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Chapter Text

As it happens, male pattern baldness doesn’t actually run in Jasper Sitwell’s family. He’s the first and only one in his family to be completely bald, which causes awkward comment during family reunions.

“Most of us just turn grey,” his uncle says reproachfully, eyeing his scalp. 

Most of us don’t work for SHIELD, Jasper doesn’t say. This was in the days when explaining his job to his family required more paperwork than any right-minded man would willingly deal with. “All my ranking coworkers are bald,” he says instead. “It’s a thing.”

“A thing?”

“An In Crowd thing. Powerful men are bald.”

“Is there scientific research backing this assertion?” his cousin demands suspiciously.

“The Director’s bald. My direct superior’s got a receding hairline.”

“Do they promote based on follicle death?” His father has a dignified shock of silver hair that makes him look more like a retired movie star than the Ivy League professor of economics that he is. He runs his hands through it now, reassuring himself. “You should find another job.”

At least Jasper’s father treats his baldness as a case more to be pitied than censured. The specter of sudden baldness haunts him, as it does all men, so Jasper’s guaranteed a certain paranoia-based sympathy out of basic male solidarity. His mother is more embarrassing, in that she has through some unfathomable method learned his phone numbers and calls him during office hours to leave horrific, well-meaning messages guaranteed to aggravate his IBS.

“I saw a program on the BBC,” she enthuses into the SHIELD answering system, committing herself indelibly to encrypted record and an analyst’s faithful transcription. “They said there’s an extract from hippopotamus fat that’s showing great promise for follicle regrowth. Better than Rogaine, they said. I spoke to my friend Raparti, the one with the beautiful daughter who’s a doctor and single, and he said she knows where you can buy some. I asked her to call you. You should take her out to coffee as a thank you. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

It’s Jasper’s opinion that the quality of reporting at the BBC hasn’t been the same since Thatcher left office.

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP I - THE CALL TO ADVENTURE.

 

The thing is, when an agent reaches clearance level five, it’s because they’re valuable, capable of something an exponentially diminishing few can offer in the ranks of SHIELD. Clint Barton, his personal issues notwithstanding, is unstoppable behind a scope. Jim Woo is an analyst and extractor par excellence. Melinda May has infiltrated half the presidential offices of Asia, and Phil Coulson has an instinct for the unusual that could be the basis of an entire TV show.

Jasper’s less certain what he brings to the party.

“Reality,” Phil tells him one day in the canteen, when they’re younger, less follically-challenged versions of themselves. “You bring the reality.”

“I could bring the badass,” Jasper says, because he still has hopes.

“Mel brings the badass,” Clint corrects. 

Heads nod around the table: of course, of course. Mel brings the badass. She frowns at them, but doesn’t deny it.

“I bring the aim,” Clint adds unnecessarily, and, “I bring the style,” says Jim, and then all eyes turn to Phil.

Phil inspects his pudding cup. “I bring the heat,” he says placidly.

Jim snorts milk out his nose. 

While Clint and Mel help him clean up, Jasper pushes a fish finger around his plate with his fork. “Reality’s boring. Who needs reality? ‘Oh, there’s Jasper, he brought the reality. Great, put it over there next to the boxed wine.’”

“Fury likes it,” Phil says. 

Jasper’s one and only encounter with Fury to date had been when his recruiter had brought the Assistant Director in to watch him retake an analysis test. Wracked with nerves, Jasper had obediently reviewed six photographs, identifying objects in each, their relationship to each other, their likely provenance, significance, and etymological background. Long after Fury had impaled him with an incredulous one-eyed stare and stalked out of the room; long after Phil had greeted him with the simple words, “You’re Sitwell. We’re going to work well together,” Jasper had learned that the one thing about the photographs he had failed to identify—the one thing every other candidate had noted—was that to most people, the objects in the pictures looked like they spelled out the letters ‘F,’ ‘U,’ ‘C,’ ‘K,’ ‘E,’ and ‘R.’ 

He spent the next few days wandering around the Hub, muttering, “Fucker. Goddamn fucker. What idiot would miss that fucker?” Three weeks later, he looked up to discover he’d gained a wholly undeserved reputation.

“You see what’s there, never what’s not,” Phil says in the here and now. “It’s an admirable trait. Most people have to be trained to do that. You do it naturally. Fury has uses for people with that quality.”

“He’s never said a word to me."

“He’ll get to that eventually."

It’ll be another two years before people start to call Phil Coulson ‘Fury’s good eye,’ but already he’s an oracle that can be counted on. Less than an hour later, Jasper is pulled into Fury’s office and is given, in stunningly swift sequence: a promotion; a team of three; and a long-term assignment monitoring a thing he’s never heard about for a reason he doesn’t understand.

“You want me to do what?” he asks, bewildered and still reeling. “Secret police? In America?”

Fury leans on his hands, his not-smile speaking volumes. “Congratulations, Sheriff. Welcome to Night Vale.”

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP II - SUPERNATURAL AID 

 

Being sheriff of Night Vale is a bullshit gig. After years spent hunting aliens, supertech, mutants, and would-be sorcerers, dealing with sentient pavement and the occasional escaped librarian is refreshingly straightforward. The secret police trade enforcement roles with the hooded figures on odd-numbered days, so really, Jasper only works four days a week. If it weren’t for the vague stress of being followed around everywhere by the glow cloud, which is bizarrely fixated on him, it’d practically be a vacation. Unfortunately, Jasper’s staff of three rotates with depressing regularity, each transfer out preceded by increasingly pointed memos from Psych. The record is one level four agent who lasted for all of two hours before Jasper made a command decision and had him moved to distant pastures. He sent Jasper a thank you card from the middle of charmingly pyrrhic civil war in the Congo before the Night Vale effect erased his memories of it.

Jasper can’t see what the fuss is about.

“I’m level three, specializing in infiltration and covert surveillance,” says his new transfer when Jasper meets the man at the ambitiously named Night Vale airport. “I speak Croatian, Farsi, and French, and my last assignment was in Damascus, tracking down black markets in future tech.”

Agent Ward looks around himself at the desert. He’s tall, good-looking, has all his hair, and he's obviously wondering what the hell he did to get assigned to butt-fuck nowhere.  Jasper has to remind himself that he's not a petty man. He’s not. Ward just looks unreliable, is all. Really, really, really unreliable.

Ward rumples his hair and frowns. "Is there anything here that actually needs someone with my skill set, sir?" he asks. His cheekbones are making the wind bleed.

Jasper suppresses the urge to shelve him like an Alan Alda biography. “Are those sunglasses SHIELD issue?” 

“Yes, sir.”

“Make sure you keep them on.”

“Sir?”

“On your face,” Jasper clarifies, in case Ward is one of the especially dumb ones. He looks like one of the dumb ones. 

“Sir?”

Creativity in eyewear is not worth encouraging in Night Vale. SHIELD has an orientation packet for the town that every assigned agent reads, but most of them don’t believe it until they experience the place. Jasper has lost more agents to poor eyewear protocol than he has to the library, and that’s saying something.

“It’s too early for Night Vale yet,” he says, checking his watch. “You’ll have time to make the pickup. Take the car. Take the GPS. You’ll meet a deliveryman outside the town. He’ll transfer crates from his car to yours. Watch him. Make sure all the crates are transferred, then bring them back to the hanger. And if any of the clouds talk to you,” he thinks to add, “don’t talk back.”

Ward doesn’t ask, doesn’t so much as blink at the milk run assignment or the incongruous addendum. He takes the coordinates Jasper hands him and strides off with tie flapping in the sullen breeze. A man without any curiosity has a—well, not a future in Night Vale, exactly, or in SHIELD, but at least not an immediate and painful death. Mostly. Maybe.

Possibly.

By the time Ward gets back with the crates and gets them loaded into Jasper’s car, it’s time to visit the town.

“There’s something wrong with the radio,” Ward reports, after fiddling with it on the drive in. “It’s off, but it keeps making noise.”

“That’s not noise. That’s Cecil. Put on your sunglasses back on,” Jasper says.

“It’s night time,” Ward objects.

Jasper isn’t wearing sunglasses, but then again, he’s never really needed them. “Put them on,” he says.

“Sir?”

“It’s a disguise,” he says, on the off chance that’ll work. He turns the volume on the radio up. Cecil is already crooning a rhapsodic narrative of Ward’s arrival. 

You ride towards an unknown destination, sitting beside a man you do not know and should not trust. He tells you to put on your sunglasses. You wonder why you should. Through them, the sky will look as black as your ignorance, the unknowable crossing paths with the unfathomable—

Ward is apparently oblivious. He puts on the sunglasses.

You make the right choice, Cecil congratulates. It will be the last right choice you will make for a long time.

Jasper says, “We’re going in to pick up intel from Old Woman Josie. That’s a description, not a code name. Be polite.”

“I’m always polite, sir.”

And now, the traffic, says Cecil. Air, rail, network, internet, illegal, control, arms, drugs, human, wildlife….

 “Community radio,” Ward comments. 

Jasper waits for the rest of what sounds like an opinion, but apparently it starts and stops there. “We’re at the town limits. Don’t take the glasses off,” he reminds. Cecil is warbling a paean to the beauty of Damascus.

“Yes, sir,” Ward says. And then, staring out the window, “Was that … Johnny Depp? With a crow on his head?”

What an asshole, Cecil huffs. 

Josie lives in a tiny slat house a few blocks down what is currently Existential Crisis Avenue, a misguided street that has plenty of parking, if not much in the way of signs. Jasper parks in the conveniently empty driveway and pops the trunk, tossing Ward the keys. “Get the crates out of the trunk and put them in the garage,” he says. “Don’t drop any of them.”

The radio is playing in the parlor (of course) and Old Woman Josie is keeping herself occupied. Hobbies in Night Vale are never simple things like knitting, or stamp collecting—no, that’s not true. Mighty Stilton at the 7-11 knits entrails out of pig intestines when he’s feeling recursively anxious—but the point is that somehow Night Vale citizens always manage to do the normal things wrong. No amount of explanation will get them on the same page as the rest of the planet, so Jasper has given up trying. 

Take, for instance, Old Woman Josie, who is putting together replacement children in an assembly line that resembles a doll factory. Fortunately, it’s not from original parts. Unfortunately, the replacement parts are from different … sets. 

“There you are!” she greets. “I’ve been waiting.”

“That leg is the wrong color,” he points out. She peers over her glasses at it before realizing, “Too pink!” and replaces it with a brown one with undertones of green. It wiggles its toes. She tickles them. 

He stoops to kiss her on a soft, plump cheek, and suffers the indignity of getting his butt pinched. At least he’s fast enough to prevent her from stealing his gun out of its holster again.

“Did you bring me something?” she asks, hopeful as one of the partially assembled children. 

You take the last box out of the car, Cecil says ominously. It’s dripping. You can feel the wetness on your fingers, so you sniff at them in the dark. They smell like blood. Thick, viscous, salty, fresh. You can feel it splashing on your foot. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

“Oooo,” says Old Woman Josie.

 “It’s not what you think—” 

“Did you bring me a person to put back together?” 

“—And then again,” he amends. 

She rubs her little hands together. “I’ll get the yarn.”

SHIELD is privately acknowledged to have the best of medical plans and benefits by agents who’ve worked other alphabet soup agencies, though the inner workings of the most classified and dangerous medical services are known to a total of four agents. Of them, Phil is the only one who’s actually gone through the actual process. This is his third time in the four years Jasper has been sheriff. Jasper’s starting to wonder if Phil’s really as badass as people claim, or just the world’s most lethal klutz.

“He might not be in a good mood when you finish putting him back together,” he warns. “He had a bad time of it before he died.” Terrorists. Torture. Exsanguination over the course of three days. The usual.

“Little Peanut,” Josie says fondly. “I used to change his diapers, you know.”

“I didn’t say it was him,” Jasper protests, and she reaches over to pat his knee with one kindly, gnarled hand and says, “Maybe I’ll put a new scalp on him. That might cheer him up.”

He’s taken aback. “A new scalp? You mean— more hair?”

“I could find some in the same color.”

Jasper’s a professional, but he’s also only human, which is why he says with no guilt whatsoever, “We like him with what’s left of his original hair.”

Old Woman Josie purses her lips, but lets it go as one of the incomprehensible whims of a vague yet shadowy government organization. “I do enjoy your little challenges. They’re just like jigsaw puzzles. So much better than bingo. And Erika says they’ll help.”

Jasper has never been convinced about the angels. He sees Erika as a perfectly creepy, if somewhat terrifying, woman-possibly-or-maybe-a-man with a striking resemblance to a black Tilda Swinton. He knows from experience that his fellow agents see something very different though, so he simply bobs his head on general principles and remembers to say, “Don’t put a librarian inside this time, please. Original souls only.” He translates Old Woman Josie’s roguish twinkle as something that might be agreement. Cranky, resurrected Phil is bad enough, but a cranky, resurrected Phil with a librarian inside him doesn’t bear thinking of. 

—a human hand, Cecil says. He’s been talking this entire time, of course, but Jasper was, in all fairness, distracted. It’s a nice hand, with a nice watch on it. You look at that hand and wonder what other hands it has held. Who knows where it has been? Has it helped a child over an impossible obstacle? Has it caressed a loving cheek? Has it brought implacable justice down on the darkest evil? Does it know how to play Tiddlywinks?

“Shit,” Jasper says, and dashes out. The glow cloud is overhead again. Typical. 

He finds Ward in the garage.

“Sir,” Ward says, and holds out a hand. His hand. His hand, holding the other hand that is not his. He looks suspicious. “Are we delivering human remains?”

“You have to pick now to get curious?”

“I’m sure there’s a national security reason for this.”

“Okay. We’ll go with that,” Jasper says, resigned. “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d kept your sunglasses on. And now there’s blood everywhere.”

Ward looks down. “The plastic liner leaked,” he explains.

“You’ll have to clean it up. There’s bleach in the back of the garage. Make sure you get all of it, or the fairies will smell it and come hunting.”

“Fairies? Sir?” 

“They’re like sharks when there’s blood in the air.”

Ward looks alarmed. “You anticipate a security threat from local homosexuals, sir?”

Jasper opens his mouth. Then he closes it. “Yes, Agent Ward,” he finally says. “Eight-inch, swarming homosexuals who can strip a full-grown cow to its skeleton in one point six seconds flat and can only be kept away with Neil Diamond songs or pleather. They’ll make eye contact by burrowing straight through your cornea into your brain, but they’ll look fabulous doing it.”

“Do you have any intel on how they’ll be armed?” Ward asks, in all seriousness.

It just isn’t worth trying to be funny in Night Vale. Jasper sighs. “Get the damn bleach.”

He’s back in the middle of the living room, saying, “Agent Ward will clean up the blood before any damn fae smell it,” when he’s stopped by the sight of Old Woman Josie and Erika sitting on either side of the radio, their hands folded in their laps.

—wonder what could be here that’s so interesting to the vague yet menacing totalitarian terrorist organization you work for that has infiltrated the vague yet shadowy government organization that thinks you work for them, Cecil says. You hope it’s easy to identify and retrieve without the little bald man noticing. Having to kill him might raise flags. Gosh, you live a hard life. 

Jasper clutches at nonexistent hair. “Goddammit, I knew he looked— Little bald man, what the fuck, Cecil?”

Old Woman Josie and Erika both turn horrifyingly familiar looks on him. It’s like going back in time again to that one visit home, when his mother first realized that he was losing his hair. In retrospect, it’s not especially surprising that an Angel of the Lord would know how to make that face. The question is whether it’s an expression innate to disapproving female-or-possibly-female authority figures, or if it’s just something about Jasper himself that brings it out in female-or-possibly-female authority figures.

