flooding the trading floor. And then she robbed a top secret government black site of some classified technology.
And that’s when Director Nick Fury made finding and stopping Dr Foster SHIELD’s number one priority.
Agent James Barnes had been stuck on suspension for two weeks, with two more to go, and was itching to get back into the field. He had way too much free time on his hands: he’d caught up on his sleep and everything in his Netflix queue. He’d cleaned out his refrigerator, done laundry and enough meal prep to last him until next month. He’d caught up with his family, cleaned his whole goddamn apartment twice, and now he was well and truly bored.
He was out for his fifth run of the week (and it wasn’t even Wednesday) when his work phone rang.
“Thank Christ,” he muttered before answering.
“Barnes.”
“It’s Hill. How’s the arm?”
“Fine,” Barnes grunted, rotating his metal shoulder irritably. “You got something for me?”
“Are you up for a recon mission?”
Usually he would have protested. He headed tactical units. He was an elite ‘first through the door’ kind of field agent. Not that he couldn’t be stealthy and patient - he’d been a sniper in the army for christ's sake - but going unnoticed in public was kind of a problem for him these days; he’d have to wear jackets and gloves in the middle of August to hide his prosthetic for starters.
On the other hand, his mother had been calling him every second day to feed him carb-heavy meals in exchange for help around the house, all while dropping not-so-subtle hints that he should start dating again. Requests for more grandchildren couldn’t be far behind.
“I’ll be there in thirty.”
Thirty-five minutes later Agent Barnes was back at his desk at SHIELD HQ perusing through the increasingly large file of one Dr Jane Foster.
She had been a brilliant student and had earned a PhD in Astrophysics from Culver University by the age of 25. By all accounts she should have been one of the leading researchers in her field, and if doctoral programs handed out superlatives Dr Foster’s would have been “Most Likely To Win a Nobel Prize By 30”.
Unfortunately for Dr Foster, and the rest of the world, she had been forced from that path by a sexist tenured professor who publicly denounced her theories, and the woman herself, as crazy, discredited her published work, and used his influence to ensure she was denied all of the more lucrative research grants.
When federal agents went to interview him after the 405 incident they found his office looking like a tornado had gone through it and the professor himself was nowhere to be found. A few weeks later he stumbled into a US Embassy in Russia after being found wandering in from the forests outside Vladivostok, half mad and still decrying the evils of allowing women into scientific fields.
He had been placed into witness protection and promptly admitted into a psychiatric facility under his new name, and was being monitored by several undercover agents in case Dr Foster felt like punishing him some more.
Anyone else who had a part in ruining Dr Foster’s legitimate career was also under surveillance, as was her mother in London, a terrified ex-boyfriend in Boston, and a handful of known associates, though Dr Foster hadn’t been in contact with any of them in years.
SHIELD and other federal agencies had tried the usual methods of tracking down a rogue mad scientist. They tried to find out where her base of operations was, firstly by looking for any properties in her name, but Dr Foster had been a broke student with an impressive amount of debt (until the day she decided to wipe it, and the rest of Culver’s student debt, out). So if she had property it would definitely not be in her legal name and all but impossible to trace back to her. Then they tried to look for drains on the powergrid. However she managed to generate her portals - SHIELD scientists still hadn’t figured that out - it surely had to be using huge amounts of electricity. So far they’d found six grow labs and two server rooms running illegal god-knows-what, but no Dr Foster.
Agent Barnes read the file twice, reviewed all the transcripts of the interviews with her known associates, and came to one very important conclusion: she had an accomplice.
As smart as Dr Foster was there was nothing in her academic history to suggest that she had a background in computer science that would account for the notable hacks and the untraceable nature of her activities. To add to that several interviewees had made passing remarks about her not having a cell phone for most of her academic career, and how she had zero interest in social media.
Two days later, after getting the okay for a field trip from Hill, Agent Barnes made his way to Culver University to speak to anyone who had even the vaguest recollection of Dr Foster. And that’s how he learnt about the intern.
He’d started by dropping by one of the physics labs where Dr Foster had spent most of her time, and by pure chance met a doctoral candidate who remembered her, and her intern.
“I think her name was Darlene. Glasses. Always on her phone.”
…which led him to the academic advisor who put the two of them together...
“Darcy. Darcy Lewis. She was actually a PoliSci major but left it too late and Dr Foster’s internship was the only one available. She had only been working with her for a few weeks before… before Dr Foster’s funding was revoked and she was asked to leave.”
...who pointed him to one of Darcy’s former professors…
“Average student. Good debater. Often late, and always had a coffee in her hand.”
...who gave him a few names of some former classmates who might remember her…
“Not the worst person to be stuck with on a group assignment. Pulled her weight. Obsessed with her stupid iPod.”
