Chapter Text
Kate stares at the paper in front of her. She's been staring at it for a good thirty minutes and the words have yet to transform into different, better words.
Fury coughs, drawing her attention back to him. "Agent Bishop, you need to sign them."
"I don't want to sign them."
"You'd rather do desk work for the next ten years?" Phil asks. "Assuming you live that long, of course."
Kate swallows her angry retort, knowing that all it will do is net her another visit to medical to look at all of her various head pictures. Scans, x-rays, another showing of Concussion. Yeah, that's not her idea of a good time. Nor is being a desk jockey for Phil, come to think of it.
It's hardly her fault that the number of concussions she's had in the past year has been...excessive. Of course, nobody is blaming her. They're just throwing around words like "permanent brain damage" and "death" and "idiot" and "retirement."
She resents....roughly all of those words. "What am I supposed to do?"
"That's the beauty of retirement," Phil reminds her. "You have time to figure that out. The time and money to figure that out."
"But I'm Hawkeye!"
"And if you want to continue being Hawkeye, that's your business," Fury cuts in smoothly. "But not with us. Maybe if you take care of yourself, in a few years, you come back, get the evals done, maybe we stick you back out in the field. Until then..." Fury trails off, sliding a pen towards Kate's elbow. "Until then, I'm not putting you in the field. Or in a gym. Or a plane. Or--"
"I get it," she mutters, grabbing the pen and clicking it a few times. She is fine and this is ridiculous. She's just tired because Loki has been worrying about their new job, it's not like being Sorcerer Supreme is easy. Not like Kate really knew what Sorcerer Supreme was a month ago. And now Loki is Sorcerer Supreme and protecting the entire world from supernatural threats and calling her at four in the morning asking morality advice--
Kate realizes she has been sitting here, clicking a pen, for a very long time. Longer, at least, than she probably should. Click click.
A few more times. Click.
A few--
"Bishop!"
"Yeah, yeah, okay," Kate grumbles, scrawling her name across the bottom of the sheet. "There. Happy?"
"Ecstatic," Fury deadpans. "Enjoy retirement. I hear Boca is nice."
~*~*~~*~~*~*~
Kate's first stop is the gym. Well, a gym. A strategically chosen gym. She sits on a bench and pulls out her wraps but doesn't even unroll them before they're being snatched out of her grip.
"No," Captain America informs her. "Absolutely not."
"You don't even know what I was going to ask!"
"I don't care what you were going to ask," Sam Wilson says, voice flat. "You're recovering from a major concussion. You shouldn't even be thinking about a gym, much less boxing."
"You don't know me," she says under her breath. Now she's mopey.
"While we're on the subject, no, I'm not clearing you for Avengers missions, either."
"What?"
"Don't give me that look, Hawkeye. I'm not going to be responsible for you dying. And if you leave the gym now, I'll make sure not to mention your death wish to Eli when he and I meet up later."
Kate can't contain her indignant noise. "You know what, Wilson, you were a bird once. I expected more from you."
"More than not letting you kill yourself? Okay. Right."
Sam not-so-gently shoos Kate back out into the world and she's left blinking into the sunlight, wondering what's to become of her.
Moping. Moping and sadness food, that's a good place to start.
~*~*~~*~~*~*~
She's in Central Park when it happens.
She's watching the squirrels, who chitter angrily at her, as if daring her to ask Doreen to team up, as if news of her un-team-up-abliity has spread like wildfire, as if Phil sent out a mass text letting every hero in the Tri-State area know that she's one tap to the head away from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. She is not, that's a lie, if Clint doesn't have it she definitely doesn't—but apparently her impulsiveness, headaches, and inability to pay attention during briefings freaked Phil out. Not like she wasn't all those things before.
It doesn't matter why, not anymore. All that matters is the outcome, which is that Kate doesn't have a job. She's twenty-seven and unemployed, oh God, fuck.
It's about then that she sits on her phone. StarkPhones are supposed to be butt-dial-proof but this is, apparently, not the case, as Kate discovers when she hears a familiar, if muffled voice.
"Helloooo?" It calls. "Kate? Everything all right?"
Kate drops her hot dog in her haste to stand and fish her phone out of her back pocket.
That feels about right; about on par for the day.
"No, everything is not fucking okay, Billy! I just got fired! Well. Forcibly retired, because Phil thinks my brain is about to turn into useless dried-out shrunken jello--"
"What," Billy interrupts her. "Again?"
"What? What do you mean, again? Oh my god. Is this like Fifty First Dates and I have short term memory loss and Phil was right, oh my god, how many times have I had that conversation with Phil and Fury--"
"Wow. Okay, please calm down, Kate, you do not have permanent brain damage, this is the first time we've had this conversation, take a deep breath for me, okay?"
Kate does. "What did you mean, again?"
"Ah. Well, this might be weird. Kate, what year is it? For you?"
"What year is it?"
"Yeah. What's happened? Gone on?"
"This had better not be time travel," she warns him.
"It might be time travel," he admits.
"Well, let's see. I got fired. America got engaged. I punched my dad in the face, Eli started working with the Avengers, and Loki became Sorcerer Supreme."