“You can’t leave a vague yet menacing totalitarian terrorist organization in my garage,” Old Woman Josie says severely. “It’s Tuesday.”

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP III - THE ROAD OF TRIALS

 

To be honest, Jasper feels a bit vindicated. On the one hand there is Ward: handsome, tall, white, full head of hair, evil. On the other hand there is Jasper:  commanding, slightly less tall, Honduran-American of Palestinian descent, bald, but—and this is key—not evil. 

“‘Vague yet menacing totalitarian terrorist organization!’” he shouts at Cecil, who is regarding him through the sound room glass with the bewilderment of a pygmy owl meeting its first Ascot hat. “That’s what you said! He works for a ‘vague yet menacing totalitarian terrorist organization!’”

“There’s a narrative, dear neighbors,” Cecil croons into the mic, still staring fixedly at Jasper, “that waits for no storyteller. We’ve known it in our bones since the day we first crawled out of the primordial ooze and stood up proudly under the twin suns. We know it as the battle between good and evil. But is it really a battle? Maybe it’s a birth? Maybe good is born screaming and clawing, glistening with the fluids of evil’s womb, dragged forth into the light of day by the forceps of truth—“

Jasper’s cell phone rings. He pinches the bridge of his nose between his fingers before he answers, feeling his headache grow. “He’s not cooperating, Director,” he says, as Cecil happily plops his moral relativism on the backs of appalling, increasingly organic metaphors, and takes them for a gallop over the airwaves. “He’s barricaded himself in the sound booth. No, sir. I can’t. Station management is greasing Ineffability, and they took the key with them.”

“Bald women,” Cecil tells his Night Vale fans, “are powerful.”

“No, sir. Dr. Santos is out in the desert, trying to catch a— no, sir, Ward didn’t hear anything. He’s currently unaware.”

“Bald men are just . . . they’re just so shiny,” Cecil enthuses.

“Yes, sir,” Jasper says. The weather starts shrieking over the WZZZ speakers. “I’ll be waiting.”

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP IV - THE MEETING WITH THE GOD(DESS)

 

In the five days he spends waiting for Fury, Jasper learns that Ward has the emotional backbone of a jellyfish, believes his act of socially inept upstanding agent is convincing, likes sandwiches, likes dwiches, can sing entire songs from West Side Story, and can’t retain ndwiches, likes sandwi, can’t retain any infor any formation in the likes sandwiches sehciwdnas sekil, can sin entire gons from West Side Sto

(“Que chingados!” Jasper swears, slapping a pastrami sandwich out of Ward’s hand. “There’s a reason why wheat is not allowed in Night Vale. Stop fucking with the space-time continuum, you dick!”

“Sir?” Ward says, looking puzzled.)

In the two days he spends waiting for Fury, Jasper learns that Ward has the emotional backbone of a jellyfish, believes his act of socially inept upstanding agent is convincing, likes sandwiches, can sing entire songs from West Side Story, and can’t retain any information in the Night Vale debriefing packet for more than fifteen minutes. 

The last one is entirely the fault of Ward’s inability to follow basic eyewear protocol, though it’s too late to do anything about it so Jasper doesn’t bother to write him up. Ward’s not the first agent to have that problem, or the first one to shoot the briefing packet out of frustration, or even the first one to set fire to it and stomp on the remains. He might be the first one to stick his face in its ashes and sneeze, though.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Ward says at Rick’s, looking like a hilariously tragic raccoon. 

“Why do any of us ever do anything? Why are we here at all? Why did you join SHIELD?” Jasper asks slyly.

“I don’t think this place is working for me,” Ward adds, completely missing this subtle interrogation. He pokes at his pizza without appetite.

Despite himself, Jasper can't help but feel a little sorry for the asshole. “I don’t think you’re wrong,” he admits. “On the bright side, Steve Carlsberg really liked that look on you.”

Ward brightens.

Jasper learns nothing about a vague yet menacing totalitarian terrorist organization. Jasper’s interrogation skills could really use some work. Cecil is no help whatsoever, because in a freak of bad timing, Carlos Santos decided to try a new shampoo and in his absent-minded way, accidentally picked up a bottle of Nair instead. The entire town is still in the throes of PTSD.

“So basically, you got bupkis,” Fury says when he arrives to debrief Jasper in person.

Fury wears his sunglasses. Fury respects the rules. Fury delivers a crate of wheat-free Twinkie knockoffs from Clint Barton, and then eats six of them while sourly reminding Jasper that he’s the goddamn Director of SHIELD, not a motherfucking UPS guy. 

“I got a ‘vague yet menacing totalitarian terrorist organization’ out of a routine resurrection,” Jasper grouses. “What do you have? Sir.” Respect for authority is the first thing to go when you begin your morning by emptying a clip of .44s into your breakfast cereal.

“I got a secret chain of command under my command that isn’t under my command,” Fury retorts. “It’s not the first hint I’ve had that something’s rotten. I’m one-eyed, not blind. Whatever it is, it’s dug in deep. And it’s big. Quartermain noticed something three months ago and tipped me off. He started looking into it.”

“And?”

“And two days later, he was dead.”

Jasper feels a chill. “How many people know about this?”

“Including you and me?”

“I mean, obviously if I’m not cleared to—“

“Two.”

It’s not a good feeling, being in a club that has Nick Fury as the only other member. Jasper thought being in the know would be cooler than this. This is not cool.

“Your cover story is that you’ve been running extractions for the last four years,” Fury says, apropos of nothing in particular. “You yanked Phil out from the Lambs of God base in Akrit with a covert team. And you got diagnosed with coeliacs while you were in Lyons last summer.”

Which explains why Clint sent the fake Twinkies, if not why Fury is telling him this. But Jasper’s not an idiot.

“You want me to go undercover,” he says, trying to hide his excitement.

“No.”

“I can go undercover.”

“Like hell. You’re the worst damn liar SHIELD has in its employ.”

Jasper doesn’t droop. He’s a professional. “That’s hurtful, sir.”

“That’s fact. You told your mother you were a marriage counselor for the gay and trisexual community in Key Biscayne. You told your last girlfriend you were a secret agent working secretly for MI6 on a secret mission that was secret. You told your last landlord you were a yoga instructor specializing in therapy for quadriplegic veterans with Lupus. You—“

“Okay, I get it.”

“—told a fucking gas station attendant that the bullet holes in your car were made by Peruvian goats who escaped from a Shriner petting zoo,” Fury plows on, plainly enjoying himself. “You’re a good agent, Sitwell, but when it comes to lying under pressure, you’re the goddamn Clapper of bad choices.” He pauses. “If you’re going undercover, we’ll have to do something about your natural instincts.”

It takes Jasper a second to catch on. “Oh, no,” he says.

“Oh, yes. Man up,” Fury says with relish. “Or in this case, man down. Some kind of freaky Night Vale bullshit implanted in your meat sack, up.”

Chapter Text

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP ? -  WHO THE FUCK KNOWS 

 

It takes a couple of trips to the library and an actual, honest-to-God conversation with a librarian—conducted with the aid of a latex glove, a McPherson speculum, and a pair of forceps (do not even get Jasper started on this, why the fuck does Fury carry around McPherson speculums in his coat pockets)—to get something that Fury considers a viable option.

Jasper doesn’t consider it a viable option. “Seed of Formless Evil,” he says with careful emphasis on the most important syllables, which is to say, all of them. “Because nothing bad could possibly come from messing around with something called ‘Seed of Formless Evil.’”

Fury eyes him thoughtfully. “Funny thing about that,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Jasper is pretty sure he’s not going to like ‘later.’

So here’s the deal with having a seed of formless evil implanted. Every so often, Jasper will become kind of evil. When he’s Evil Jasper, he’ll do Evil Jasper things, and have Evil Jasper thoughts. If he needs to be not evil, Fury’s got a trigger word to change him back. 

That’s pretty much it. 

“This is a terrible plan,” Jasper says flatly.

“Suck it up,” Fury says.

“How does this make any sense? How do you know I won’t double-cross you while I’m evil? I’ll be evil. Double-crossing is just what an evil person would— Why don’t I have the trigger word?”

“Because you’ll be evil,” Fury says, and then says, “Duh,” with that gleam in his eye that just knows Jasper doesn’t have the balls to tell him he sounds like a twelve-year old girl. 

This is going to end so badly.

They do the ceremony in the high school gym, which combines an earnest dedication to instilling the principles of fitness and teamwork in the students, with a joyously pre-fab, can-do attitude towards the Dark Arts. The Circle of Sacrifice and the Lesser Names of Death are repainted yearly on the basketball court floor, and there are live goats in the girls’ locker rooms.

It takes less than two minutes to do the implantation, start to finish. Jasper thinks he should be worried about that.

“Find out what’s going on,” Fury tells him, when the smoke has cleared and Jasper’s no longer seeing triple. “Start with Garrett. He brought Ward in. Ward’s been with him since day one. If that apple’s rotten, it got its poison from its branch.”

Jasper bobs his head. The smoke inhalation during the chanting bit has left him a bit giddy. “Chop off the branch.”

“Move up from Garrett. If he’s running the show, I’ll eat my right eye. He’s a survivor, but he’s a twit. Find the people above him.”

“Chop down the tree.”

“It was a fucking metaphor. Let it go. Work your way up to the top if you can. I want to know who, I want to know what, I want to know how, and I want to know why. Got that? I want to know how far this goes, and how many roots we gotta pull up to clean house.”

“And then we set fire to the forest,” Jasper says hopefully.

Fury glares at him. “I honest to God cannot tell if I’m talking to the evil version of you or not.”

“Ask me a personal question,” he suggests.

“Favorite musician.”

“Rick Astley.”

“Damn.”

“No, wait!” Jasper begins. It really isn’t worth trying to be funny in SHIELD. “I was just—!“

“Reverie,” Fury says.

Fuck.

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP ?? - I THINK JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S MONOMYTH MISSED THIS PART

 

“Your evil self is a lot perkier,” Fury says with annoyance.

Once more, Jasper feels vaguely, if nauseously, vindicated.

“The only problem with this is, I got no idea how long this op’ll take,” Fury adds. They’re holed up in the Community Center with the glow cloud hovering overhead like a big fucking ‘HERE BE JASPER SITWELL’ sign. Ostensibly, they’re planning. What they’re actually doing is hiding, because some of the citizens have mistaken Fury for an Ancient One and try to sacrifice virgins to him whenever they see him. Well, virgin. Well, gin. Cecil has a canker sore, so all of Night Vale is having semantic foreshortening problems. “Without a sheriff around, shit’ll get out of control.”

They’re huddling under the a pool table. Jasper’s built a barricade out of sofa cushions. He’s having a keen sense of deja vu that has nothing to do with Night Vale, and everything to do with growing up an only child in a house overfurnished with sectionals. Frankly, he sees nothing about this situation that suggests shit is not already out of control in Night Vale. “You could assign a new sheriff,” he points out.

“Like hell. You know how many agents we went through before you took over? Longest anybody held the job before you stepped in was four days. If it wasn’t the librarians or the dogs or the mayor’s office, it was the goddamn glow cloud sucking their brains out through their noses while they slept. I got no problem spending assets where I got to, but fuck if I’m going to waste good men and women away on a guaranteed suicide mission.”

Jasper was dimly aware that he was special, but it’s still nice to have validation. “Wait,” he suddenly thinks to ask. “Suicide mission? You didn’t tell me when I—“

“We’ll have to box Night Vale up for a while,” Fury says, ignoring him. Then Fury winces. He actually winces. Winces like he anticipates bad things happening as a result, things that even Nick Fury can’t face with equanimity.

Jasper isn’t ashamed to admit he feels a chill. “What’ll happen if Night Vale’s boxed?” 

“If the damn thing can’t work out its weird through Night Vale, it’ll go somewhere else.” Fury looks grim. “You’ll see.”

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP ??? - OK FINE LET’S CALL THIS ONE THE ROAD OF TRIALS AGAIN VERSION 2

 

Jasper sees.

Two days after Night Vale is boxed, Tony Stark disappears in Afghanistan. SHIELD and the US Armed Forces have a collective aneurysm. Jasper spends way more time in Pakistan than he ever wanted, bitching about SHIELD over shitty alcohol with Garrett, and honing his interrogation skills on ex-Taliban and what laughably passes as the local intelligence community. A few months later, Stark comes back from Afghanistan, fights a giant robot in the streets, and announces he’s Iron Man. 

Right around the time Legal finally tells Phil to stop special-ordering dummies modeled after Stark for weapons testing, a physicist with an ego problem rips up Harlem. 

“Some days you got to figure, there’s got to be a better way to run things,” Jasper tells Garrett as they pick their way through the destruction of Harlem with a mix of SHIELD cleanup and Army Reserves. The SAR is still underway, but this many days into it, they’re finding more corpses than bodies. “This kind of chaos is just—wasteful.”

“More order,” Garrett agrees easily, his face creased. Even when he’s frowning, he always looks like he’s about to break out into a grin. He’s a psychotic asshole with weasel cunning and access to a horrific amount of C4, but he’s hard not to like. “Less shit going boom. Don’t get me wrong, I like me a little boom. A big boom, even. Lots of big booms. Hey, I ever tell you about the time I was in Tikrit with some old Soviet tanks, and there was this guy holed up in an apartment building—“

“Time and place, man,” Jasper interrupts, because yeah, he has, four fucking times, and the story’s blackly hilarious, not to mention impressive on the body count side of things, but c’mon. The Reservists have no sense of humor, and they’re starting to eye Garrett and by association, the rest of the SHIELD guys, askance.

“I get it. Public relations.” Garrett taps the side of his nose in what might be the most obnoxious display of understanding ever. “You’re a smart guy, Jasper. I always thought you were a bit of a squint, but you’re not bad. Hey, while we’re in town, I should introduce you to Shirley.” He winks lewdly and thumps Jasper hard on the back. Jasper staggers. “You’ll like Shirley.”

He honestly believes Garrett is talking about either a stripper or maybe a grenade launcher. Instead, Shirley turns out to be a mousy little woman who runs one of the dozens of Accounting’s sub-departments. For the first half of their night out, Jasper has the depressing conviction that Garrett is trying to set them up, and invited himself along because he’s just that shitty at setting people up.

Then, over whisky sours, Garrett turns to Shirley and announces portentously, “Jasper the mensch I told you about, in Pakistan. I tell you how bad it was out there?”

“What a shitshow,” Jasper says, recognizing his cue.

Shirley smiles brightly at him, her eyes a little too sharp and steady for the amount she’s had to drink. “Some days,” she says, “you have to wonder if there isn’t a better way to run things. Don’t you?”

And Jasper thinks: aha.

 

 

After that, things start moving fast.

The vetting process Jasper threads his way through is less a ‘vetting process’ and more a gentle probing of his political and personal alignments. With no idea yet what this hidden network believes in, much less what it’s for beyond the sheer ballsiness of infiltrating one of the US’s oldest intelligence agencies, Jasper can only do the best that he can. The participants he already knows about are too different in their personalities and alignments to be worth any solid conclusions. Ward’s a codependent weed whose personal worldview starts and ends with what’ll make Garrett happy? while Garrett’s a self-centered dickface whose religion revolves a full-length mirror—but Shirley’s a different animal altogether. Shirley’s a true believer. 

He learns a lot from Shirley. A lot. 

“Whoever they are, they’re organized, they’ve got an agenda, and they’ve been around a while,” Jasper tells Fury during one of their debriefs. 

“Years?”

“Decades.”