“I swear she lived off pop tarts and coffee. And not Starbucks either. Some stupid hipster chain.”
“Deja Brew. Serious problem. Went through one of those loyalty punch cards every week. Always complained about having to go home for the holidays and resort to big chain coffee shops.”
...which had him driving out to Darcy Lewis’ hometown, located a few hours south of Roanoke, Virginia, stopping first at the local high school to speak to the school principal…
“She’d always been good with computers but wasn’t allowed to use them at home for some reason so she spent a lot of time at the local library using theirs. We had to suspend her once. One of her classmates accused her of accepting payment from other students to hack the school’s records and alter their grades. Their grades were definitely getting altered, but we couldn’t get any concrete proof it was her.”
...who was able to find a photo of 16 year old Darcy in an old yearbook and told him what bar he could find Darcy’s mother in.
“She knows not to come to me if she’s in the shit, because I would call the cops in a heartbeat. Especially after that stunt she pulled before she went off to college…”
“What stunt was that, Ms Bennett?” Agent Barnes asked patiently, hoping he wouldn’t have to enable her alcoholism to get some useful information.
“I made some mistakes, okay,” she slurred defensively. “I was having an affair with my boss. Don’t know how Darcy knew. She told her stepfather but he didn’t believe her. Then a few weeks later we went out to dinner for my boss’s birthday... all the tv’s in the bar start showing security camera footage of us falling into offices and motel rooms. Took her all of a minute to ruin two marriages and a law firm.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he replied diplomatically. “Is there anyone she could turn to for help? Her father, perhaps.”
“He died when she was about twelve. They were as thick as thieves,” she recalled with a tinge of bitterness.
“Was there any place that was special to them? Someone she might go to ground?”
She shook her head. “He used to rent this old cabin near the Catskills off a buddy of his every other year. Winter or summer, Darcy loved it. But it's long gone. Forest fire, I think, the year before his accident.”
Back in his car Agent Barnes reviewed the data points.
Dr Foster had a base of operations somewhere. Had to be private, and as best SHIELD could guess it must be off the grid and Dr Foster must be generating her own power.
Dr Foster was a space nut at heart, and while an abandoned observatory might be too much to ask for, she’d probably want somewhere with minimal light pollution.
And while they could portal anywhere, neither of them spoke any other languages and had no familiarity with any international locations, so they were most likely still State-side. (Dr Foster’s mother had moved to London when Jane was twenty-three, but she’d never found the time to visit.)
Miss Lewis was familiar with the Catskills area. A base of operations there could be very isolated.
Dr Foster was most likely building and modifying her own own equipment so she had to be able to access materials. Sure, she could portal to her local hardware store, but having Darcy drive into the nearest town for supplies would attract less attention.
Miss Lewis had an addiction to coffee procured from Deja Brew, a small hipster chain with only a handful of locations along on the east coast. While she could have found another way to get her caffeine fix, people were creatures of habit.
Miss Lewis was also known for stocking up on poptarts. In one of the only images of the other side of one of Dr Foster’s portals there was what appeared to be, if one squinted, a box of limited edition pop tarts on a counter.
He plugged it all into SHIELD fancy search engines and got a few results back. The most promising was an abandoned ski chalet turned abandoned research station halfway up a mountain, an hour drive away from an up and coming tourist town, whose main street hosted a Deja Brew cafe. They also had a small mom and pop hardware store, as well as a post office, and a grocery store that had still been selling pumpkin pie pop tarts around the time Dr Foster’s portal had been caught on camera.
Agent Barnes came to with a groan. The flesh of his shoulder where it met his prosthetic felt like it was on fire, and he was pretty sure he could smell fried wiring.
The research station had come up in SHIELD’s initial search for a potential mad scientist's lair, but had been dismissed for not using any power and for not sending back any heat signature readings. Perhaps they’d found a way to fool the scanners. Or maybe they just weren’t in the day the readings were taken. Whatever the reason, Agent Barnes had a good feeling about it. He filled his tank up at the nearest gas station and got on the highway, forgoing checking in at the Triskelion on his way past in favour of driving all night. He’d call Hill when he had something solid.
** *** **
“Fuck…”
He willed his eyes open and came face to face with Darth Vader.
Barnes reeled back at the sound of the synthesized voice. “Who sent you? Who do you work for?! The Rebellion?”
“What the fuck!”
It took him until his eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting to realise that Darth Vader was wearing a grey knit dress and black tights. Darth Vader laughed and ripped off his mask to reveal a smiling bespectacled brunette underneath. The accomplice. Darcy Lewis.
