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Your grade will be what you deserve.
Those were the words that were going through Hiccup’s mind, the words of his teacher shortly before the test.
“Ugh!” Merida’s elbow was directly in Hiccup’s stomach, just barely not to the point of causing pain. Her knees were wedged into the corner, her hip seemed to grind against his at every movement, and her hair was all in his mouth, despite being in a ponytail.
Hiccup’s arm was trapped behind Merida’s back, and his heels were against the wall, legs stretching in what was a painful position for his prosthetic leg. “Stop moving. We’re not going to get out if you panic.”
“I’m not panicking! I’m angry! What the hell does getting trapped in a box together teach us?” Merida had a point.
It was only day three of training. Granted, they’d been studying to be agents for the past couple of years, but this was the field test. The way to prove that they not only had the know-how, but the guts and ability to pull off a career taking care of superhuman and alien threats.
S.H.I.E.L.D. did not take the testing of its recruits lightly.
“Well, there must be a way out. We’ve got to work together to find it.” The box was dimly lit by a glow stick that Merida had turned on; it appeared to be smooth surfaces as far as the eye could see.
“Seriously, what sort of alien would put us in a box?” Merida grumbled, but she didn’t shift, moving around her glow stick to take in the insides of the box.
If they had only watched their step, they wouldn’t be in this situation. One false moved and the room had closed in, like a boa constrictor around its prey. Thankfully, it had stopped compressing before serious damage was done, but now it left Hiccup and Merida in a rather sticky situation.
“Well, we don’t know. That’s why they’re called ‘aliens.’” Hiccup said, and he got poked in the stomach for that.
“Don’t be cute.” Merida paused in scanning the surface, and pointed with her glowstick to a spot on the wall. “I think I see the outlines of buttons. See what they say.”
It was closer to Hiccup, and so he strained in the green light to make it out. “Numbers, 0-9. So it must be a code that unlocks it.”
“But what code?” Merida seemed pensive. “We could mash the buttons until we get out.”
“But that might set something off,” Hiccup said, not entirely trusting that the box wouldn’t close further; Merida could still sit in his lap, so their trainers might see fit to punish them further for not being careful. “It must be something that we knew earlier.”
“Such as?” Merida said dryly. However, she seemed to put her thinking cap on after that, saying, “What about the room number, 909?”
“No, too easy,” Hiccup said, thinking harder. It had to be something that they could have picked up beforehand; but what?
“What about our SS’s?” Merida tried to move a bit, but gave up.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Our teacher’s SS? That would prove we’ve done our research on the assignment,” Merida suggested, still holding out her glow stick.
“I don’t think that would be it either.”
Hiccup must have struck a nerve, because Merida snapped, “Well, why don’t you come up with some ideas, smart guy?”
“Hey, I’m not the one who triggered the trap!” Though, technically, he was just as at fault for not noticing it…
“Hey, you’re the one who wasn’t even moving forward at all! If it were up to you, we wouldn’t have even gotten past the first part!”
“I was moving forward!” Hiccup defended, glaring in the dark and suddenly wishing he was not up so obnoxiously close to Merida. “We can’t all rush headlong into things!”
“You’re timid, and you’ll never make it as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.!” Merida snapped back, wrenching her hip against his painfully as she turned to the numbers.
“I am not timid!” Hiccup defended, and he pushed Merida back as best as he could from the keypad. “We need to think this through first!”
“No, we need to get out while we can! Or else we won’t even get a grade!” Merida struggled against him in the confined space.
“We won’t even deserve a grade if we ruin it by being impulsive!” Hiccup had her arms firmly pinned, but she was strong.
She snarled at him, “You might deserve a 0, but I’ve worked too hard!”
“Wait. Wait! That’s it. That’s the number: the grade we deserve.” Hiccup felt like a new light had dawned; it had to be it. Nothing the S.H.I.E.L.D. instructors did was meaningless; they were always teaching them to read things that weren’t stated outright.
“Then what do we deserve?” Merida demanded, though she stopped struggling.
“I… I don’t know. We figured it out, so we should get a good grade, but we got caught…” Hiccup stared at the keypad, chewing on his lip nervously.
There was silence for a moment, then a look of understanding dawned on Merida’s face. “We were supposed to get caught. We get a 100.”
“No, wait! What if we weren’t supposed to get trapped, and we’re supposed to grade ourselves zero?” Hiccup stared at the keypad harder, as if it could give him the answer.
“Part of being an agent is mind reading. Intuition. My intuition is telling me that this is it.” Merida pulled free of his grip, grabbing his hand. “Just trust me.”
Hiccup couldn’t keep delaying the inevitable. “Okay. Okay, we’ll do it.”
Merida tapped in the numbers, and there was silence for a few moments. Then the whirring of machinery, the walls began to fall away, and they tumbled away from each other. Merida jumped up, grinning.
In the window of the wall, the teacher stood with the slightest smile on his face. He checked something off on his clipboard, and disappeared from the window.
Merida smacked Hiccup’s back, saying, “We make a good team.”
“Yeah, yeah we do.” Hiccup had to agree. He grinned back. He would make it as an agent after all, he supposed.