“Motherfuck,” Fury says, which seems to be his default statement of purpose. His face twists with disgust. “Of course they’re in Accounting. Where else would they be? That’s how the world’ll end. One bent accountant and a whole shit-ton of zeros.” It’s less prophetic than hindsight at that point, but Jasper makes a sympathetic noise anyway.

Whatever he says to Shirley is apparently convincing, or at the very least sincere, since nothing he offers as his opinion is fundamentally untrue, just spun for a given value for truth. (Spun. Jesus. He sounds like he’s in PR. He really is evil.) He can’t pinpoint what tips her over from suspicion to trust, but at some point she introduces him to Greg and Josef in HR, who introduce him to Johann in Psych, who introduce him to a few guys in Analysis and Armaments. He does a favor here and there:  leaks a carefully vetted secret when asked, looks at a resume, slides an alleged cousin through a background check. One by one, he builds a chart of connections and intersections, a system of hopelessly complicated roots and veins that are woven into the very bedrock of SHIELD.

After the Harlem thing, Jasper gets temporarily stationed in New York City. He manages to find an apartment in Manhattan that only costs 72% of his pre-tax salary so, you know. Bright side to the weirdness and all that. Phil, Clint, and Jim help him move in, and only make fun of him a little bit for his six crate Winter Soldier conspiracy collection.

Like Phil has any room to talk. Jasper knows for a fact that he owns fourteen pairs of lucky Captain America boxer briefs.

Speaking of which: Captain America comes back from the dead. Phil almost has an actual nerdgasm when he gets the news that they found him—eyelids fluttering, mouth dropping open, hands shaking; Jasper finds it disturbing on so many levels—as a result of which Clint spends a solid two weeks off the grid in Alaska, getting shit-faced and shooting at moose and moose hunters alike with a pissy lack of discrimination.

Phil calls Jasper about it on his way to Malibu, hysterical in a way no self-respecting guy old enough to manscape has any right to be.

“I have no sympathy for you,” Jasper tells him, because he has more important shit to do, like maybe saving civilization, or at the very least Nick Fury’s cardiologist from having to deal with some kind of rage-induced coronary event. “You drove him out there, you deal with it.”

“He hates the cold,” Phil frets. “I don’t know why he decided to go AWOL. Why Alaska?”

“He’s white, Alaska’s got snow—maybe he figured he’d disappear into the background?” Jasper suggests, not really listening.

“And I can’t go get him, because I have this thing with Stark.”

Jasper hums. 

“Who’s dying,” Phil sulks, put out by the whole lack of consideration. Since Jasper is busy tracing money that’s reproducing via parthenogenesis through the IT budget, he doesn’t say anything. Phil’s voice takes on a wheedling tone. “Jasper?” 

“Busy,” Jasper says, knee-jerk. “For fuck’s sake, just tell him you want to get into his pants already.”

“I can’t let Clint ruin a promising career because he’s having some sort of emotional crisis.”

“I’m begging you. Just jump him in the shower or something, get him drunk, pretend you’ve been hit by sex pollen— you’re a secret agent, man. Getting people into bed is supposed to be in your fucking job description.”

“Fury will start asking questions. Someone needs to go out there and get him. Someone he trusts.”

Jasper pauses. It’s like they’re having two completely different conversations. Curious, he asks, “You don’t even hear us when we tell you these things, do you? We’re the grown-ups in your own personal Charlie Brown cartoon, aren’t we? All you hear is wah waaa, wah waaa, Clint, wah waaaaa.”

“Jasper, as his friend,” Phil pleads, and there, that’s a real disappointment, because it turns out that even evil, when it comes his friends, Jasper will always fold like a goddamn napkin. 

“You are an goddamn embarrassment to professionals everywhere,” he says bitterly. “When the revolution comes, I hope you know you’ll be first against that wall.” 

 

 

He finds Clint rolled up in furs and shitty down jackets inside an honest-to-God igloo fifty miles east of Point Hope, playing the worst blues he has ever heard. Jasper crawls into the igloo to find the idiot still holding the icepick he was using to play the guitar, his face chapped red with cold and grimly resigned.

Jasper sits up to glare at him.

Clint scowls back.

“You sound like a cat passing a kidney-stone,” Jasper informs.

Clint holds up his hands. They’re in fucking mittens. He was playing the guitar in fucking mittens. “You here to kill me?” he asks, sounding like he’s actually looking forward to it.

For fuck’s sake.“You are the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen,” Jasper advises, and then lies, “Phil needs you.”

He wins a bet with himself when that’s all it takes to get Clint off his ass and onto the back of the snowmobile. These two assholes deserve each other. And, Jasper notes, his inner monologue is starting to sound like Fury.

For the sake of all their sanity, he decides to break the habit of a lifetime and stage an intervention on this fucking pair. Being evil is liberating that way, and listening to Clint hate on Captain America and comment extensively on Phil’s ass the entire way back from Nome to LAX is inspiring in a way Jasper’s never experienced before. Unfortunately, they get to New Mexico just in time to meet a L’oreal commercial from outer space, who kicks SHIELD’s ass and then helps disassemble a small town into its component molecules. 

Also, an evil robot invasion destroys Stark Expo. The point is, Jasper’s got no time to deal with Phil and Clint’s bullshit. He’d seriously like to go back to Night Vale now. The people in Night Vale were sane compared to this kind of stupid. He actually misses Steve Carlsberg.

Fury shows up in the aftermath of Puerto Antigua, apparently for the sole purpose of rolling an unimpressed eye at the dead flame-throwing Tin Man from outer space. 

“When you said ‘weird,’ I was just thinking— instead of, you know, this—“ Jasper waves a wordless hand at Tin Man and concludes, frustrated, “this thing-ness.”

“You got no imagination,” Fury says. Then he says, “Forget it.”

“Sir?”

“Finish the job in front of you. Then we’ll talk about you going back to your original assignment.”

A few months later there’s an alien invasion in New York, led by a Wagnerian coloratura who wears his inadequacy issues on his head. Phil dies yet again, this time in front of multiple, medically trained witnesses without clearance, damn it all, and Tony Stark nukes an alien mothership.

Jasper’s rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan gets destroyed by a space whale because, fuck. Doesn’t it just figure. 

He’s starting to feel persecuted.

 

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP IV - WOMAN AS TEMPTRESS

 

Bringing Phil back is . . . ugly.

Jasper memorizes the cover story, then gets the full recorded debrief on Project TAHITI a few days after they wipe Phil’s memory. He’ll have nightmares about that for a while. “I could’ve just—” he tells Fury, indignant on Phil’s behalf.

“We didn’t pick Night Vale up at the fucking Shoe Locker,” Fury snaps. “You don’t just take something like that out and put it back again for the hell of it. TAHITI was a contingency plan. We needed it. We used it. You got a problem with that, Agent?”

“If he starts gnawing on my scalp, you and me, we’re going to have words,” Jasper says darkly—but not, admittedly, until after Fury’s safely out of earshot. 

Interestingly and completely unsurprisingly, Phil’s return from the dead rouses all kinds of interest from what Jasper’s privately calling the Dandelion Brigade, which seems like an appropriately dumbass name for a vague yet menacing totalitarian terrorist organization. Their exploratory questions about Night Vale are easy enough to deflect. The town’s amnesiac effect, which conveniently wipes agents’ memories while they’re in their mandatory three-day post-assignment quarantine, serves as a perfectly good excuse, even if it doesn’t seem to apply in Jasper’s case. They’re more eager about Phil’s recovery and what happened in Tahiti, or Garrett is, or Ward is on Garrett’s behalf; anyway, there’s curiosity and lots of questions, and Jasper promises a whole bunch of people that he’s looking into it.

Because Phil and him? They’re buds. 

“I thought you were high enough to have this kind of clearance,” the deputy liaison of NATO operations says, her voice all humorous teasing, her eyes all stone-cold killer dickhead. 

Jasper doesn’t point out that the deputy director’s clearance is higher than his own. “Sometimes Fury goes off the book,” Jasper says instead, smiling thinly from his superior position as Phil’s friend and Fury’s occasional gopher. “Clearance has nothing to do with it.”

The months before Phil’s resurrection are busy, on every conceivable front. Jasper has acquired a shit-ton of new friends—in his head, he twitches the first two fingers on both hands whenever he says the word: rabbit ears, friends, rabbit ears—and is in draft forty-six of a suspected mission statement for the Dandelion Brigade that’s as schizophrenic as it is terrifying.

There’s no formal initiation. There’s no, hey, welcome to the club party. There’s a STRIKE team mission in bumfuck Afghanistan that he’s unaccountably tapped to run, at the end of which they’ve completed their primary objective with extreme prejudice, and somehow accidentally started a clan war that cuts off several major oil lines.

Not so accidentally, he’s made to understand, when he stands in the middle of a goat shed and starts yelling at Rumlow. 

“The entire fucking team, sir,” he reports to Fury later, his jaws aching with remembered anger and fear. “STRIKE One is all in on it. They pointed guns at me.”

“You dead?”

“What? No!”

“Then get over it.”

“The entire team,” Jasper says sulkily. “I’ve never talked that fast in my entire life. With all due respect, sir, screw you. I’m an incredible liar.”

Fury’s eye slits. “They had a bunch of casualties a couple of years ago.” He doesn’t need to state the obvious conclusion; the agents who died were probably the ones who failed the membership auditions. 

“Rumlow wants me to go after the chair in Ops.”

“This mean you’re in? Or that you’ve flipped on me?”

Jasper glares at him. 

“Why the fuck start that particular war in that particular place at this particular time?” Fury demands, staring somewhere just past Jasper’s prefrontal lobe. 

“Raise oil prices?” Jasper suggests.

The subsequent silence is awkward. Fury doesn’t seem to have a blink reflex.

Jasper breaks first. It was a foregone conclusion. “Sir?”

Fury sighs. “Get the fuck out of my office.”

 

 

Jasper gets the fuck out of Fury’s office. Jasper gets the fuck out of Fury’s office and goes to the HUB to pretend he’s picking Phil’s brain about TAHITI. He meets Phil’s twittering biochemist, who tells him he has a gorgeous head and then shoots him. He’s conflicted about that. On the one hand, she technically committed an act of treason. On the other hand, she shot him. One of these things is bad. 

“I apologize for that,” Phil says when he visits later, and then adds because he’s ultimately an asshole, something the whole alien DNA implantation thing has done nothing to improve: “It probably won’t happen again.”

“Do you think I should ask her out?” Jasper asks. 

“She shot you,” Phil points out.

“It was really hot. I like a woman who doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger,” Jasper says, then pauses to listen to himself. “I see what he means. I honestly can’t tell if I’m evil right now.”

Phil, being Phil, doesn’t pursue the question of why that’s even a thing. “Does ‘no’ mean ‘no’?” 

“Yes?” 

“Then you’re not evil.”

“I can be evil and pragmatic. She shot me.” Jasper can’t help himself. He sighs. Maybe a little longingly. It’s been a long time for him. Night Vale is a lot of things, but it isn’t a good place to meet women. Or men. It isn’t a good place to meet human beings, anyway. Suddenly wary, he asks, “She doesn’t have a third eye hidden in her naval or anything, does she?”

“That seems like the kind of personal question you should ask her yourself,” Phil says thoughtfully.

He gives Jasper her number. Jasper calls her. She’s adorable. 

“I hope you don’t mind that I shot you,” she says.

“I hope you don’t mind that I’m occasionally evil,” he says.

“Oh, really?” If anything, she’s inappropriately thrilled by the revelation. “I’m British!” 

He takes her out. She doesn’t have a third eye in her naval, or anywhere else for that matter. She also doesn’t shoot him again. Jasper’s not sure how he feels about his improved love life being a likely side-effect of the ongoing rise in global weirdness. Since Jemma is charming, hilarious, sweet, seems to like him, and is totally, spectacularly, outrageously out of his league on the intelligence front, he doesn’t complain.

She kind of makes him not want to be evil anymore.

That’s a problem.

“You’re such a good boy, Jasper,” his mother tells him when he calls her to report on their third date. She sounds pleased and proud of him, which both warms him and clenches him up in reflexive alarm. “You call home so much more since you quit your marriage counseling job in Florida. And Raparti says you called his daughter about that hair treatment, too. Maybe some day soon, I’ll have grandchildren. I’d like to have grandchildren. It’s my life’s dream: a little Jasper Junior to carry on the family genes.”

“Your life’s dream is to solve the galaxy rotation problem. That’s been your life’s dream since before I was born. I remember you talking about it at dinner last month. ‘My life dream is to solve the galaxy rotation problem,’ you said. ‘Eat your vegetables, Jasper, you’re too old to have this irrational fear of asparagus, and did I tell you about Keller’s paper on time dilation,’ you said.”

“I have so few things to look forward to.”

“You’re an astrophysicist, Mom. You have publication schedules and awards, a book coming out in the spring, and the— aren’t you doing a TED talk next week?”

“Immaterial in the grand scheme of things,” his mother says sadly. “In the long run, a woman learns that family’s the most important thing. The recognition and jealousy of her peers is nice, but without grandchildren, she really has nothing in her future but the prospect of watching her hair and teeth fall out, and her breasts sagging into fleshy sacs until they start banging into her knees. Old age is undignified for the big-boobed. I don’t recommend it.”

Jasper quietly beats his head on his desk.

He doesn’t know what it says about himself that he calls his parents more when he’s evil than he does when he’s good. Maybe Evil Jasper is trying to punish Not Evil Jasper for something. Or making some sort of point. 

“When I die, you make sure they put me in a push-up bra,” his mother orders. “It doesn’t have to be an expensive one. I just don’t want people’s last memory of me to be my tits in my armpits.”

He’s definitely being punished.

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP V - ATONEMENT WITH THE FATHER 

 

Gas prices go up. These days, people are used to gas prices going up. They grumble about it, and maybe they drive a little less, but overall they still pull out their wallets because they have to get to work. The poorest who can’t really afford it get poorer, and globally the Middle East fractures just a bit further, while Putin quietly sells a lot more oil and returns his profits to the global economy by purchasing a shit ton of weapons and spreading them around on the ground just outside Russia’s borders. Generally speaking, things get a little more precarious overall.

Jasper’s got other shit on his mind though, because Phil’s getting weird and the favors the Dandelion Brigade are asking for are getting scarier and scarier. Rumlow’s one of the first people in the Dandelion Brigade Jasper feels like he could honestly like without eventually wanting to shoot the head; the guy’s tired in a way Jasper recognizes in Phil, someone who’s seen too much and done too much, and generally wishes he could make the world a better place right now. Plus, he’s not a bad guy. Barring the whole, threatening to kill him and being part of a vague but menacing totalitarian terrorist organization, that is.

“One of these days, I want guns to be like rotary phones. People’ll have them as decorations, or to be retro, but it won’t even occur to them to use one because there isn’t any damn need,” Rumlow tells him as they rest outside an empty prison hut in South Sudan. 

Jasper, lying next to him in a vain attempt to catch a nap before extraction, yawns. “For a badass, you’re kind of a Care Bear.”

Rumlow’s chuckle is low. “What, you don’t want a better world?”

“Sign me up,” Jasper says sleepily. 

“Okay,” Rumlow says. 

Fury assigns Jasper to head up Ops, a promotion that comes with an L8 badge. It’s a lot of shit to learn—the job means learning the ins and outs of the metric shit ton of data that make up SHIELD’s files, and the nightmare of code that runs all SHIELD’s satellites and remote observation systems. 