“Sorry, I was just messing with you, dude,” she teased, tossing the mask over her shoulder. “I’ve always wanted to do that. But seriously, who do you work for? Who knows you’re here?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he lied. “I was just camping in the woods, man. I saw the lights and decided to check it out,” he rambled in a lazy Canadian accent. “How the hell did I get here? Did you electrocute me?”
He used his not-quite fake panic to test the limits of his restraints. He’d been strapped into some sort of junkstore barber chair, with thick metal shackles locked around his wrists, ankles, and chest. His metal arm could probably make quick work of them but the damn thing was not responding. His panic became a little less fake.
“Just camping, huh?” she echoed back with a raised eyebrow, leaning forward to the point where Barnes couldn’t avoid getting a good look down her top and the 15-carat pink diamond (worth about 40mil and reported stolen in one of Dr Foster’s vault heists two months ago) hanging around her neck. “So that wasn’t you poking around town this morning?” she asked pointedly, drawing his attention to the wall of monitors he hadn’t noticed showing various street cameras around the town. “I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere, dude. You got into town bright and early in a beat up looking truck with plates that didn’t exist two weeks ago and started flashing my yearbook photo around. So, who do you work for?”
He levelled his best steely-eyed agent stare at her and switched back to his native pissed-off Brooklynite accent. “I ain’t tellin you shit, sweetheart.”
“C’mon now,” she cooed, taking a seat on his lap. “Who do you work for? FBI? Interpol? SHIELD? Crawford County Library Services? Listen, I was totally going to return Eat Pray Love, but we had to skip town in a hurry and it got lost in the move. I will totally pay to replace it.”
Years of training (and regular poker games with the Black Widow) had taught him to school his features, even if that last one threw him for a loop.
“Nothing? You sure you don’t want to talk to me? Fine,” she whined. “Jane!”
It was only then that Barnes switched his focus from his captor to his surroundings and realised that there was another occupant puttering about on the other side of the large telescope that took pride of place on a hydraulic platform underneath the research station's retractable roof. The infamous Dr Foster.
“Jane!”
“What?” came the irritated reply.
“Come over here and practise your monologue. Look! You’ve got a captive audience and everything!” she announced, laughing at her own joke.
“I don’t have time, Darcy,” the disgruntled voice argued.
“Hey! I spent two days writing up that monologue, the least you can do is spend twenty-five minutes reading it out loud so I can make sure it doesn’t make you sound too much like a cartoon villain.”
“Twenty-five minutes?! Are you kidding me?” Dr Foster stormed out from behind the telescope to wave a wrench at her assistant. She looked less put together than her ID photo, appearing to be long overdue for both a shower and a nap. “I’m in the middle of something. I’ve almost figured the problem with the mobile portal generator, and… Darcy, why is there a man tied to a chair in my lab?”
“This man?” Darcy snorted, taking Barnes’s chin in her hands and wiggling it about. “This is the intruder. You remember the intruder alert, like fifteen minutes ago? Lots of flashing lights and alarms? Well, I found this guy passed out on the lawn. For most people, hitting my force field would be like getting lightly tased, but this bad boy,” she continued, tapping a fingernail against his dead metal arm, “meant you ended up getting the full 50,000 volts to your heart. Thanks for letting me practice my CPR by the way,” she added with a wink.
“It’s not a force field, Darcy. It’s a glorified invisible pet fence, upsized and modified so it reacts to the electrical impulses in the human body.”
“It keeps people out; I’m calling it a force field.”
This was definitely the weirdest interrogation he had endured by a large margin, Barnes mused as he followed their bickering like a pingpong game.
“Who is he, Darcy?” Jane sighed wearily. “What is he doing here?”
“Fiiiine. Janey, meet Agent James Barnes of SHIELD.”
“What?! SHIELD?!!”Jane screeched. “Why did you bring him here?”
“He found us, Jane. What was I supposed to do?”
“Something other than bringing him inside our secret hideout.”
“I am not killing him and burying him in the woods; I just did my nails.”
Jane scowled, turning the full force of her overtired fury on James. “Why can’t you SHIELD issue jackbooted thugs just leave me alone? Can’t you understand how important my work is? I am challenging the very foundations of modern science - of the laws of the universe! I am on the verge of a breakthrough! And if you or Nick Fury think you can stop me, you’ve got another thing coming!”
Before his mouth could betray him and ask how the hell they knew his boss Darcy spoke up.
“A little off script, but I like the energy, Jane. Very much the mad scientist vibe we’re going for. But next time, try not to make it so personal – we’ve got to hide the target of our frustrations, remember? Instead of saying “SHIELD” say “government”, instead of saying “Nick Fury” say “president”.”
“Right, right,” Jane nodded absently, tapping the side of her head with the wrench she had just been waving around like a weapon.
“Now, go back to work. I’ll handle this.”
“Okay, thanks Darce. Oh, have you seen my soldering iron around?”
