Work Text:
Josephine Dernier’s great grandfather hadn’t punched Nazis in the face per se, but he had blown them up. And quite magnificently.
Jo wasn’t a particularly violent person. Like Steve Rogers before her, she didn’t want to kill anybody, but she’d stand to to toe with a bully any day. But you didn’t need to kill a person to help destroy an idea: a symbol would do just fine. After all, Bree Newsome was as much a hero as Martin Luther King had been. Takiyah Thompson, too. So the week the world mourned Heather Heyer and the US was still reeling from white supremacy and an unrepentantly fascist administration, she did the only thing she knew how to do: blow shit up. And quite magnificently.
She called up Trip and met him in D.C. with his cousin Sharon. The trickiest part wasn’t even producing the thermite, it was babysitting those two supposed professional spies while she worked with potentially biohazardous aluminum dust. In the end she wrestled them into gloves, protective glasses and gas masks, and the two of them scraped down rusted scrap metal as she ground aluminum foil in Luis’ molcajete and disassembled no less than twenty second hand Etch-a-Sketches purchased from Amazon, Ebay, and thrift stores along the East Coast. No one had looked twice at the whistling man who’d “needed them for my celly Scotty’s kid’s birthday party, she might be like five but kid was feelin’ that nineties shit, you dig? So I told Dave to tell Kurt to tell Scotty you should just get her an Easy Bake, yo.”
For the fuse, all they needed was magnesium, and August was close enough to the Fourth of July that sparklers were on clearance. A twenty inch legal limit in the District of Columbia was of no consequence, not to the determined. Jacques Dernier had certainly done more with even less. That night she and Sharon lay them end to overlapping end up the sidewalk as Tripp kept watch, and taped them atop the concrete and that bronze base.
And finally, their pièce de résistance: a simple zippo lighter, purchased for $14.95 at a local convenience store. Fucking take that, tobacco and slavery.
Trip held out his hand. “You wanna do the honors?”
“Non,” Jo said. “I insist.”
Trip nodded and flicked the lighter. “Good night, Alt-Reich.”
And that was the story of how Jacques Dernier’s Creole-Syrian hijabi great granddaughter, Peggy Carter’s great-niece, Gabe Jones and Peggy Carter’s adopted “grandson” and a DACA Dreamer burnt down the Brigadier General Albert Pike memorial monument with magnificence, even if Luis insisted it was “the power of Toy Story, Breaking Bad, and like, Love, yo.”
...Afterwards, they got shawarma. It seemed the American thing to do.