“It’s spaghetti code,” one of the engineers says stridently, preemptively aggressive in the face of non-engineer management. “Some of it is from Howard Stark’s days. We’ve been trying to maintain it, but it really needs to be completely rewritten. If we could just get approval to take the satellites offline for a few months, we’ve written memos—“

Jasper fades out. It’s like being tortured, really. A trained operative knows how to cut off his body from his mind, to live somewhere outside of the here and now. He’s vaguely proud of himself for being able to do this still, even after moving to a desk job.

“—Memory leaks in the firmware for the Insight satellites. We’ve been trying to patch them before they go up from the Lumerian Star, but there’re race conditions we can’t—“

Of course, every operative knows there are limits.

“Race conditions?” Jasper asks, blinking. 

The engineer looks aggrieved. “It’s a bug. Like, imagine a bunch of dominos, or— no, imagine trees, branches of trees, and there are these forks— no, wait, the dominos metaphor works better. Pretend there are dominos—“

Jasper fades out again.

By the end of the third week, he’s spending private time in the men’s bathroom, trying to scoop his brains out through his nose. With a plastic spoon. It just seems like a better life choice than going back to work.

Jasper’s been undercover for five years now, going on six, and he’s tired—so fucking tired, it doesn’t get any easier to do shit that makes him want a year of showers just to get the slime off, and Fury’s pushing harder and harder—but two days later some kind of shitstorm hits London, the heavens open up, and he thinks with reverence, that’s it. This is as weird as it gets. Nobody can beat this.

And then he gets to Heathrow after cleaning up Asgard’s latest fuckup to find Rumlow waiting for him. 

“C’mon,” Rumlow says, nodding him away from the public terminals. “Pierce wants to meet you.”

About thirty minutes after that, things get weirder. Like, there are still Nazis and they run SHIELD levels of weird.

So, okay? Hadn’t seen that one coming.

 

 

“With all due respect, sir,” Jasper says, wondering if the tick he feels by his right eye is visible, “I’m not white.”

“Really,” Pierce says, regarding him with mild bemusement.

Even if the tick isn’t visible, he’s pretty sure the blush isn’t. “The last time I checked, Hydra was a Nazi organization. I’m fairly sure they had no room for people like me.” He’s trying to be polite, oh so polite, because Rumlow is right behind him, and he’s pretty sure Rumlow will put a bullet in his head if Pierce so much as frowns. But to give in too easily would be suspicious. It’s a fine line. He’s Honduran-American of Palestinian descent, and— okay, he’s not remembering history wrong, is he? Hydra was the fucking Nazis?

“White supremacy and the racial Darwinism that the Nazis espoused is very 1930s, Jasper,” Pierce explains, putting his arm around Jasper’s shoulders. “It’s the kind of ignorant garbage espoused by small, angry people with narrow minds full with fear. That’s not who we are. We’re not interested in superiority. We’re not interested in inferiority. We’re interested in peace. A world where people can be safe from crime or war or violence, no matter who they are or where they live. A world where people can be free to just live their lives and trust that they and the people they love are protected.”

It’s a good speech. In fact, if you replaced ‘white supremacy’ with ‘political extremism,’ and ‘racial Darwinism’ with ‘economic Darwinism,’ Pierce’s explanation is almost word for word his guest speaker speech at the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies. He got a standing ovation for that speech.

“We could use a man like you.” The arm around Jasper’s shoulders squeezes paternally. “A man of talent and vision, who wants to make a better world. It’s not that different from SHIELD’s vision. In fact, it is SHIELD’s vision, just carried to its natural conclusion. SHIELD protects people from the things that threaten them. But you and I—what we know, better than anybody out there, is that the greatest danger to people, the one thing that threatens them most, is people themselves. The world needs change, Jasper. It’s sick, and it’s in denial. I need you to help me fix it. I can’t do it without you.” 

Despite himself, Jasper can feel the persuasive power of Pierce’s charm. “But . . . Hydra,” he says helplessly.

“Is it the name that bothers you?” Pierce asks, his face warm and kind. “Because a hundred fifty years ago, the Democrats were the ones voting to continue slavery in the United States, and President Abraham Lincoln and his supporters were Republicans. Now the Democrats are the loudest proponents of civil rights, while the Republicans are identified as classists. Labels stay. Their meanings change. Hydra is already here, everywhere, in everything. We’re the ones who decide what that means.”

The worst thing is, nothing Pierce says is actually wrong. 

 

 

In the end, there’s no decision to be made at all. Pierce pins a little SHIELD emblem on his lapel—“As a gesture between friends,” he says, patting it and, by proxy, Jasper’s chest possessively. Jasper thumbs its back, where the tiny dimple of electronics lives under the metal skin, and arches an eyebrow.

“I don’t have many friends who bug me,” he points out. Which is absolutely a lie, because all of them have done it to each other at some point or another.

“A little insurance,” Pierce says cheerfully. “Trust, but verify. And if my trust is misplaced—“ he taps his finger on the pin, “—you know what this will do.”

Jasper’s seen what the damned exothermal charges do to a human body, compliments of STRIKE One and a really complicated situation in Puyallup, of all places. There’s not much he can do about it right now, though. He smiles and shakes Pierce’s hand and trots out of the meeting, the image of a placated and reassured convert. His two dominant thoughts are, Fury has to know, and suck it, I’m the fucking god of liars.

“Something big’s gonna be happening soon, Jasper,” Rumlow says as they leave the private hanger Pierce used for the meeting and head for the terminals. “He’s got a plan. You’re part of it. You’ll help us make a new world.”

“Great. No pressure,” Jasper says.

Rumlow slaps Jasper’s back. “No worries, buddy. One of us’ll will always be with you from now on. You’ll never be alone. We’re all one big, happy family. We got your back.”

The hand on his back might as well be holding a knife. Goody. “Hopefully someone better-looking than you,” he says, because it’s sort of expected of him. 

“Who knows? Could be. You won’t know who it is. Nobody knows everybody, except maybe Pierce. You’ll learn eventually. We got code words, signs to recognize each other, like one big fucking fraternity, you know? I’ll show some to you later. Cheer up,” Rumlow adds, when Jasper pulls a face. “It just means if you ever get made, there’ll be someone next to you, ready to carry on the fight.”

Not a word about said fighter jumping in to save him, mind. If that’s meant to be encouragement, it’s the worst encouragement Jasper’s ever heard. He can tell from the glint in Rumlow’s eye that it really isn’t meant to be. It’s a warning, a message about the so-called greater good.

That’s fine. Jasper knows from greater good. He keeps his inevitable reflections to himself though, because they’re probably counterproductive at this point. All he really can do is give Rumlow a crooked twitch of mouth and say, “It’s nice to know that in this better world we’re making, there’s room for a Honduran-American of Palestinian descent.”

It’s almost like Rumlow’s on a timed delay. After a too-long second, he smiles too. And now Jasper knows something that he only suspected before; that if things go the way Hydra plans them, Honduran-Americans of Palestinian descent will be as dead as everybody else.

Jasper suppresses a sigh. It just isn’t worth trying to be funny while joining the dark side. He needs to get this intel to Fury. He needs to debrief. 

 

 

 

Of course, then Fury gets himself killed. 

Jasper is never going to stop saying I told you so.

Chapter Text

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP IX - APOTHEOSIS 

 

There’s nothing quite like being a mole deep in a vague yet menac—fuck it, a mole deep in Hydra with no handler and no clear way out. 

Jasper has had better days.

There aren’t many certainties in life, he’s learned over the last few years, so it’s just as well that he’s gotten used to working with uncertainties. Not that he’s a paranoid bastard or anything, but Fury’s attitude is the kind of contagious that makes psychologists curl up in flannel and cry; like hell was Jasper oiling his way into the trust of Hydra without a backup plan if Fury ate a bullet.

So it’s time for the backup plans. And the backup plans consist of: Plan A) Captain America; or Plan B) die.

He gives it serious thought. He really does. Really hard, really serious thought, weighing the pros and cons of each alternative. Honestly.  And then he goes with Plan A, because it comes first in the alphabet and Jasper, he’s a by-the-book kind of guy.

Out of everyone in SHIELD, Steve Rogers is the only one that Jasper is 100% positive couldn’t be Hydra. (A part of him dies a little inside at the thought that Phil or Clint might be Hydra; he wants to trust them, but Fury’s lasting gift is trust no one. He’s the worst fairy godmother ever.) But Jasper needs a minute after watching Fury die in the hospital—a few seconds alone in a supply closet, fist in his mouth while he shakes hard, fuck this, he has never felt so alone in his goddamn life—and by the time he gets out, Rumlow has Cap firmly in hand. 

Jasper races back to the Triskelion. When the orders come down from Pierce, he’s already in Ops. He orders rubber bullets for the squads and sends them racing up to meet the elevator; he needs to get a private word to Cap. He has to let Cap know what’s going on, and he can’t do that if Cap’s in the wind. For a few minutes anyway, he and Hydra are in complete agreement. Captain America can’t leave the Triskelion. Not yet.

What he hadn’t counted on was Captain America being donkey balls insane.

Jasper stares at the video of Rogers crash-landing after falling thirty-two floors and then getting up and running away. He’s got a feeling of real personal injury about that. He kinda thinks that should’ve been in Rogers’s file. He’s going to have a serious heart-to-heart with the Psych department when this is all over. 

There isn’t any real hope that they’d contain him in the garage. He fires off the order anyway. And then he races out of Ops—he hasn’t decided why or where he’s going yet, besides knowing he’s got to get word to Cap somehow—and runs head-first into Hawkeye.

Clint grabs him by the upper arms to steady him. “What the fuck, Jasper?” he demands, sharp. “Are we seriously hunting down Captain America?”

And that’s when Jasper realizes he’s panicked and has done things all wrong.

It’s like a bucket of ice water in his face. He’s done things all wrong, and he could get Cap killed if he’s not careful. There are people racing back and forth around him, so it’s no kind of time to fill Clint in. “Cap’s gone off the reservation,” he says instead, grabbing a strap on Clint’s vest and gripping it hard. “Pierce wants him alive. He’s got a tracker in his uniform. Run him down, got it?” 

He flicks out a pen and scribbles the tracker details on Clint’s palm. Under the numbers, he scrawls the Strike Team Delta sign for dangerous waters. It’s all he has time for. 

Clint looks down at it. “And then what?” he asks, not giving anything away.

“Do what comes naturally,” Jasper says. 

For a second, he gets the full force of Hawkeye’s sniper stare—it’s a bit like having his brains scooped out with a melon-baller—and then Clint’s mouth curls up in one corner. “Hey, a chance to shoot Captain Fancypants,” he drawls. “I love this job. Where’s Tasha?”

Jasper’s mouth opens, then closes. He blinks. How the fuck did he miss—

“Never mind,” Clint says. “You know how she is. She’ll be where she needs to be.”

Five minutes later, Ops is bitching about Clint putting together a quick team and stealing a quad to go after Cap. Jasper shuts them down and clears it, pausing only long enough to confirm that Clint hasn’t taken anyone from STRIKE with him. The information comforts him, if only a little. If Clint’s Hydra, he’ll— he’ll shoot Cap, but at least Cap’ll be alive. Pierce’s name will guarantee that. Jasper will get Cap out somehow, after updating him. And if Clint’s not Hydra, if he’s actually the contrary disaster Jasper once found swimming an honest to God shark tank wearing nothing but a neon green Speedo and a lobster hat— if he’s who he’s always pretended to be, Cap’ll be fine.

Cap’ll be fine, and he’ll learn about the tracker, and Jasper will be up shit creek. But Cap will be fine. He’ll figure things out.

Probably. 

Maybe.

Jasper sends up a quick prayer that Captain America really is as smart as the psych profile claims he is. He’s lost a bit of faith in that profile, what with it not mentioning Cap’s dream of being the first 6’0” lemming.

“Found the tracker,” Rumlow reports, half an hour after Clint’s quad goes down and Clint himself is carted off to the ER with a concussion and fractured ribs.

“And? Do you have Rogers?” Jasper asks.

“No.”

Jasper feeds his adrenaline surge into a sharp, “Location?”

“High school gym. He ditched the uniform. Questioned witnesses. Cap’s long gone.”

It’d be tactless to do a fist-pump, all things considered. That makes two people he’s pretty sure aren’t Hydra. Of course, one of them is in the wind and the other one is unconscious. The fact that this still means his day is looking up might be the saddest thing ever.

 

 

The thing about Maria Hill that always gets Jasper almost every time is that she’s pretty. 

She’s not beautiful. She’s pretty. That’s not one of those things that Jasper noticed the first time they met—he’s bad at superficials, and his initial reaction to her was a bone-deep terror that she was going to rip his testicles out through his trachea and eat them with some fava beans. It was an excessive reaction to the occasion, Phil pointed out, given that they met at a Biergarten while Hill was undercover for the CIA and Jasper hadn’t realized she was even an agent. She was wearing a Swiss maid’s outfit, complete with push-up bra and pigtails and the worst German accent this side of a Carol Burnett skit. She was also a really shit waitress.

Jasper almost pissed himself when she asked if they wanted appetizers.

He’s gotten over his initial reaction, if not over the conviction she’s eventually going to end up grinding his balls between her molars. They’ve developed a great working relationship since, based on mutual respect and his healthy fear. It’s only when heads turn as she passes, obviously noticing the least meaningful parts of her—catsuit, who the hell thought catsuits would be a good idea, Jasper looked terrible in a catsuit—that he’s reminded: she’s pretty. As an objective assessment, it’s lacking a few words.

Right now, as she saunters through Ops towards him, she’s pretty fucking terrifying. And still, some of the guys manning terminals are turning to look after her ass, as though she doesn’t know perfectly well that they’re doing it and taking names as they do.

Sometimes, Jasper has to remind himself that SHIELD employees are the best and the brightest. Sometimes, Jasper wants to weep for humanity. He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. 

He registers her presence by the lack of any sensory clue that she’s present.

“Jasper.” 

“I hate everyone,” he says, eyes still closed. “I especially hate Fury. Pass that on, will you?”

“Next time I see him, I’ll be sure to mention it,” Hill says blandly.

“Where were you?” 

“Arranging his funeral.”

He blinks just in time to watch her arch a judgmental eyebrow at him. It’s possible his attitude towards death has gotten a bit cavalier since he was assigned to Night Vale. It actually takes him a second to remember that death is bad. In some parts of the world, it’s even permanent. 

Well, damn it. Now he just comes off like a cold-blooded asshole. Even from the grave, Fury manages to screw him over. Jasper almost has to admire that, in a cranky kind of way. “I’m sorry.”

“Happens to the best of us.”

“Happened to Fury, too,” Jasper says, because he’s just having that kind of day. Hill’s eyes go flat. Jasper’s balls scramble up into his body cavity. “So here,” he says hastily, backpedaling to one of the analysts’ stations. “You know anything about this?”

She looks down now at the replay of Apple Store surveillance footage, Steve Rogers standing watch while Romanov fiddles with a Mac. If she’s Hydra, she already knows. If she’s not, she’s warned that Cap has a shadow.

“Nice glasses,” Hill remarks.

“Captain America is a hipster,” Jasper says resentfully.

“It was bound to happen eventually.”

“Romanov is on the run with him. You knew about this?” 

“No, but I’m not surprised. That’s Captain America you’re after. He inspires loyalty.”

You’re. Jasper’s heart leaps, and then he remembers Pierce’s bug. Fuck. Test? Not a test?

“The hipster look was probably her idea,” he says, while he’s busy thinking fast.

“We always knew her moral compass was dubious at best,” Hill says, without any sign of concern. “It’s a good look on him.”

Jasper eyes her suspiciously. She doesn’t seem to notice, too busy smiling faintly down at the screen. Her approval of the hipster look, in Jasper’s opinion, puts a tick mark in the ‘possibly evil’ column. It’s possible his criteria for thinking people are Hydra might be getting a little shallow. Then again, as Fury would have told any children stupid enough to come close: a little paranoia a day keeps the headshots at bay.