“It’s in the locked cabinet because you’re not allowed to use it unsupervised, you know that. Gimme ten minutes, I’ll bring it to you.”
Jane wandered back to her side of the observatory, muttering under her breath, leaving Barnes at Darcy’s mercy.
“She’s not the criminal mastermind here, is she?” he wondered, his eyes roaming over the strange cupcake of a woman in his lap.
“Not exactly,” Darcy admitted. “I mean, it’s not like she set out to be a mad scientist. I kind of rebranded her after that little freeway incident.”
“Rebranded?”
“Yeah. She was in a bad way after New Mexico and then when the first live test of her portal engine went a little sideways I didn’t want dudebros on the internet coming after her, so I changed the narrative. Instead of ‘girl scientist makes mistake, should stick to making sandwiches’ I changed it to ‘Dr Foster, genius astrophysicist, causes chaos, totally on purpose.’”
“And all those robberies?”
“I may have encouraged that. I’m all for sticking it to the one percenters, and Jane needed to fund her experiments somehow,” she added with a shrug.
“So Jane’s the absent-minded professor and you’re the brains behind this operation, huh?”
Darcy laughed and slid out of his lap causing a distracting amount of friction. “I’m really not. So you, Coulson, and Fury should be really, really scared.”
“How do you know those names?” he had to know, cover be damned.
“You don’t know? Of course you don’t,” she huffed. “Fury and his clearance levels. I’d tell you to ask him about New Mexico sometime, but you’re not going to be able to.”
“Why not? What are you going to do to me?” Barnes fretted, unable to ignore the sinking feeling that he was in big trouble; she wouldn’t have told him anything if she intended on letting him walk out of here.
“Oh, relax. I’m not going to kill you. I’m just gonna scramble your brain a little.”
She circled his chair, flipping switches as she went, and something behind him started humming ominously.
“So, admittedly I didn’t major in hard sciences. I had an ex who did, but he also fancied himself something of a cat burglar, so when he went to jail I liberated all his college textbooks and gave myself a crash course in electrical engineering. And it helped that those HYDRA designs were really easy to follow.”
“HYDRA?” Barnes cursed.
HYDRA had been the scientific branch of the Nazi regime and believed that discovery required (human) experimentation. They were supposedly eradicated at the end of WWII but Project Paperclip saved some of HYDRA’s greatest minds, giving them immunity in exchange for their genius. If Foster or, more worryingly, Darcy had aligned themselves with some surviving HYDRA faction the results could be catastrophic.
“Yeah, I found them in that SHIELD warehouse when we recovered Jane’s stolen research.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They just call it ‘The Chair’, which is totally not creepy at all,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And this is the Halo,” she added, drawing Barnes’s attention to the whirring circle of metal that was lowering itself over his head.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted, renewing his efforts to break free of his restraints. “Get that piece of scrap metal the fuck away from me!”
“Hey! Don’t mock my work. It may look like I raided a junkyard for the components - and I did - but my welding game is on point. It’s totally safe. Mostly safe. It’s just going to send focused electrical pulses to your…” she paused to consult some smudged writing on her hand, “hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.”
The Halo stopped moving and two metal plates extended, pressing against the sides of his head, holding it like a vice.
“Please… don’t do this,” he begged as she approached him with a rubber mouthguard.
“C’mon, open wide. You don’t want to end up braindead and unable to chew your food,” she jested, waving the thing in front of him. “Oh, just one question before I fry your brain,” she added just when he was about to give in. “How did you find us? I was so careful,” she whined.
Agent Barnes, terrified as he was, still managed to look smug at his small, short lived success. “Deja Brew coffee.”
“Curses!” she wailed theatrically. “Betrayed by my one true love!”
Darcy huffed and quickly returned her attention to the matter at hand.
“Thanks for that,” she said with a smile as she forced him to bite down on the mouthguard. “I’ll know better for next time. Start making my own coffee at home… but it never tastes as good,” she muttered to herself.
She stepped away from him and bent down to pick up a similarly frankensteined industrial remote with long wires snaking back to the chair and a clichéd big red button at its centre. He began struggling anew, screaming around the foul tasting rubber, begging for mercy.
She took great delight in his terrified expression and put on her best supervillain voice, “Give my regards to Nick Fury.”
Nick Fury observed his agent from behind a two way mirror as he sat behind a table in an interrogation room. Barnes had been sitting there for the past hour as still as a statue, except for his unfocused eyes which flitted about the room.
In true horror movie fashion, Agent Barnes’ screams echoed down the mountainside like an avalanche, sending animals fleeing in terror for miles around.