"Yes!" There is a great deal of movement from Billy's end. Maybe punching the air, or some similar physical type of movement Kate isn't allowed to do for another year. "Oh, hell yes, this is great timing. Kate, I'm coming to get you."
"Excuse me, future boy. What?"
"I'm going to create a hole in time and space and you're going to walk through it. Don't worry. You'll be fine. See you in a sec!"
He phone bloops as Billy ends the call. Kate glares at the squirrels, all staring at her. "You keep this to yourselves," she warns.
An old lady on the bench next to hers looks over at her, and for the first time Kate thinks: maybe there is something to all this concussion talk.
~*~*~~*~~*~*~
The hole in time and space is ringed by a glowing circle, golden light that reminds Kate of a Fourth of July sparkler.
The Billy who greets her is older, but not old, though given his truly badass mutant genetics and general magic-godliness, this could be misleading. He could be a hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred--
Billy smiles and shakes his hair out of his eyes. So not three hundred. No self-respecting three-hundred-year-old would have floppy hair like that. He's greying a bit, but that's no indicator either. Kate herself found two—two!!--white hairs a week ago. Not grey. Completely, utterly white.
Kate eyes Billy's cloak. Or...future-Billy. Demiurge-Billy. It is stripey and magnificent, it flutters even though there's no breeze, and seems to know the most dramatic way to sweep around Billy at any given moment.
It is, in short, the most Extra thing Kate has ever seen.
"So—how did you know I basically was forced to retire early?" .
Billy laughs, gives her a sidelong look full of fondness. "I am incredibly powerful," he reminds her. "And from the future. And your best friend. Besides Clint, though I don't think he should really count, since the Hawkeye bond transcends friendship, but that is neither here nor there."
"So," she says tentatively. "Long time no see?"
"Not exactly. We got coffee this morning. You're trying to convince me that a pony isn't an appropriate gift for my daughter's birthday."
"Oh." Kate is not impressed with her future self, so far.
"You're trying to convince me to get her a unicorn."
"Oh! Well, that's okay. You should do that, by the way. It's a horse with a sword on its head. A mode of transportation and defense."
Billy tries to hide his laugh behind his hand and fails.
"You didn't bring me here to talk about birthdays, though. What's up?"
"How's Loki doing?"
Kate stops. Stares. "How's Loki doing?"
"Yeah. As Sorcerer Supreme."
Kate's eyes narrow. "Shouldn't you know, being from the future and all?"
"Kate, we of all people know that the future is what you make it."
"That's a bullshit answer and we of all people know it, Demiurge." Billy doesn't even flinch, a big clue that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Billy stares at her, and she stares right back. She's got nothing to do, and nowhere to be. Billy might be a god, but he's never had much patience. They stand and stare for a few minutes before Billy shows the first signs of weakening—shifting his weight from foot to foot.
He takes a deep breath and Kate grins, triumphant. "How do you think Loki is doing?"
"Okay, I guess," Kate says with a shrug. "I mean, Loki is just kind of winging it—there's a lot of training and background knowledge that they just don't have but nobody is willing to give? Which sucks but is kind of understandable because..."
"Loki," they say together.
"If Strange could get his head out of his ass, he'd be a huge help to Loki, but for some reason, he doesn't seem eager to do that." She shoots Billy a pointed look. "It's almost like he got fired from a job he'd dedicated his life to."
"Okay, I can see where this would strike a nerve for you--"
"Which like, I get," Kate steamrollers over Billy. "From what Loki tells me, Strange is kind of a dick. But then, so is Loki. And then there's the whole magic-has-a-price thing, but Loki's godly body can take it? Which seems a little classist, either magic has a price or it doesn't--" Kate's words are coming faster and her thoughts are skipping more and more. She can see Billy's wide eyes, and she can feel it, the thing everyone's been telling her. Her brain isn't working right. "Zelma said she once saw Strange barf up a lung, so that seems pretty awful. You'd think you and your all-powerful Vishanti trio thing could figure out a workaround. It seems like poor planning to just...let one person take on all this physical bullshit and then when they can't take it anymore picking someone else and hoping they can figure it all out before some world-ending nonsense happens."
She hasn't stopped to breathe since she started speaking so she takes the opportunity to do so, and finds that Billy is grinning at her.
"Kind of like The Librarians," she concludes.
"See, I thought it was more like Buffy, and it's super dumb to have just one Slayer, hoping she doesn't die, and when she does leaving the world vulnerable until the next one gets trained."
"Billy, you know I don't watch Buffy."
"How many times have I recommended it to you? Come on, Kate, you have to work with me here!"
"So, um." Kate presses her lips together, thinking. "Not to be rude, but what does any of this have to do with me getting fired?"
"Well." Billy opens a door and holds it open for her. "We were kind of hoping you'd convince Strange to...mentor Loki."
"Billy," Kate says as she steps through the door. "There's a giant tiger in here."
~*~*~~*~~*~*~
She's back in the park. The squirrels are still chittering.
Magic has a price...
With a sigh, she pulls out her phone.
...even for gods.
MY BRAIN IS BROKEN, she types out. SOMEBODY BETTER FIX IT.
She puts Loki in the To section, and after a moment of deliberation, adds Billy.
Send.