“I hear you’re going back to New York after the service,” Jasper tells her, because he’s seen the orders. 

Apparently, she hasn’t. She stops dead, then turns, her eyes chips of ice. “Why?”

“The Director feels your connection to Captain America is a liability. SHIELD demands loyalty too.” If she’s Hydra, it makes no difference. If she’s not—if Fury read her in on something ugly happening in SHIELD—it’ll be a warning. She’ll be under less attention if she’s not part of the high-focus team chasing Cap, and New York means Tony Stark means maybe some safety, means maybe some fucking brains who’ll be able to figure out what’s going on if Jasper goes down. 

She stares at him. Then she smiles.

Jasper’s balls go alpine climbing again.

 

 

 

Four hours later, something happens on Jasper’s terminal.

He’s in the middle of inhaling a doughnut and stale coffee after way too long without sleep, so he almost misses it. Quick lines of text; a couple of words he recognizes, then the twitch of coordinates.

He sits forward, feet thumping down. The screen goes blank. “What,” he says, and jabs warily at his keyboard. He’s an agent. He’s a field agent, no less. The code of the field agent is to never call in IT under any conditions; there are no people on the face of the earth who hate SHIELD agents more than SHIELD IT. It’s standard practice to let them handle the interrogation of double agents; their success rate is a good 13% higher than trained SHIELD interrogators.

Anyway, Jasper’s tech savvy. If shit goes wrong with a computer, he pokes the keyboard. Or maybe slaps the screen a few times, he’s good at that.

The screen flickers the third time he slaps it. He pokes the Enter key in a half-hearted attempt to convince it not to be broken. Then it stops being blank, and he stops feeling peevish in favor of feeling drenched in ice and sheer, horrified terror. Air strike authorized, it reads, with his name and Level 7 ID code clearly slotted into the Level 11 co-authorization field under Pierce’s. The map grid is centered on an old Army base in New Jersey.

He actually feels himself go white. That takes some doing, for a Honduran-American of Palestinian descent. He’s willing to bet it’s not a good look for him.

 

 

 

“I’m impressed, Jasper,” Pierce says.

It’s the first time Jasper has left Ops in fifteen hours. Trading Ops for Pierce’s office isn’t a choice he would’ve made willingly; the view is better, but then again, the fall is higher. If he wasn’t bald already, he’d have torn his hair out by the roots. “Agent Rumlow reported Captain Rogers escaped the scene, sir,” he reports. It’s the only good thing to come out of this entire situation; that and the fact that anybody who’s really SHIELD now thinks he’s a Captain America-hating asshole— or wait, is that bad? He’s starting to lose track.

Pierce is speaking though, and with a real effort, Jasper forces himself to listen past the hiss of static in his ears. “—wasn’t sure if we could really trust you, but Brock was right about you. He usually is. And the fact that you did it on your own initiative—“

Jasper makes himself to smile, despite the fact that he really has no fucking idea what Pierce is talking about. “Sir.”

“Though I’d prefer it if in the future, you didn’t claim authorization clearance you haven't been given,” Pierce says gently, and that’s it: Jasper’s balls are never going to come down again.

“I’m not entirely sure how that happened, sir,” Jasper says hastily. “I wasn’t—“

Pierce waves a dismissive hand. “No harm done. Or at least—“ he amends with a small sigh, “—nothing that can’t be reconstructed eventually, at any rate. All this business about the cloud, well. I don’t know what the geeks say half the time, but nothing is ever really lost. Which is lucky for you.”

Jasper doesn’t let himself relax. “Sir.”

“And there’s something to be said for not having the peanut gallery constantly kibitzing,” Pierce muses. His smile is quick and charming, warm again. “So it might have worked out in my favor after all. Even without a resolution to the Rogers situation. No, don’t apologize—Brock will take care of it from here on out. He’s better suited for it than you are. I have other business for you, and it’s time you were read in on Project Insight.”

“I was read in by Director Fury before he died, sir,” Jasper volunteers.

Pierce looks amused. “You were read into what Fury thought Project Insight was. Now let me read you in on what it actually is.”

 

 

 

 

Way back at the beginning, Fury gave Jasper a speech about compartmentalization. “I could just say ‘need to know,’” Fury said. “But big words help some people feel like there are serious reasons behind it.”

“As opposed to?”

“The popular theory is that I’m just being a fucker.”

Jasper thought about that, and decided not to touch it. “Are there real reasons?” 

Fury just leveled a look at him. “No, Agent,” he said. “I really am just being a fucker.”

It was the kind of sarcasm that was so large, it came out sounding like sincerity. On the theory that he couldn’t lose by simply nodding, Jasper nodded. Fury barked something that was either a laugh, or the liver of his last appointment getting caught in his throat.

As it happened, Fury had some damn good reasons why he was segregating his investigations into need to know. Explicit, terrifying reasons. He was nice enough to share some stories. Jasper might never be able to sleep without nightmares again.

“I can count the number of people I trust completely on one hand and have fingers left over,” Fury said.

Jasper tried not to look hurt. He didn't try very hard.

Fury’s smile was humorless. “There’re a few other people I trust conditionally.”

“Do I get a finger?”

There was a short, flat silence. Jasper was almost positive which finger Fury was going to give him. Instead, Fury lifted his right pinky. “This one’s you.”

Because of course he'd pick the shortest digit. “And the others?” 

“Pierce. The rest are—“ he huffed, amused by something that Jasper just didn’t get, “—need to know.”

In retrospect, Jasper can understand the lack of trust. 

(Fury was also a fucker, though. Not that that was ever in question.)

 

 

 

 

The thing is, Stalin is right. The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

Jasper can’t even feel fear anymore. He’s numb. “Thank you, sir,” he says. He really doesn’t mean it. Some cowardly part of him is kind of wishing he could’ve stayed oblivious until Rumlow inevitably put a bullet in his brain. The size of what he has to stop now is just— 

He might throw up.

Pierce is watching him. The damned thing is, he looks sympathetic. “I know,” he says. “It’s a lot to wrap your mind around.”

“You don’t hear something like this every day.”

“Hopefully not. Otherwise I’d start wondering what you were up to in the field.”

Jasper blinks quickly. Pierce just looks amused, damn him.

“You look dead on your feet, Jasper. When was the last time you slept?”

“It’s been a while,” he admits.

“Go grab a nap. Then I need you to do some liaising to make sure everything is in place to restore order on the ground in the aftermath. You have a gift for operations. That’s why we brought you on board.”

“Sir,” Jasper says blankly. He half-turns to leave, then stops. 

Pierce looks up from a file, questioning. "You want to ask something?"

“If you don't mind me asking," Jasper says, and: "What made you decide to trust me?”

“You cosigned an air strike in civilian territory less than two seconds after I ordered it.”

“But you routed the order to me for execution. I shouldn't even have been able to authorize it. It should've gone to a higher level agent. You chose me.”

“I didn’t. Zola did. All that data he analyzed, all the observations and all assessments— you know what name’s not on his list of Insight targets?”

Jasper does some more blinking.

“Yours.” Pierce gestures, his face warm. “Your past predicts your future, and you’re no threat to Hydra.”

He’s definitely going to throw up. “Thank you, sir,” Jasper says hoarsely, and starts to turn away again.

Behind him, Pierce hums. “Jasper?”

Jasper stops. This is it. This is where Pierce pulls the rug out from under him, explains he knew all along that Jasper was a spy, has him shot in the head. He swallows hard. His hand twitches by his side; one of the STRIKE team is standing watch by the door. If he puts a bullet through Pierce, will that stop Hydra? No. Pierce dead, Jasper dead, Insight will still go up. Hydra will still be a rot in SHIELD. Zola’s algorithm will still run. 

He forces his hand still, his gun heavy on his hip, and turns back to Pierce. “Sir?”

Pierce’s eyebrow is rising. “Celiac?” he asks gently.

For a few seconds, Jasper’s mind is blank. Of all things, that was the last one he expected. “What?” At Pierce’s nod to Jasper’s front, he looks down to discover there are doughnut crumbs clinging to his tie. He brushes at them, wonders if there’s coffee on his shirt, and then realizes— “Oh.” His file. Celiac Disease. Fuck Fury. “That. It was— Agent Barton used to make me stop at IHOP any time we saw one. Have you ever eaten an IHOP pancake? They’re disgusting. Soggy and dry, all at the same time, and—“ He shudders. “It was terrible for my IBS.”

Pierce’s other eyebrow joins its buddy in his hairline. 

It takes no trouble at all for Jasper to feed his nerves into embarrassment. “I was just sick of IHOP pancakes, but the man wouldn’t listen to reason. He kept pouring more syrup on them. I panicked. Itold him I was diagnosed in France, and then I had to fake medical records. After that, things spiraled out of control. Everyone started getting me gluten-free food and homeopathic remedies, and it just got too awkward to explain—“

He stops when Pierce chuckles. “So now you sneak doughnuts while Agent Barton is in the hospital?”

As though he needed the reminder that Pierce was monitoring him at all times. “I like doughnuts,” he says weakly.

“I told my wife I’m lactose intolerant so I won’t have to eat the cottage cheese she wants me to eat for my health,” Pierce says fondly. “The things we do. Go rest. I’ll need you at your best when we change the world. And Jasper?”

“Sir?”

“You’re a terrible liar.” Pierce smiles at him.

His heart racing so hard it hurts his throat, Jasper goes.

Not to rest, though. No. Hydra is about to kill millions of people. He doesn’t go rest. He needs a team. He needs to take down Insight. He needs to kill Pierce and root out Hydra and avenge Fury and rescue Captain America and save the world—

 

 

 

Honestly,  that little red sniper dot that shows up on his tie? Best thing to happen to him in days.

 

Chapter Text

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP X - THE ULTIMATE BOON 

 

Jasper’s first thought is that he’s been captured by one of SHIELD’s many frenemies. Army is his first guess, but they don’t have the style to pull a mid-day, public kidnap. The CIA though, they’ve been upping their game lately. Three months ago, they snagged Kahane with a tranq needle in a YMCA towel, and traded him for SHIELD intel on a Bolivian arms dealer. They’ve got misplaced balls.

 (Fury retaliated by kidnapping one of their comptrollers from a Hooters bathroom stall—literally sliced out and air-lifted the entire stall out of the building, the poor bastard trapped inside with his pants around his ankles—because ‘restraint’ isn’t in his vocabulary.  He traded the comptroller for access to an undercover agent in Syria. If the good citizens of America knew how their national security community handles interagency cooperation, they’d all move to New Zealand.)

To be honest, he’s kind of excited. The CIA is relatively harmless. Filled with twiddlepoops, but harmless. Relatively speaking. Not given to, say, wholesale massacre on a global scale. He can handle them. 

It takes longer than it should for Jasper to realize that this kidnap is serious. The black guy who steers him to the waiting car is unfamiliar, but his companion definitely rings a few bells. In more than one way.

He’s sprawled on the ground nursing a bruised jaw before he even sees the fist that clocked him.

“Hi, Jasper,” Natasha says.

“Hi?” he says back, peering dazedly up at her.

“Get in the car, Jasper.” Natasha says.

He gets in the car. Natasha gets in next to him in the back; the black guy gets in behind the wheel and starts driving.

Awkward silence falls.

“How’ve you been?” Jasper tries. 

Natasha says conversationally. “Everyone I know is trying to kill me.”

“So pretty normal, then?”

Natasha shrugs. “I ran into some SHIELD inventory problems in New Jersey. Someone misdelivered some missiles. I don’t suppose you know anything about that, do you?”

Jasper decides silence is his friend.

If they’re taking him to Captain America—he’s worried his hands will shake with relief, so he sits on them—if they’re taking him to Captain America, he has a chance to pass on intel about Insight and Hydra. Big if. He doesn’t know who the black guy is; he recognizes the signs of ex-military, but veterans are a dime a dozen in DC. Unknowns are disturbing. Then again, he’s sitting next to Black Widow, who might or might not be Hydra. Fury and Clint brought her in from the cold, but if anyone’s past suggests they might be fine with working for a mass murdering, ideologically suspect pack of evil shits, it would be Black Widow’s. Jasper’s seen her play a long con before, helping an enemy of SHIELD to get full intel and then flipping at the Nth hour to take them out. There’s no saying she’s not doing the same to Captain America.

Lack of sleep isn’t doing Jasper any favors, but the adrenaline surge of sitting next to a possibly Hydra Black Widow is better than an IV of caffeine. He riffs through near term possibilities, dismisses several as unlikely, and settles on the two most probable: imminent death, or; imminent Captain America. Or hell, imminent both.

Option one: he could break cover and spill everything to Cap. Would Cap believe the sheer scope of this? Hard to say. And the net benefit of that would be—the net benefit would be that the damn bug Pierce put on him would alert Hydra that he was a double agent, Pierce would trigger the kill switch, and Jasper would die. Or else Black Widow is Hydra, and she would kill Jasper and maybe Rogers, and everyone would die. On the up side, Cap would believe him for a few seconds before everything went black. It’s not as comforting a thought as he’d like.

Option two: he could take the bug off— 

Jasper reaches for the pin.

Natasha promptly shoves a gun up his nose. Jasper freezes. She isn’t even looking at him. “If you turn left here,” she tells the driver, “you’ll miss the traffic on D.”

“I’m not turning left here.”

“Turn left here. Here. Here—“ The gun isn’t moving. Jasper’s nose hurts. His eyes start watering. “You missed the turn.”

“I’m sorry, terrifying woman in the back seat, are you driving? No. It’s my car, I’m driving, I decide to turn right on 11^th instead of 9^th, because I am not a crazy person. Don’t get brains on my upholstery. I just paid off this car; I’m not cleaning no brains off my upholstery.“

“You drive like an old woman.”

Jasper carefully sits on his hands again. Natasha’s gun releases his nose. The driver demands, “Have you ever seen an old black woman drive? You could only wish you were so lucky.”

Option three: he could keep his cover. He could stay undercover and support Rogers somehow. The plan has merits, beyond the instinctive whine that immediately lodges itself behind his teeth. Pierce trusts him, and for the moment, at least, has a use for him. He could sneak intel out to Cap as he goes, provided nobody finds out—provided neither side shoots him—he could do real good. How to communicate that the Rogers though, without Widow knowing? Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he just plays this out and then adds a new handle for his communications out to Rogers.

He’s got the niggling feeling that he’s forgetting something important. Hydra, undercover, Captain America, bugged, imminent exothermic death, scary Black Widow, intel transfer— what the hell is he forgetting?

“You should know that he’s a little upset at you,” Natasha remarks, as they pull up outside a run-down apartment building.

“I’m not scared of Rogers,” Jasper says as he steps out of the car.

Natasha raises her eyebrows. The driver purses his lips. 

“I’m not,” Jasper insists.

“Hey, more power to you, man,” the driver says agreeably. “I mean, you’re a Nazi. Poor life choices seem to be kind of your thing, but who am I to judge?”

Jasper considers. “How upset is he?” he asks Natasha.

She tilts her head and pinches her thumb and forefinger together, leaving a small gap. “Bit.”

 They meet Rogers on the 16^th floor. The first thing he does is drop-kick Jasper out the door and halfway across the roof.

“Tell me about Zola’s algorithm!” Rogers shouts.

Jasper is hit once more by a sense of grievance.