** *** **
Local LEO’s had found him wandering aimlessly down a stretch of highway just outside the ruins of what had previously been Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, and ten minutes after they ran his prints Agent Romanoff had been on a quinjet to collect him. She’d been directed to the nearest hospital and found him sitting up on a bed but not responding or reacting to any of the medical staff as they buzzed around him. Agent Romanoff took a cautious step forward and held her breath as his unfocused eyes settled on her.
“Hello James...”
An excruciating minute later the veil lifted and he attempted a smile.
“Hey Tasha.”
She’d brought him back to base and dragged him to SHIELD’s medical bay for more tests - not that Barnes put up much of a fight, in fact he was terrifyingly compliant. The SHIELD doctors confirmed what the New Mexico doctors suspected: the bruising and electrical burns around his temples and his memory loss were indicative of some back alley version of electroshock therapy. His memories should come back in time - how long was anybody’s guess - but for the moment Agent James Barnes had no memory of the last four weeks.
Fury picked up a tablet with depressingly little information on its screen and stepped into the room, waiting for Barnes eyes to focus on him before taking a seat.
“Agent Barnes.”
“Director.”
“I know you’re probably sick of questions by now, but I have a few more for you, if that’s alright.”
“Yeah, sure…”
It rankled Fury to no end how meak and passive Barnes seemed. Heaven help him, he missed the argumentative sonofabitch.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Being called into your office.”
“What for?”
“I punched Rumlow.”
“Why?”
“He was bragging about taking advantage of a drunk woman at a club when he was last on leave. He didn’t like me calling out his shitty behaviour. He punched me, I punched him back.”
Fury sighed. He hadn't gotten a straight answer out of Barnes at the time of the incident and he couldn’t feel happy about getting one now.
“Do you remember what happened once I called you into my office?”
His brow creased and his eyes zipped back and forth like the carriage of a printer as his mind searched for the elusive memory.
“You suspended me?”
“I did,” Fury confirmed. “For a whole month. But two weeks into it I pulled you in for a special assignment.”
Barnes tensed, shrinking in on himself. The confusion about his lost time seemed to be the only thing that got under his skin, but only when someone brought it up. Once the moment passed he forgot to be concerned about it.
Fury took pity on him. “For the past two weeks I had you running down leads on the whereabouts of Dr Jane Foster.”
“The scientist with the portals? Did she do this to me?”
“It’s not exactly her MO, but then again no law enforcement agency’s ever managed to have a confrontation with her. Never had the chance. Those portals of hers let her keep at a distance. You might have been the first person to have a face to face with her, but I can’t confirm it because I don’t know where the hell you were when this happened,” he grumbled, letting a little more of his usual exasperated tone filter through. “You missed check in by two days. The last we heard from you, you were at Culver running down leads on what you said was a potential accomplice. We found your car in Tromso, Norway, a day after you were found on the side of a road in New Mexico. You don’t appear on any security footage or speed cameras in the area. There’s no activity on your work or personal credit cards. Your activity logs on our highly secure system for the last two weeks are nonexistent, as are your call logs on your work phone. Even the messages you sent Romanoff from your personal phone complaining about your assignment have since been deleted - from her phone too. She’s real pissed about it. As far as your digital footprint is concerned you disappeared from a gas station outside Roanoke, Virginia, last week - do you know how weird it is to know you were headed out towards a place called Roanoke only to up and vanish?” He sighed at Barnes’ painful silence. “Is there anything you can remember, anything at all about Dr Foster or her accomplice? Anything that will help us catch up to you without talking to everyone on campus to figure out what you discovered?”
Barnes’ brow creased in painful confusion.
“I think… I think I saw Darth Vadar.”
Director Fury blinked. “Right…” He took a deep breath to stop himself from venting his frustrations at Barnes, the sorry bastard looked like a kicked puppy as it was. Instead he got up and tapped the tablet against the metal tabletop harder than strictly necessary. “Well, I’ll just go put out a BOLO out for Darth Vadar then.”
“Okay,” Barnes murmured, and promptly zoned out again.
Agent Romanoff exited the viewing room looking uncharacteristically unsettled.
“I want a full detail on him at all times,” Fury ordered as he stormed off towards the elevators. Hill had just stepped off and was looking even more grim than usual. “Until his memories come back he’s vulnerable, and once they do he’ll be a target.”
“I’ll get a STRIKE team on it. Not Rumlow’s.”
“Get another one along with any assets currently not on assignment. Flood that campus, interrogate everybody. I wanna know who the hell Dr Foster’s accomplice is, and I wanna know yesterday. Understood?”
“I think we might have more pressing concerns, sir,” Hill reported, tapping at her tablet as it beeped erratically. “Coulson’s said there’s an issue with the Tesseract. Dr. Selvig read an energy surge from it fifteen minutes ago.”
“NASA didn't authorise Selvig to test phase,” he grunted, taking the tablet from Hill.