Practically speaking, Jasper doesn’t actually feel his life is in danger at any point. Rogers’s reputation for being a goody two-shoes aside, the man was a soldier behind enemy lines, relying on intel he got in the field, so it isn’t that Jasper doesn’t expect a certain practical physical motivation. He expects bruises, a beating, possibly a bullet or two in something non-fatal. Nothing he hasn’t had in the course of his SHIELD career. Killing Jasper would be counterproductive, though; they wouldn’t have pulled him out of the middle of a public area, complete with eyes on target, if they had any other options for intel. 

Getting kicked off the building is a bit unexpected. Nobody’s ever done that to him before. Cross that one off the bucket list.

It gives him the perfect opportunity to spill the beans, though. (A distant part of him is indignant that they honestly think he’s that easy to break. He’ll nurse his wounded ego later.) He manages to get the key elements of it out while on his hands and knees, painfully conscious of the pin on his lapel. Choosing Insight’s targets. Anybody who’s a threat to Hydra. Gravity pulls it down as he yammers, a few precious seconds of distance from his skin that might let him get it off before it goes through his chest. He has the sequence of moves planned out in his head. Left hand grab. Jerk it away. Right hand to pull the suit over his head and off. Probable losses: left hand and arm. If the reaction area and speed is the same as the one he saw Rumlow use, possibly left leg as well. The flying driver standing to his left might be burned. 

He’s poised and ready. He’s got a plan. He’s prepared for the pain.

Nothing happens.

He keeps talking. Nothing happens.  

Greatly daring, Jasper stands up. The pin weighs down his shoulder. Rogers and Natasha stand there like total tools with I am a stupid fuckhead written all over their faces, until he lays it all out for them using one syllable words, actually identifies Pierce as the head of Hydra by name—Jasper is going to havewords with Psych, he is so pissed, this is not the time to be this slow—

And nothing happens.

“Then the Insight carriers scratch them off the list. A few million at a time,” he says. 

And still nothing happens.

Something’s wrong. He’s missing something. 

Panic hammers on a distant door. Jasper invites it in.

 

 

 

“Get in the car, Jasper,” Natasha says.

“This is a bad idea,” Jasper says. He’s trying to be the voice of reason here.

“Get in the car, Sitwell,” Steve says.

They’re planning on keeping him prisoner. Irrationally, arguing with Black Widow and Captain America is calming in a way Jasper would never have expected. Being ignored when he’s shouting is reminiscent of a childhood spent around hard-core academics. He had a very safe childhood. No Hydra terrorists anywhere; just politically irrelevant obsessive-compulsives.

He’s also tried to take the pin off three more times. Natasha threatened to taze him until he lost bowel control.

“You could just let me go,” Jasper says hopelessly.

Natasha narrows her eyes. He sighs and gets in.

The last time he was packed in a car with this many people, he was on a road trip with his parents and his third cousin Salman from Jordan. He’s pretty sure this trip is going to end the same way: in tears.

“We’ll have to take out the carriers,” Rogers says as they putter down the Beltway in the black guy’s shitty car. “What are our options?”

“A lot of civilians could get hurt if you take them down after they get in the air. Debris, explosions,” the black guy—his name is Sam, apparently—points out.

“So we can’t let them launch. We have to destroy them while they’re on the ground.”

“Easy,” Natasha says. “And if we can’t?”

“We got a pair of wings as backup,” Sam points out. “And you said SHIELD has planes.”

“I can’t fly,” Rogers admits. “I never learned how.”

“Clint can fly,” Natasha reminds.

“Clint’s in the hospital,” Jasper interjects sullenly. 

“Why?”

“Ask your boyfriend.”

She looks at Sam first. Then Rogers.

Rogers slouches down, his shoulders curling in. “He was trying to shoot me? A little?” After a few seconds of Natasha staring a hole in his left temple, he adds reassuringly, “He’s not Hydra.”

Natasha sighs. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

“Thor can fly.”

“Off-grid.”

“Hulk can—”

“Same.”

After a short, stiff silence, Rogers asks “Iron Man?”

“He just had open heart surgery two days ago. They fitted him with a new ribcage.”

“I should’ve sent a card,” Rogers frets.

“You did,” Natasha reassures. “It had kittens on it. And glitter.”

“That sounds nice.”

Jasper cannot understand why he thought Captain America would save the day. “We’re all going to die,” he says sadly.

“So how do we get access to these carrier things?” Sam asks. “And once we get to them, how do we turn them off? There isn’t some kind of self-destruct, is there?”

“This isn’t the movies, Sam,” Natasha tells him, without her usual bite. 

It’s obvious she likes him. Jasper shivers in sympathetic terror. Sam appears to be oblivious to his imminent doom. “Too bad. Shit’s a lot more convenient in the movies.”

“The black guy always dies in the movies.”

“Then again,” Sam says, not missing a beat.

Rogers interjects, “You can’t get down to Insight without higher clearance than I ever had. I was level eight. Fury used an override to get down to the bay.”

“Could Hill get us in?” asks Natasha.

“We can’t take the chance she’s not Hydra.”

“Is she?” Natasha asks Jasper.

“I’m not telling you anything else,” he says, glowering out the window because he doesn’t know. “Hydra doesn’t like leaks.”

“Then why don’t you try sticking a cork in it?” Sam suggests.

Natasha leans forward to mutter at Sam and Rogers, like Jasper won’t be able to hear her if she sticks her head in the front half of the car. If Jasper wasn’t so convinced Natasha rips the heads off her mates during copulation, he’d actually consider being distracted by the view of her rear. It’s a convenient break, though; he watches the traffic whip by. The thing he’s missing. The thing he’s forgotten. It’s just on the tip of his tongue. If he just—

“No!” he blurts out, his brain catching up with Rogers just said. He’s a Level Seven. Why the hell would they think his clearance would do anything but paint a great, big, intruders! Intruders! on the map? “Are you crazy? That’s a bad idea. That’s a terrible idea. It’s—“

There’s a thud on the roof. At the same moment, Jasper realizes what he’s forgotten. Map. Bug. Electronics. Frequencies. Tracker. That’s why Pierce didn’t kill him. Rogers is dragging him around, and Jasper is wearing a tracker.

His mouth is still open when the hand smashes through the side window and grabs him by the neck. He registers metal plates, slams into the side of the door. Glass and sharp air bite deep into his skin.

Phil can keep Captain America. Give Jasper Winter Soldier, any day. The assassin is a ghost. A conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. Jasper soars high over traffic; has an exhilarated, fanboy thrill of, That’s the Winter Soldier! Phil will not belie—!

Then he gets hit by a DHL Ford AeroMax going 68 miles per hour.

 

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY - INTERMISSION

 

Some important shit happens during intermission.

Don’t worry about it. Go ahead. Take your bathroom break. Jasper’s dead. He can wait.

 

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP XI - REFUSAL OF THE RETURN

 

Jasper wakes up stark naked on Old Woman Josie’s coffee table.

“What the actual fuck,” he yelps, sitting straight up.

“Welcome back,” says Fury, from the couch where he’s drinking a scotch on the rocks. He’s not wearing an eyepatch.

“Jesus Christ, his eye. It’s hideous,” Jasper says. And then he says, “Shit, am I doing that thing where I come back from the dead and I have no inner monologue for the first twenty-four hours?” And then he says, “Shit, I am. This was so much funnier when it was Phil not having an inner monologue.”

“I can believe it,” Fury says, looking almost interested. “What’s he got to say?”

“It’s incredible how much he thinks about Clint’s ass. I can’t blame him. When Clint walks, it’s like watching mangos wrestling in a spandex bag. Not the tiny yellow mangos, the oblong red and green ones you get at the big grocery store chains, I love those mangos. They’re delicious, yum, oh God will someone please sew my mouth shut.”

“They still haven’t gotten together,” Fury informs.

“His eye is really freaking me out,” Jasper says, starting to panic. “Please don’t kill me with it. Oh God, it follows me everywhere, like the Mona Lisa. Shit, stop concentrating on Fury’s eye. He’ll notice. Don’t let him notice. Think of something else. I wonder if Phil would be on top if he got together with Clint. They’d have to use a lot of lube because Phil’s dick is demoralizingly large. I bet Steve Rogers’ dick is really large. I’m so confused now, these are not my thoughts, I’ve never considered Phil’s dick in my life. What’s happening?”

“You died. Spread your brains like butter across the Beltway. That can screw with your memory.”

“How did I—“

“The Winter Soldier threw you under a semi. Natasha dumped our database on the internet. Then Rogers blew up SHIELD because it was full of Nazis. The man’s got a nervous condition when it comes to Nazis. Some kinda reflex. Pavlovian."

Jasper freaks out. Maybe has a tiny fanboy moment. “Winter Soldier? The Winter— I met him? Did I get his autograph? Holy shit. The Wi— wait, Nazis. What Nazis? I don’t remember Nazis. What do you mean, blew up SHIELD?”

“Triskelion’s gone. SHIELD’s on the terrorist watchlist. Feds’re hunting us.”

“What?!”

Fury shrugs. Looks thoughtful. “In hindsight, I probably should’ve put him in therapy for the Nazi thing.”

Jasper whimpers, wrenching his stare away from Fury’s blind eye to discover: “That’s— black. That’s— why is that black?” His voice rises. “Is it necrotic?”

“I thought you might like to try some different accessories,” Josie volunteers, toddling in from the kitchen. “I like to mix things up on the fashion front after a hard day.”

“Everyone looks good in black,” Fury says unhelpfully.

“My dick is not an accessory!” Jasper shouts, before stuffing his fist in his mouth to stop the rest of his inner monologue from making its way out. After a second to make sure he has it under control, he uncorks long enough to ask, “Did you at least get the seed of formless evil out?”

Josie peers at him over her spectacles, her forehead wrinkling. 

“About that,” Fury says.

 

 

 

 

“What do you mean you can’t get it out?!” Jasper shrieks.

 

 

Chapter Text

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP XI - REFUSAL OF THE RETURN (PART 2)

 

“Let’s talk about evil,” says Fury, limping out onto the porch to sit down next to Jasper.

Night Vale is always weird. It’s not usually this weird, though. The view from Old Woman Josie’s front porch is currently the inside of a Foot Locker retail store. A mall somewhere, maybe. Wrapped up in a fuzzy blue quilt that Old Woman Josie unearthed from behind the sofa, Jasper has been watching several umpire-geared employees steal inventory, smoke weed, and generally live down to their minimum wage status. They can’t seem to see him watching them. It’s like really dull reality TV.

Clint's therapist used to send him  to the aquarium to watch the small animals with fins that live in water. Calming. Clint said it was calming. This is like that. Jasper needs calm. He’s got a lapful of his paper reports to Fury, and a tablet full of news about SHIELD agents being massacred around the globe. His brain is still regenerating from being freeway butter, and two minutes ago he counted his toes. It didn’t work out to an even number.

The way he feels right now is not a step up from being dead.

“When this is over, I think I’m going to build a tank,” he says distantly. 

“Your lease cover that kind of ordinance?”

“Not the kind that fires shells. Water. The ones with water.” He considers this. “And bright things that swim.”

Fury grunts, stretching his legs out in front of him. He folds his hands across his stomach and watches the Foot Locker employees. “No reason those can’t fire shells, too.”

Jasper admits the truth of that. He remembers with relief, “Fish. That’s the word.”

“Never tried to arm one of those.”

“I’ll be retired. I’ll be over needing weaponized fish.”

He feels rather than hears Fury’s snort. “People like us, we’re the kind who retire six feet under. There isn’t any ‘over.’ There’s just the next thing.”

“There wouldn’t be a ‘next thing’ if you hadn’t brought me back from the dead.”

“I take care of my people.” Jasper shoots him an incredulous look; even with a half-finished brain he knows better than that. “When I can,” Fury adds, without taking offense.  “And there’s always a next thing. You think just dying lets you off? Think again.”

“Who made you God?”

“The last office holder was doing a shitty job.”

Jasper untucks a hand from beneath the quilt and rubs at his forehead. It’s raw and wet: new face growing in. It itches. “Evil,” he says tiredly. “I’m evil. Permanently evil.” One of the Foot Locker employees is hogtying another one with shoelaces. Jasper doesn’t understand retail. 

Fury says, unimpressed. “You helped save a few million lives. For someone who’s gone evil, you’ve done more good this last eight years than you did your entire life before that.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.” Even to himself, he sounds pettish.

“Do I look like your goddamn therapist? You want to sit there with your thirteen toes, your black dick, and whine about some idea of good and evil that even a five-year old knows is complete bullshit, you knock yourself out.”

Jasper rouses. “It’s not bullshit.”

“It’s people shit, which is even worse.” Fury turns his glare on Jasper. He’s still not wearing an eyepatch or sunglasses; the milky eye is even more unnerving close-up. Jasper has the distinct impression that it sees him. “That hamburger brain of yours remember actually looking at the seed you swallowed in that ceremony?”

“No,” Jasper says with quick foreboding. “Don’t say it.”

“Antacid pill.”

“Damn it!”

“Mild hallucinogen mixed in,” Fury says helpfully, like he thinks precision make everything better.

Jasper would tear at his hair if he had any. He has to settle for plucking at what’s left of his eyebrows instead. “Why would you—?”

“You were a shit liar. I needed you to be less shitty.”

“By feeding me antacid pills?”

“By giving you a new worldview. Should’ve done something about your gullibility while I was at it,” Fury adds, looking him over from top to bottom. “Seed of Formless Evil? You didn’t think that was weird?”

“Night Vale! Night Vale!" Jasper untucks an arm from the quilt to wave it around. Mostly at the Foot Locker. "It could’ve been a real thing!”

“You ever read Aesop’s fables?”

As far as irrelevant segues go, this one’s right up there with the black dick. Jasper blinks, completely derailed. “My second cousin’s a Classics professor at Yale.”

“‘Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.’ You know that one?”

Jasper scrounges through the fruit smoothie of his memory. Eventually, he’s forced to admit, “My brain’s a Mango-a-Go-Go.“

“This bunch of birds are hopping around a field, pecking around and eating shit,” Fury says patiently. “This farmer’s in the same field, spraying seeds around. Some swallow flies by and tells the other birds, ‘You see that motherfucker? You watch out for him.’ The other birds wanna know why. The swallow says, ‘Those seeds he's planting, those are hemp seeds. You better hunt those seeds down and get rid of them, or you’ll regret it.’ The birds, being dumb shits, ignore him. Eventually, the hemp grows up. The farmer harvests them and turns them into rope. He turns the rope into nets. He uses the nets to catch the birds. The swallow says, ‘I told you so,’ and fucks off.”

“I don’t remember so many ‘fucks’ in the version I read,” Jasper objects.

“You know what you are in this story?”

Jasper stares at him. "The . . . birds?"

“You’re my seed.”

After a second, Jasper says sullenly, “I feel really unclean now.”

Fury snorts in amusement.

“Captain America was your net,” Jasper guesses.

“Captain America was my sword,” Fury corrects. “He wouldn’t have been in the right place at the right time if it wasn’t for you. You dug up the network and pointed me at the code going through Ops. If you hadn't done that, I wouldn’t have sent Widow after the Lumerian Star data. She wouldn’t have found Zola. Rogers wouldn’t have picked you up for intel. A few million people’d be dead and Hydra would be in charge right now, if it wasn’t for one goddamn seed.” 

He stretches out an arm to poke Jasper gently in the chest. It feels like a club.

“You helped bring down a seventy-year old conspiracy, save millions of lives, and destroy my motherfucking organization. You got killed by an covert ops ghost story, and being tricked about thinking you’re evil is what you're upset about?”

It isn't, really. Jasper sighs, rubbing at his chest. The place Fury poked him throbs in time with his heartbeat. “I was a Nazi. I was a Honduran-American Nazi of Palestinian ancestry. I did things for them.”

“To sell your cover.”

“The stuff I did got good agents killed.”

“Every agent signs up knowing they could die in the line of service.”

“They weren’t supposed to be betrayed by their own. Not by— I was evil.”

Fury pauses, his head tilting to the desperation in Jasper’s voice. “Being evil isn’t real,” he says eventually. “Evil’s a word people use to justify murderers and monsters. They need to pretend there’s something wrong about the bad guy, something intrinsically different. Otherwise, they have to face the fact that maybe they’re a little responsible, too. Maybe they’re cut from the same cloth. Maybe they’re no better, they just made different choices. 

“People aren’t evil. People are just assholes. Some assholes decide to do bad shit just because they can. Some assholes decide to do bad shit in service of the greater good, so other people won’t have to. You went on a voyage of self-discovery and discovered you’re capable of being an asshole in order to save humanity. Congratulations. You regretting a little self-knowledge?”

Jasper opens his mouth and then shuts it. He does that several times. Finally, he manages to spit out, “Yes!”

Fury puts on his sunglasses. Stands up. Shrugs on a drab overcoat several sizes too big. “You’ll live,” he says. 

“Sir—“

“You don’t have to ‘sir’ me, Jasper.” It’s the first time Fury has called him by name. Jasper falls silent, stricken dumb. “Once a man’s died for me, he gets to start using my first name.”

“I didn’t die for you,” Jasper objects after a second.

Fury—Nick—shrugs. “Make sure you box Night Vale up when you’re done coming back from the dead,” he says, shoving a hat on. Then he steps off the porch.

In the Foot Locker, retail workers stop to gape at the six-foot tall black man in a battered overcoat who’s abruptly materialized in front of the women’s cross-trainers section. Fury tips his hat at them, then limps away.

“You’re not the boss of me!” Jasper shouts after him, too late.

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP XII - THE CROSSING OF THE RETURN THRESHOLD

 

All things considered, his parents take the news rather well. They apparently never believed his story about being a marriage therapist for gays in a state that hasn’t legalized gay marriage. 

Jasper isn’t gonna lie. Their lack of trust hurts a bit.

“We just didn’t want to put you in an awkward position, dear. You’re such a bad liar. We were hoping your employers would recognize that and not put you under any covers.”

“Undercover, Mom.”

“Except we were hoping you were working for a reputable secret government organization,” his father says. “Like maybe the NSA.”

“Obviously I can’t speak for all of them, but I don’t think any mother really wants her son to grow up to be a terrorist,” his mother breaks in, audibly aggrieved even over the bad phone line. “I personally always hoped you wouldn’t end up hunted by the federal government for treason.”

“Of course, we still love you, son.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Jasper mumbles. He has a headache from all the unconditional love.

“And we support your decisions.”

“Really? Because I’d hope that you wouldn’t support your son’s decision to be a Nazi cultist. I’d hope you’d smack him upside the head and have him dragged away to be committed.”

“I think deciding to be a Nazi cultist ranks right up there with deciding to go bald,” his father says frankly, “but your mother says we have to be supportive.”

“You’re not still a Nazi cultist, are you?” she demands. “Because I don’t feel like that’s a good life choice.”

“No, Mom.”

“But you’re still on the lam?”

Jasper winces. “Don’t say ‘lam.’”

“You’re still—what do the young people say now? Thelma and Louise? Bonnie and Clyde? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Have you ever noticed how all the most famous outlaws are couples? I always thought there was a lovely sexual tension between Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Such lovely men. I used to have so many fantasies about—”

You’d think in forty years he’d have learned to not try to correct his mother. “Astaghfirullah— Yes, Mom, but just for now. I’m going to turn myself in.”

“Don’t do that,” she says quickly. “They’ll throw you in prison and you’re so delicate. All the other prisoners will make you their bitch.”

Jasper closes his eyes and plants his forehead on Old Woman Josie’s kitchen table. He thumps it gently. It's not like he has a lot of options. SHIELD is gone. He can't go home and endanger his family. And he's tired. He's very, very tired. Too tired to keep running on his own. “I’m a—was a federal agent, Mom. I can take care of myself. And they’d put me in separate confinement, anyway. They have special security.”

“I suppose this means that darling Jemma can’t visit you in prison,” she says, suddenly tragic, as though this is the capstone on a massive personal inconvenience. “And you won’t be able to visit her at the Playground—though I hope that’s just a euphemism for something involving genitalia, because otherwise I’m deeply uncomfortable with the overtones of Michael Jackson in your relationship.”

“I’m deeply uncomfortable with this entire conversation,” he mumbles with his face in his arms. Then he sits up. “Wait. You talked to Jemma? When did you talk to her? What Playground? 

 

 

 

Unnervingly, he makes it to the Playground lobby without being challenged. It’s still as bleak and uninviting as he remembers. He’s just about to shout for someone when one of the endless string of Koenigs pops up out of nowhere and almost sends Jasper back to Old Woman Josie’s coffee table.

Jasper wheezes, “Holy shit. I thought you were all dead.”

“You,” Koenig says, eyes narrowing. “You can’t be here. You’re a bad guy.”

“I was invited,” Jasper protests. People step through the rear entrance, heavily armed. He recognizes two of them. “Phi—!” he begins.

Phil shoots him.

He falls asleep.

He wakes up feeling bruised, and opens his eyes. He recognizes Jemma.

“Jemm—!” he begins.

“No!” she cries, and shoots him.

He falls asleep.

He wakes up and opens his eyes. He recognizes Jemma again.

“Wai—!” he begins.

“Bad!” she cries, and shoots him.

He falls asleep.

He wakes up and opens his eyes. This time he doesn’t say anything, on the off chance this will keep him from being shot again.

“You!” Jemma cries. He winces. She doesn’t shoot him right away. Promising. “You were lying the whole time! You were Hydra! Coulson said you were Hydra!”

“I told you I was evil,” Jasper says weakly.

“I thought that was just something people did!” Jemma cries, waving her gun around in an alarmingly cavalier way. “A social exchange where they shared their ethnic, national, or archetypal associations so there’d be a common frame of reference! A means of behavioral classification! I thought you were joking!”

“I’m not evil anymore?” Jasper ventures.

“No! No! You don’t get to reclassify! I am very angry at you! It’s not good! It’s the opposite of good! It’s anti-good! Like you!”

“Can I—“ he begins.

Apparently he can’t. She shoots him.

He falls asleep.

He wakes up and fatalistically opens his eyes.

“Damn,” says an alarmingly good-looking black man. Jasper recognizes him as one of Garrett’s. Triplett. Legacy. “She is really, really pissed at you.”

There is nothing tentative about the way Triplett is holding his gun, and no clear indication that it’s a Night Night mod like the others. Given which, Jasper obeys meekly when Triplett prods him up and out of the room to talk to the ‘Director.’

Of what? he wants to ask, but he doesn’t bother, at least until he gets herded into an interrogation room and faces a frowny-faced Clint, a terrifyingly unemotive Melinda, and:

“Director Phil Coulson. Of SHIELD.”

“Of course you are,” Jasper says, resigned.

“Did you bring it?” Phil asks.

“Of course I brought it. What else was I going to do with it? I couldn’t just leave it there.”

“Does Hydra know about it?”

“Not from me. Wait, did—“ Jasper glances between Phil and Clint, “—our mutual friend read you in?”

“Let’s go get it, then,” Phil says, ignoring him. Jasper doesn’t complain. Phil is the best person to take possession of what he’s been guarding since Fury blew out of Night Vale like an emo SUV. He climbs to his feet and with the prickly escort of Mel—it is nice to see her, for a given value of nice—Triplett and Clint, goes outside, unburies the case he concealed on his way in, and brings it back inside.

It’s a big, square, black metal case. Phil says, “Everybody out but Agent Sitwell—”

“Like hell,” Clint says.

“—Especially Agent Barton,” Phil finishes. Clint glares at him.

“Wow,” Jasper says, because he’s still having trouble with his inner monologue. “You two are never getting your dicks in each other.”

Clint glares at him, too.

The others leave with varying degrees of obedience. Clint, who seems to have no problem undermining Phil’s new authority as director, stays stubbornly behind. Which, honestly? Makes opening the case a lot more dramatic than it really needs to be.

Clint hisses, “Motherfucker!” as he wedges himself in the corner of the room, gun aimed at the box. The room is bathed in blue light. It makes the two white guys look unappealingly undead. “Why the fuck is that here?! Thor took it! I saw Thor take it!”

“It’s not the Tesseract,” Phil says, producing salad tongs—SHIELD’s budget has seriously taken a nosedive; Jasper owns the exact same set—to lift it carefully out of the case. Clint makes an appalled sound. “It just looks like the Tesseract. A lot like it.” 

“Exactly like it,” Jasper says.

“It’s really nothing like it,” Phil reassures Clint with a passing, irritated glance for Jasper, “except that it’s currently blue and unimaginably powerful. And SHIELD don’t know where it came from or what it’s for beyond the fact that it’s a doorway, and—“ He stops with a blink and that little frown he gets when he realizes he’s lost control of a sentence. “Normally, it’s orange.”

“That goddamn glow cloud."

“Out-of-towners are complicated.”

Clint looks ready to climb the walls, torn between throwing himself between Phil and the cube, or huddling under the table with his arms over his head.  “So what’s the actual difference?”

Jasper says, “SHIELD figured out how to open this one.”

The blue haze brightens, shifting from the far side of the cube to the side that’s closest to Jasper. Fucking stalker.

“This is one of those things that Thor and Odin don’t ever need to know about,” Phil tells Clint, who looks like he’s leaning towards the ‘throw himself between Phil and the cube’ option. “I always wanted to introduce you someday.”

As if Clint wasn’t unnerved enough already. “Introduce me to who? What?”

“Clint Barton, meet Night Vale. My hometown. It’s a lot bigger when it’s not boxed.” 

“You were born in a Tesseract?”

“In a town that fits in a box,” Jasper corrects. Personally, he finds weirder than everything else. He’s a little annoyed Clint seems to be able to accept that part of it without blinking an eye. “A lot of stuff about Phil started to make more sense once I saw his baby pictures.”

“You were a baby?”

Phil puffs a breath across one of the cube’s corners. The glow cloud stretches inside the cube, considers Phil, then returns to flexing hopefully on the side facing Jasper instead. 

“Stop that,” Jasper orders. 

It doesn’t stop. Fucker.

“It’s nice to see this again.” Phil tucks Night Vale away into its case again and closes it, looking wistful. Then he picks it up and smiles at Jasper. “Welcome home,” he says.

Jasper sighs.

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP XIII - MASTER OF TWO WORLDS

 

Jasper’s depressed.

He’s feeling grey. Dark. Underground. The last one might be because of the literal underground part of being at the Playground, but the lack of Vitamin D isn’t helping him any. His people were meant to be in the sun. Nature has hard-wired him to be pissy, bipedal solar panels. Jasper tries to hide his mood from his mother when he calls her, but she immediately peels him like a banana; working with a motivated Nick Fury never left him feeling as exposed as a two-minute phone call with her. In a sense, he’s been training for SHIELD from the moment he was born.

“You’re depressed,” she says. “Is this about the whole temporary Nazi thing? Mijo, of course you’ll feel terrible. You did terrible things, even if they might have been for the right reasons. Terrible, terrible things.”

“Thanks for the pep talk, Mom.”

“People died.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“And I’m sure you’re sorry.”

“I am.”

“Good boy. Don’t tell me where you are or what you’re doing. Need to know. That way if someone tries to torture me for information about you, I won’t be able to tell them anything.”

“Nobody’s going to torture you for information about me, Mom.”

“But if they do, they’ll regret it,” she insists, abruptly ferocious on her throne of sacred motherhood; then she swings dizzyingly back to the commonplace, demanding, “Is Jemma there? Give her the phone. I want to know how Leo is doing.”

He’d been wondering why Jemma was hovering like a baleful, electrified hummingbird at his back. He surrenders the phone to her, and beats a hasty retreat. As a spy, he should be curious just how and when this friendship between his mother and his ex-girlfriend happened. As the son of a Honduran-American woman, he’s too cowed and well-trained to ask. 

Phil’s been reintroducing him to the SHIELD agents that he’s been collecting and clearing from all corners of the globe, Clint broody and longing nearby. Many of the agents are unenthused. Some are outright hostile. Apparently, Jasper personally placed several Hydra ringers who killed loyal agents when things went bad. 

“When we realized Garrett was Hydra, the Hydra soldiers in the tac team took out all the good agents when he used your name,” Phil says, and nods over his folded arms at the far corner, where Jemma is pushing Fitz in his wheelchair. “Fitz, May and I almost didn’t make it out.”

Jasper winces. 

“You did what you had to do,” Phil says. 

“That’s what our mutual friend said."

Phil raises a curious eyebrow. “Does that help at all?”

“No.”

Phil nods, unsurprised, and Jasper recalls he’s done his share of undercover, too. 

The thing is, Jasper vaguely remembers helping Hydra get soldiers in and assigned, just as he vaguely remembers placing those moles in tactically insignificant positions. Not that that matters to the dead agents. He reads over the list of confirmed dead obsessively, wondering which ones he was responsible for. The more he hears about what he did while evil, the more he wonders if Fury was lying about the seed of formless evil. The more he wonders if Fury was lying about the seed of formless evil, the more he’s certain Fury wasn’t. The weight of knowledge flattens him from the inside out, like his entire body is being pulled down and in by its own gravity well. Guilt is annihilating. He wonders if this is how Clint feels. He wonders if this is how Banner feels all the time.

They could start a really depressing a cappella group. He says as much to Clint, who shrugs and admits he doesn’t have much else to do at the moment. Jasper wasn’t actually being serious, but it really isn’t worth trying to be funny in the new SHIELD; two hours later he finds himself practicing fucking “Let It Go” with Hawkeye, neither of them meeting each other’s eyes because they both know all the words and neither of them are particularly keen on admitting why. The acoustics are best in the third floor men’s bathroom, so they spend the afternoon swaddled in the stink of urinal cakes and bleach. It suits both Jasper’s mood and the shame of knowing this damn song. It’s something to do, anyway.

It turns out that Triplett has a good tenor (asshole) and Blake, who crawls into the Playground one afternoon looking like a dead man walking, can carry a bass line. Triplett’s out on the field a lot, but Blake needs recovery time, and Clint—emotionally constipated fucker that he is—threatens to go all blue-eyed whenever Phil talks about sending Clint on ops away from him, so they have a reliable trio. The a cappella group moves on from Disney songs to Usher, because Triplett has better taste in music, and watching Blake sing Who is that girl I see / staring straight / back at me? is spiritually scarring in ways neither Clint nor Jasper are able to handle right now. 

More people join. Mack’s got a good voice. So does Luke. Hartley does as well, though she’s disqualified on account she has massive balls but no dick. Nobody has the guts to tell her, so she shows up anyway. Pretty soon they’ve got a group of about seven guys (and Hartley) who regularly convene for hours in the third floor bathroom. Everybody bring snacks and beer. 

Everybody else is starting to eye them funny. 

Every day, lost SHIELD personnel trickle in from the field, sit in Koenig’s machine, debrief about partners turning on them and undercover agents shot in the head, then get patched up in the too-sparse medical wing. There aren’t enough agents to tackle the Hydra bases they know about, or to rescue all the agents they know were caught when the SHIELD databases were dumped. Phil has to prioritize. It’s wearing on him, visibly. He's got shadows under his eyes. Barely sleeps. His hairline isn't receding anymore, it's sprinting. Meanwhile, Jasper’s day consists of getting up, telling Koenig whatever new stuff his brain has barfed up about Hydra, fucking around on the range, then spending time in the bathroom.