“He wasn't testing it, he wasn't even in the room. Spontaneous advancement.”
“Motherfucker.”
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Writer's works in progress
I saw that someone else had written up their wip-s, so maybe writing up mine will make me GET ON WITH IT and help me write more on one (or more) of them. 1) 1938 Brooklyn Murder mystery: in which a Ripper (any killer with a knife is always dubbed a Ripper by the press, it's a thing) stalks the young men of the queer/gay community of Brooklyn. One by one young men die and the cops either can't or won't do anything about a few dead [slur]; the mob doesn't care either; war looms in Europe; the Mayor is trying to clean up the city before the World's Fair; the dynamics of the queer community itself is changing as men and women who previously might not have considered themselves part of it are thrown in with it, with new laws meant to manage a moral society; and two men, in exactly that predicament, are watching their friends dying at the hands of the Ripper and hoping they're not next, while dealing with feelings for each other. (The historian in me has run amok.) 2) The Sweater Curse: (Bagginshield) In which hobbits consider it bad luck to make crocheted or knitted garments for themselves (a sign that one has no kin) because sweaters are made and given between first and second degree blood relatives (parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews). Other kinds of garments are given freely. If a sweater is given to an unrelated person it is considered a proposal. In which dwarves make their own crocheted or knitted garments for themselves (a sign of their craft-skill and self-sufficiency). Other kinds of garments are bought and sold freely. If a sweater is offered as a gift to another person it is befuddling at best and an insult at worst. The Sweater Curse in our world says that if a person, usually a woman, starts to make a sweater for their significant other, usually a man, before they are married, the relationship will end. The fic I'd imagined had a happy ending - with Thorin thinking that Bilbo had been making the sweater for himself. "You loveable dunce, did you never notice I'd keep borrowing Kíli to size it correctly for you? I'd be swimming in it!" 3) transman Phil Coulson fic. I'm not trans, so I'd have to tread carefully here. My real aim is feminism and femininity. A male Coulson has leeway in a manner that a female Coulson would not. A male Coulson is not told that he is missing out on the essential manly quality of being a father and a husband; he is not automatically assumed, on walking into a room, to be the secretary or the assistant. Women always have to be twice as good to be perceived as half as competent, and then (often) they're told not to be a b*tch about it. But all this from the point of Clint Barton, who is kind of clueless, and who really loves Phil (I kind of love this ship and like the rest of the fandom I'm not really sure why), means that he just sees grade-A badass Phil Coulson. Full stop. No edits. No matter what is, or isn't, in his past, in his pants, in his medical file, or what his parents used to call him. 4) Werewolf romance novel Tall dark and handsome (TM) is the antagonist who is stalking and eating people. He's a creep who plays into rape culture and preys on young women who think that his bad boy vibe cover up anything other than a black heart. The protagonist is a smart and kick-ass young woman with a shiny degree and huge student loans working below her talents, as a barman, which is how she knows of the antagonist and his creepiness. She has a friend, her landlady's daughter, who is close to her age. (Yay for passing the Bechdel test? I'd better, after actually meeting Alison Bechdel.) The love interest is this sandy blonde dorky guy, a drifter who works construction and throws darts at the bar. When people start getting chewed up he's the prime suspect, and even our protagonist doesn't know what to think - but only until our antagonist tries to take a bite out of her, and he intervenes, as a werewolf. And from there it's your usual. I got sick of the werewolf books with creepy rape culture overtones and not passing the Bechdel test and thought, I could do better. 5) a Clint Barton/Darcy Lewis fanfic, in which she helps patch him up after Loki's mind control. In the comics, Clint had a pretty messed up childhood. Circus, dad who beat him, taught to shoot by a man who beat him and then used him first as a thief and then as a killer (or so I loosely understand; and I'd be using a variation on that in the fic, anyway). He would have had to have therapy for it at SHIELD just to be functional as an agent around people. But Loki's mind control messed with all that, breaking the locks and self-management he'd had for so long. He'd have major depressive episodes and PTSD following it. And Darcy, being a civilian, might not be the best person to bring him out, but she was there for Thor and the Destroyer. She saw some shit. And who knows what she had in her childhood. (I do, because I created it, but I'm the author and I can do what I like.) What was done by Loki cannot be undone, but what was done before Loki could, just maybe, be done over again, more painstakingly and with greater care, like walking around the glass shards of a broken vase. 6) a Fíli/fem!Bilbo fic: in which a pregnant Bilbo runs from the Mountain. (Thorin died of his wounds, but Fíli and Kíli survived.) Bilbo, in whatever feminized spelling of one's choosing, won't, can't, stay. The memories of battle, of being shaken like a rat over the gates of Erebor, are too fresh and too raw. The halls reek of dragon and she hears Smaug's eerie deep voice creeping in the shadows. No, she cannot stay. She must go somewhere green. A month, a year, five years, forever, she must go somewhere clean and cleansed. And Fíli, her One, can't go. She knows this. And she, even though she's his One, can't stay. Magic lover's nonsense and whatever, there's reality you have to deal with, and sometimes reality means PTSD and dragon stink. So they argue, the night after his coronation. She is due to leave the next day with Gandalf and it'll be the last time - it's emotionally fraught. He's mad and she's mad, because they both *want* it to be different. In my mind's eye I saw the argument, in the indirect result: his name was Frerin. And, of course, that can't be let alone, since as the eldest son of a king, half-hobbit or no, he is heir apparent to a throne, and a birthright. Tolkien wrote that dwarf populations at the end of the end of the Third Age and into the Fourth dwindled until the race itself failed - meaning that there were too few women having too few children. This is obvious enough from what we see in the appendices. A king having a son hidden from him and raised by a non-dwarf woman, even if she is his mother? A scandal, the fanon assumes, and I presume with it. 7) a Bucky Barnes in slightly more efficient and effective hiding fic. There's that photo going around of Sebastian Stan from the set of his latest movie and he has this big mustache, and jeez if Bucky looked like that, some people commented, and not all 90s Grunge, he might have escaped a lot better, since the photo Zemo circulated assumed that Bucky looked like a hobo. Personally I don't see Bucky growing that mustache (looking like Howard Stark, who he assassinated, would give him a heart attack). Nor do I see him as a teacher, of math or otherwise, as the original post suggested; he'd never pass the background check. But there's another picture of Sebastian Stan I saw that was also relatively recent (but before any of the photos from the set of I, Tonya) with a full beard, and if he'd grown that out, if Bucky had grown that out, maybe he might have looked like Norm Abram back when he was younger. So, maybe a carpenter. It's a sin to hide that beautiful jawline, but effective. Bucky would get away from HYDRA and SHIELD both, just by staying off the radar and not looking like what they expect. He could even use his real name - there are 4,207 other James Barnes-es in the US, what would make him special? There are only 27 Clint Bartons. One borrowed social security number, one rented house, anywhere would do but I was thinking Santa Fe (because I've been there and can describe it, it's cool enough in part of the year he can wear long sleeves outside and the rest of the year there's air conditioning and he can wear long sleeves inside to cover the arm, and because it's a tourist town, people with money to spend on his carpentry work). From my notes, in particular: He checks in at the spots the Smithsonian mentioned. Red Hook, Dumbo, Coney Island. Those spots in Brooklyn that are supposed to have had that towheaded little captain America to be and his sidekick to become running amok in the 1920s. Some pieces fit. Bits of bitty Steve fit in, here and here, slotting back into Bucky's memory. Steve is a huge, pun intended, part of who he once was. To have made Bucky forget Steve, no wonder he forgot himself - - or was it the other way around, that Bucky forgot himself because he forgot Steve? 8) nonfiction, Torah commentary, starting with Genesis (Bereshit). 9) nonfiction, the history (I've been working on for five years) of the Hasidic movement during the Holocaust. Various dynasties and their rebbes, and the rebbes' successors, and the survival of the Hasidim and the Hasidut - how it worked, where it happened, how it happened; but from there, which members of the rabbinical families did not survive? Why? What attempts were made to save them? When attempts were made, who was given first preference and what stated reason, if any, was given? These are questions that have not yet been answered. And I have limited access to Hasidim, by language and by culture. These are not questions anyone would ever give me a straight answer to, of course. I have strong suspicions. Nothing more. The demographics of death - these are records we do have - say a lot. And the final chapters of the book, or the last volume, or the next book, also needs to be written: the rise to power of the other Hasidic dynasties, the massive shift in power away from Poilisher-Yidish culture elsewhere due to the near destruction of that community. Lubavitch, Bobov, Satmar, Belz, and Ger - only the last is Poilisher-Yidish. Before the war the largest Hasidic dynasties were to be found in Poland: Ger, Aleksandr, and Radomsk. There's a lot here no one else has done. I suppose it falls to me. So, I have many things to work on. I have lots to choose from. If only my brain would ACTUALLY LET ME DO IT, DAMMIT.
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Swans down Giants in wet
SUPERSTAR forward Lance Franklin has made a successful return from off-season surgery in the Swans’ 12-point JLT Community Series win over Greater Western Sydney on Friday night.
Franklin, who had shoulder surgery over summer, booted two first-quarter goals in the 0.8.6 (54) to 1.4.9 (42) win and while he didn’t have much influence after the first break, the Swans will be extremely happy to get the triple Coleman medallist through his first game of the year.