He’s a real contributor. 

It's starting to make him itch under the skin. Just a little. 

“You could send me out,” he tells Phil one day a couple weeks in, watching him absorb the shock of losing another agent to Hydra. He regrets the words as soon as he says them.

Phil shoots him a comprehensive glance. “You’re not ready.”

“I could be.”

“Do you want to be?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that. He probably could be ready—but to do what, exactly? Head out in the field and confuse an already confusing situation? Loyal SHIELD agents would shoot him in the face. Hydra agents would shoot him in the back. 

“Welcome to my world,” Clint says sourly. He’s been warming back up to Jasper in the last few weeks, inasmuch as he’s warmed up to anyone since SHIELD fell. He’s back to being Bitchface Barton again, the paranoid, miserable, depressing sack of shit he was just after Loki and an army of therapists descended on him like overeducated mosquitos. About a third of them were probably Hydra, come to think of it. 

Phil’s been looking around for a loyal therapist to bring back into the new SHIELD. Jasper thinks bringing in some Hydra therapists and letting people shoot them would be just as effective and a lot cheaper.

“I can’t think what I could do,” Jasper says. 

“Bring down Hydra.”

“I did that.”

“Do it some more?”

“I think about quitting,” Jasper admits, lying back on the bathroom floor and pillowing his head in his arms. Nobody uses the third level men’s bathrooms anymore; it’s probably the cleanest place in the building, barring the potato chip crumbs and smell of stale beer. Even the least self-conscious guy in the world will think twice about using a urinal when there’re seven guys (and Hartley) singing Pink’s “Blow Me” at him while judging the size of his dick. 

“I couldn’t figure why you even came back,” Clint says. “SHIELD was my second chance. It wasn’t yours.”

“Eh," Jasper says. He's not sure why he came back, either. "Why did you?”

Clint shrugs, his head down over the hangnail he’s chewing on. It’s pathetic on an epic scale.

“You can’t sit around and keep him alive forever,” Jasper points out.

“Watch me.”

The problem is, that’s all Jasper does. That’s all he did. He watched. He’s a watcher. He’s a bit part in Fury’s global play, an also starring role twelve lines down from the headliners of Rogers, Romanov, and Phil. He’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although maybe his death was way cooler—“Did I tell you I almost got killed by the Winter Soldier?” he tells Clint, and Clint says peevishly, “Give it a rest, for Christ’s sake,”—if about as relevant to the main storyline. He’s just not sure he’s up for being the convenient plot point for someone else’s narrative again.

He says as much to Phil, who just looks puzzled. 

“Whose narrative do you think it is?” Phil asks. “I don’t like the way he’s been telling the story.”

Mel narrows her eyes at him.

“Or her,” Phil corrects himself, without batting an eye.

“You’re not a bit part, Jasper,” Mel says.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Stop sulking and get over yourself,” she adds. "You're useless like this."

It’s like talking to a mini-Nick Fury. 

As far as therapy goes, it’s not exactly butterflies, sunshine, and flannel blankets. Then again, sometimes a  man just needs a kick in the pants. He tells himself that he isn’t built for inaction. Not really. He’s built for—he’s built for seeing things as they really are. Seeing things that other people don’t see. And, a quiet, proud murmur in the back of his mind points out, finding things that other people can’t find. He found Hydra where Fury, Phil, Clint, Melinda, Hill—where all of his friends and colleagues didn’t. He found what was hidden and helped drag it out into the daylight.

It’s a novel thought. He has a talent. He’s spent eight years honing a skill and an eye that other people don’t have. He’s still got something to bring to the board. And he has red on his ledger.

Three days into debating whether their next song should be “Bad Romance” (Clint is in favor) or “Before He Cheats” (Blake’s pick, worryingly), Jasper suddenly says, “Fuck this.”

The others stare at him. Clint is the only one who just nods, like he gets it. Of course, he would. “I’ll go with you to find Phil,” he says, climbing off a urinal. “What the hell. I’m bored of singing, anyway.”

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP XIV - FREEDOM TO LIVE

 

It feels weird to be walking outdoors again, mingling with normal people. There’re people on the sidewalks, kids in the parks, goods in the stores. Jasper stops in front of a Baby Gap, mesmerized by tiny clothes on tiny, headless mannequins—his brain is still rewiring itself, so there’s all kinds of weird shit happening in there—until Clint’s voice on the comm (“Something you wanna tell me, Jasper?”) jerks him back into motion.

“Two blocks,” Clint says. “You have a plan?”

“I have part of a plan,” Jasper says. The bluetooth earpiece he has prominently displayed in his other ear keeps people from staring at him; giving the technology Ericsson was one of the best moves SHIELD ever did. Or Hydra. Whichever. 

“How much of a plan?”

“Twelve percent of a plan.”

“That’s not a plan.”

“It’s better than what you have for getting into Phil’s pants,” Jasper says, scanning the street to see if he can spot—ah, there it is. The Hydra getaway vehicle is obvious when you’re attuned to the way they do things. He memorizes the face of the driver, learns the license plate just for kicks, and then turns away. He catches his reflection in a Starbucks window:  Caucasian today, blue eyes, unremarkable. Still bald. The holo-imager only goes so far, and the glue he needs to keep wigs on make his scalp itch. 

“I don’t want to get into Phil’s pants.”

“For a secret agent, you’re a terrible liar.”

“Fuck you, I’m a great liar,” Clint says. “Your two o’clock. I think I recognize that guy.”

Jasper does, too. Josef, from HR. “Yeah,” he says, and unobtrusively palms one of the tiny trackers off the hem of his leather jacket. He lets his hand brush against Josef’s jacket as he passes, taking advantage of the press of bodies on the sidewalk. 

“Contact,” he says.

“Got it,” Clint says. In a couple of seconds, the tracker will slowly worm its way through fabric to the closest heat source—Josef’s skin—and embed itself just under the epidermis. At worst, it’ll look like an irritated hair follicle. Jasper likes to imagine that the tracker is like one of those wasp eggs that get implanted in caterpillars, that eventually hatch and eat the caterpillar from the inside out before popping out of the caterpillar’s cocoon like a beautiful butterfly. Or, well. Disgusting parasitic wasp. 

This is how Jasper gets through his issues with Hydra. That and shooting them. Therapy is not a one-size fits all kind of thing. 

“One of these days, you’re gonna have to tell Phil you’re in love with him,” Jasper adds, pausing at the cross-walk with the rest of the herd.

“One of these days, I’m gonna shoot you in the nuts,” Clint says. “I don’t have to tell Phil anything.”

“The guy already died once. Are you really going to give up on your second chance?” Fifth, really, but who’s counting?

There’s a long silence on the comm, long enough for the light to change and Jasper to cross the street. The cafe he’s targeting is at the end of the block. 

“He doesn’t need me messing up his life,” Clint says finally. 

“Is this that whole bullshit about how you’re not good enough for him?”

“I’m not."

“Sure, you're not," Jasper says agreeably.

Clint’s sigh is audible. “It’s not a good time. He’s running SHIELD. He’s got Hydra on his back, he’s— he’s a busy guy. Maybe when things quiet down. . . .”

“How are you this bad a liar?"

"I don't know, Mr. Celiac. You tell me."

"Ten years you’ve been in love with him. Have you ever known him not be busy?”

“In ten years, have you ever seen him be interested in a guy?”

“Yes. You.”

"Fuck off, Jasper."

"When're you gonna man up and tell him you want to have his babies?"

“When're you gonna explain to us why your dick is black now?” 

“Eyes on target,” Jasper says, spying his mark.

Clint snorts, but he can occasionally be a professional. “Copy.”

The primary target is seated at a wire cafe table outside, splitting his attention between a wire-bound world map and his phone. While Jasper watches, the secondary target emerges from the cafe with a tray holding two large coffee cups and plates of sandwiches. He settles at the table with the first, deliberately unloading the crockery on the map.

“Contact,” Jasper says. 

The secondary target is grinning, in mid-word to the primary target as he lifts his coffee to his mouth. Jasper is there just in time to shove a hand between the secondary target's face and the cup. For the briefest of seconds, the target’s lips touch his skin. Everything freezes.

Metal screeches. The primary target surges to his feet. Coffee goes flying. The secondary target grabs Jasper’s wrist and has him slammed cheek-down in the sandwiches before he can even blink. He doesn’t try to resist. An ass-kicking is well within the expected parameters of contact. With his head turned this way, Jasper can see into the cafe. Through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass, he catches a blur of motion as the people behind the counter make abrupt departures from the scene.

“Rear covered,” Clint says into his ear.

“Don’t—“ Jasper wheezes.

“Yeah, yeah, I got this,” Clint says, sounding refreshingly cheerful now that he’s in action. “I’ll leave a couple alive enough to follow. I know my job.”

Something cold and hard presses into the back of Jasper’s head. Gun. Oh. Okay, then.

“Ask me about the weather this morning,” Jasper says breathlessly.

“The fuck?” snaps the secondary target. 

“What did you say?” demands the primary target.

Jasper hears something sizzle; smells an odd, metallic burn to the air, like ozone. He glances down. His jacket. His leather jacket is starting to smoke. Aw, shit.

“The weather this morning is wonderful,” Jasper says in strained voice. “But I always carry an umbrella. Jesus, Wilson, let me go. I got to get this thing off.”

“Where did you learn—?“ he hears from Rogers, but Wilson is already saying, “What the hell is that,” and the gun is gone, the iron grip around his wrist is gone, and Jasper straightens hastily to strip out of the jacket fast, fast, fast.

He hurls it to the table and backs away. The sleeve is turning charcoal grey and weirdly crystalline, like it’s been on the receiving end of an atomic blast. The scorched area grows as they watches it. 

Jasper says numbly, “Huh. Not cyanide, then.”

“The coffee,” says Rogers, his voice harsh. “Sam. Did any of it—“

“Nah, nah, I’m clean,” Wilson says, frantically checking himself over, the gun in his hand. Jasper isn’t ashamed to admit he’s doing the same thing. “Steve, you?”

After a terrifying moment, Rogers says, “Clear.”

“Shit,” Wilson says. Around them, cafe patrons are staring. “One second later, and I would’ve—“

Rogers is in full on Captain America mode now. He grabs Jasper by the upper arm—“Ow,” says Jasper, purely on principle—and drags him unresisting to a nearby car. Wilson follows. They throw Jasper in the back seat, Rogers crowding in next to him, and peel off into traffic, the cafe patrons still gaping after them.

Jasper twitches. “We should’ve stayed to get a sample.” 

“On it,” Clint says into his ear. "Four hostiles down. Mel's tracking the rest." 

“Who are you?” Rogers asks, eerily calm. “SHIELD? CIA? Or Hydra?”

"Heh. He sounds pissed," Clint says happily.

“Hydra?” Wilson demands from the driver’s seat.

“Chinese Life tactic,” Jasper explains, keeping a wary eye on Rogers. “You set up a life-or-death situation and then rescue the mark, so the mark thinks you’re a friend. I'm not Hydra, Rogers.”

Rogers’s eyes narrow. “I know your voice.”

By way of answer, Jasper slowly fishes the phone out of his pocket, advertising every movement, and sets it down between them. It’s already primed to call. 

Nick’s picked up some kind of colorful knit hat since Jasper last saw him. It stretches down over his scalp and bobbles up at the top, triggering deja vu in Jasper that he traces back to childhood episodes of Fat Albert. It’s less destructive than Nick’s other exercises in irony. 

Rogers relaxes. A tiny bit. “Fury.”

“Rogers,” Nick says. “You better not’ve killed my guy.”

“Still alive,” Jasper volunteers, leaning into the camera’s view.

Nick snorts. “Nice look, white boy.”

“It was better than blowing my cover or getting shot on sight." Jasper pulls off the holo mask, wincing as the nano-adhesive pulls at his skin.

The car swerves; a wail of horns batters at them before Wilson wrenches the car back into order. He swears comprehensively. 

“Calm the fuck down,” Fury says irritably. “Jasper was my man inside. He’s been digging for Hydra in the SHIELD ranks for the last eight years.”

“More secrets,” Rogers bites out. “You’re supposed to be dead. I saw—“ he stops, his breath catching. 

“It was need to know, for my own protection,” Jasper says. “We didn’t know how far the rot went. You didn’t wonder when I gave up Pierce and Zola’s algorithm so easily?”

“Natasha kicked you off a building,” Wilson points out over his shoulder.

Jasper rolls his eyes. Hard. So hard they actually feel bruised afterwards, which he regrets a little, but he thinks he’s made his point.

Nick says, "Jasper's known for his patsy skills."

"Practically legendary," Jasper says. Clint snorts in his ear.

“He's got intel that can help you, and access to more. Hydra still thinks he’s one of them.”

"Are you volunteering him for service?" Rogers demands.

"I'm stating a fact."

Roger’s glance at Jasper is sharp. “They sent Bucky to kill you.”

“They sent him to kill everyone in the car,” Jasper corrects. He’s not too sure of his ground on that one, but it’s the kind of dickwad decision Hydra would make. The fact they never bothered to set off the exothermic pin after the fact is an argument in favor of that assessment. If he was a target, they would’ve made doubly sure. “I was in the car. Acceptable collateral damage.”

Rogers looks tragic. 

“Something else you might want to consider,” Nick says. He leans forward in the little screen, obviously preparing to sign off. “He's also our leading expert on the Winter Soldier.”

The phone disconnects. The glare Rogers turns on Jasper is a little terrifying. Jasper holds up his hands: harmless bystander, here. “Conspiracy theorist,” he translates. “I just studied the Winter Soldier’s sightings and alleged hits. I have boxes of witness documentation, media, classified material from Interpol, the SIS, Mossad, and the CIA. He was a ghost story. I never knew Hydra ran him. Or who he was.”

“Bucky,” Rogers says through his tight jaw. If he squeezes them any tighter, his teeth will collapse into black holes. “He was Bucky Barnes.”

“Well, I know that now."

“I bet he’s going to punch you now," Clint says happily. "Tell him to aim for your balls.”

“Excuse me,” Jasper adds, and fiddles with his ear. Rogers's eyes narrow. “Just doing a favor for a friend. You know. Hawkeye. Clint Barton.”

“What,” Clint says, and as Rogers relaxes, the comm system says in dulcet tones, “Recording completed. Transmitting.”

“What?” Clint demands. “What?!”

“Hawkeye?” Rogers says, sounding uncertain.

"I'm in a car with the Falcon and Captain America," Jasper says thoughtfully. "I want a codename, too. How's 'Cupid' sound?"

"Doesn't he wear a diaper?" Wilson asks. "Or does he go bare-ass naked? I'm glad you're on our side, but that doesn't mean I wanna see your junk, man."

“What did you do?!” Clint demands.

“Clint says hi,” Jasper tells Rogers.

"Hi, Clint," Rogers says.

"Transmission completed to Director Coulson," the comm system announces proudly. "Have a nice day."

“You fucker!” Clint shouts. The comm cuts off with a sharp squeal that makes even Rogers wince.

After a few seconds to let his ear recover, Jasper sits back to fasten his seat belt. Better safe than sorry. He feels good. “I’m hungry. Anyone up for blinis?”

Rogers perks up.

 

 

 

THE HERO’S JOURNEY, STEP I - CALL TO ADVENTURE

 

“So, here’s a thought,” Wilson says, friendly, after his twelfth blini. “We’re hunting the Winter Soldier, with a side of Hydra on the way. Wanna help?”

Jasper stuffs a french fry into his cheek and chews. “Why not,” he says when he’s swallowed. “I wasn't doing anything else, anyway.”

 

End