Full match details and stats
He finished the match with 16 touches, three marks and a massive bump on Giants draftee Tim Taranto, who immediately went to the bench before eventually returning to play out the match.
Swans assistant coach Henry Playfair, who was in charge of the team on the night, said that Franklin’s output against quality opposition was pleasing.
“I thought his effort was really solid across the night, just his competing,” he said.
“He impacted the game strongly early and then we probably didn’t give him great supply after quarter-time, but he still kept cracking in and bringing the ball to the ground as a minimum.
“He played some solid game time and we knew he was ready for that, he’s trained with contact for a couple of weeks now.
“It was good preparation and we’ll monitor him going forward.”
The Giants had their own reasons to be satisfied despite the result, with veterans Steve Johnson (thumb) and Shane Mumford (elbow) getting through their first appearances of the season unscathed.
Coach Leon Cameron said that both men would be in the side for next week’s clash with North Melbourne in Canberra to continue their preparation for the season proper.
“They’ll go full bore again next week,” he said.
“There was some areas they needed to be better at, but there was also some pleasing things, so I look forward to them having a good hit-out on Friday night, and hopefully that prepares them for round one against the Crows.”
Star Giant ruled out of round one
Sydney’s wet weather made it a scrappy affair and most players on the field struggled to handle the slippery ball, with Swans captain Josh Kennedy and Giant Josh Kelly the exceptions, the pair sharing 31 possessions in the first half to be the standout players on the ground.
Kelly kicked the game’s only super goal in the second quarter and called it a night at the main break, having playing most of the Giants’ first pre-season game against West Coast a fortnight ago.
Kennedy thrived on the heavy deck, especially in the first half when the heavens opened, with midfield partners Luke Parker and Dan Hannebery solid again, and Callum Mills and Jake Lloyd prolific across half-back.
Like his opposite number, Giants co-captain Callan Ward was in his element and finished the game with 26 hard-earned touches, with Dylan Shiel, Heath Shaw and key defender Adam Tomlinson among the best.
WHAT WE LEARNED
Greater Western Sydney: if Leon Cameron’s three key defensive options can stay on the park the Giants coach will be ecstatic this season. Phil Davis, Adam Tomlinson and Aidan Corr showed off their versatility against the Swans with all three playing on Lance Franklin, both close to goal and up the ground. Tomlinson was outstanding in one-on-one contests, while Davis and Corr were also rarely beaten in the air, albeit in atrocious conditions for marking forwards.
Sydney Swans: Darcy Cameron’s form might see Kurt Tippett return to his role as a permanent deep forward. The mature-age ruckman from the WAFL hasn’t exactly dominated his first pre-season in the League but he’s shown enough to suggest that John Longmire has to consider him for the team’s second ruck spot behind Sam Naismith. That would allow Tippett, Lance Franklin and Sam Reid to play forward, which would no doubt give opposition backlines the sweats, with Tippett also available for a cameo on the ball when needed.
NEW FACES
Greater Western Sydney: No.2 draft pick Tim Taranto showed plenty of ticker when he kicked a brilliant goal shortly after he was crunched by Lance Franklin in the second term. Will Setterfield was used sparingly in the first half and had little impact after the main break.
Sydney Swans: Big man Darcy Cameron did his chances of a round one debut no harm with another solid performance, the West Australian’s marking on a couple of occasions particularly impressive in the wet. Oliver Florent found some footy in the second half but fellow 2016 draftees Will Hayward and Robbie Fox had limited game time and struggled on a night better suited to mature bodies, while rookie-listed defender Lewis Melican provided a strong contest deep on the likes of Jeremy Cameron and Rory Lobb.
NEXT UP
The Giants have to back up for another Friday night game when they clash with North Melbourne in Canberra next week, while the Swans are also on the move, taking on St Kilda in Albury for their final JLT Community Series match on Sunday.
GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY 0.0.3 1.3.6 1.4.8 1.4.9 (42)
SYDNEY SWANS 0.2.2 0.5.3 0.7.3 0.8.6 (54)
SUPERGOALS
Greater Western Sydney: Kelly
Sydney Swans: Nil
GOALS
Greater Western Sydney: Ward, Smith, Taranto, J.Cameron
Sydney Swans: Franklin 2, Towers 2, Robinson, Tippett, D.Cameron, J.Kennedy
BEST
Greater Western Sydney: Ward, Shaw, Kelly, Shiel, Tomlinson, Williams
Sydney Swans: Kennedy, Mills, Lloyd, Parker, Rampe, Hannebery
INJURIES
Greater Western Sydney: Nil
Sydney Swans: Nil
Reports: Nil
Umpires: Fisher, Rosebury, Jeffery, Stephens
Official crowd: 2,695 at Blacktown International Sportspark
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