Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

BANG.

She feels the sound rip through her, as if it’s the physical thing and not just an acknowledgement that she’s too far, too slow, too weak to be wherever the bullet is.

BANG.

He falls.

She fumbles at the arrow in her quiver, pushing against the localized drag of molasses that only seems to affect her, fingers forgetting how to nock, arms buckling at the draw, her release far too late and her aim far too short.

He falls.

BANG.

The gun screams with her as she stumbles, eyes blurring dark—Was it dark then? I don’t remember it being dark—but still managing to find the figure in the air, his turn too sharp, as late as her arrow, and he too, tumbles into gravity. She doesn’t even try for her quiver. There’s no point.

She’s on the fire escape then, in an eyeblink, a mockery of the time-molasses. It stretches up and up and up forever and all she can do is climb, expecting another shot, another falling friend. The silence stretches out instead and she climbs.

He waits at the top. Tall and imposing, the gun she’d been racing to silence for an eternity clasped firmly in his hand. “Katie. Stop this.”

This isn’t how— “Dad?”

“Katherine. Look at me. I’m right here. For once in your life, you are going to pay attention while I am speaking.”

Yeah, something’s definitely off here. Right? “Daddy?” she asks around the doubt, hating the lift of fear in her voice.

“Yes, Katie. I need you to put down the gun.”

She blinks, confused. She doesn’t have a gun. He has a gun and she has her bow, these are the choices they’ve made. Or . . . no . . . Dad doesn’t use guns. Or weapons at all. That’s you, isn’t it. You’re the violent one. She looks down and there it is, warm and natural. She’d been struggling so hard to reach it and here it is, literally in her grasp. Like it’s always been there. Maybe it has?

“Daddy, I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s not safe, and—”

“Katherine.” He steps forward. “The only person making it not safe for me is you.” But I was trying to stop this! I didn’t—this wasn’t me! The molasses-time returns then, a slow motion scramble at the edge of the roof as he tries to rescue the gun and her fingers no longer numb and fumbling, react. It feels so natural.

BANG.

He falls.

~

Kate could hear a phone ringing. Clint’s phone. Clint’s stupid, on the wall, jangling off the actual hook, old it enough that it should be ashamed not be a rotary, stone-age phone. She jammed her head further under the pillow and groaned.

She’d just managed to fall asleep. Unconsciousness didn’t come easy these days, even on Clint’s couch, which should by all rights be stupidly uncomfortable, and which had proved instead to be the only place she could convince her eyes to stay shut at least occasionally, if only at the price of some seriously fucked up dreams. Those had started on her first night on Clint’s couch, falling asleep while waiting for him to return from SHIELD, waiting for news that her dad was going to prison, waiting for whatever came next. She usually wasn’t good at waiting, but mindless tasks like washing the truly ridiculous amount of coffee mugs around the place gave her something for her hands to do while she processed.

She was done with the processing by now, she figured. And with the sleeping apparently.

She heard Clint stumble down from the loft, grumbling curses at the phone, so at least they were on the same page there. Probably Avengers business. Cap would be the type to call Clint at a time that had no right to be labeled “morning.”

Kate flopped over, accidentally kneeing Lucky, who liked to wedge himself between her and the back of the couch, and lie there, with all four feet in the air like a weirdo. He grouched at her in dog as she resettled, determined to ignore Clint's conversation. The Avengers wouldn't want her along anyway, they never did, and besides she was bad publicity right now. Toxic, thanks to her dad’s decisions, splashed all over the news.

“Kate?” Clint’s hand rested on her shoulder, and something in his tone popped the last remaining bubbles of sleep-haze she’d been clinging to. She unburied her head to glare at him.

“What, the world is ending and they actually want me in the fight?” As soon as she fired off the auto-sarcasm, she regretted it. Clint looked . . . sad? Not sad like he had been. Not the tired, resigned, stumbling through life sad that had hung around for months before finally being chased away with the help of three criminals, a couple of spies, and a building full of pissed off tenants. Oh, and her. Katie-Kate to the rescue.

But this wasn’t that type of sad. This was a different, conflicted, I-have-bad-news-and-I-hate-being-the-messenger-but-here-goes type of sad. It didn’t fit his face well. Made him look dumb.

“What?” she pressed, sitting up and yawning. Whatever it was, better known than not.

Clint sat heavily on the couch, close enough that their things touched. He rubbed the hand not resting on her shoulder over his mouth and jaw. “That was Bobbi,” he said finally. “There’s been . . .” He cast about for words, then seemed to give up on finding soft ones, because his choices punched through her like arrows through a target not built for their force. “There’s been a hit. Your dad . . . Madame Masque . . . Ivan. All of them. Everyone from the roof. In SHIELD custody. To stop them from talking, probably. They’re dead. Maria needs me to come in, ID the bodies.”

“Oh.” Kate said. It didn’t feel like enough. She should have more to say. She always had more to say. Too much, according to just about everyone who wasn’t worth talking to. So why wouldn’t words come? Or air? Breathing only took this much effort when she missed a jump and crash landed, or lost focus while sparring with America, or decided fighting five goons at once was a great idea. Those were sensible, if annoying, times to be at odds with her lungs. This—it’s not like when Mom died. Dad doesn’t get to make me feel like this. He lost that right.

Clint was watching her like he didn’t know what to do with himself, or with her, and she refused to see that expression on his face when they’d just worked his shit out. Poor Clint, never can catch a break. The thought jump-started her lungs, giving her the air to laugh, which didn’t make the look on his face any less of a conflicted mishmash, just added a layer of confusion and worry, and only made her laugh harder. “Are you okay? . . . Uh, Kate?” 

“Fine!” she finally gasped and something about the absurdity of the lie made it true, in a kinda alternate-dimension-ish way.

The way she saw it, somewhere in the grand scheme of the multiverse, there was a normal Katie Bishop, who lived a normal life with normal parents and normal drama. She played cello and happened to be good at archery and fencing. She volunteered with her mom, and agreed to horrific bridesmaid colors for her sister, and if her relationship with her dad was strained, it was only because he'd left them to marry someone she'd gone to school with and yet somehow still treated Kate like a child. Somewhere, in some parallel universe, that Katie lived.

This Kate, hiccupping with inappropriate giggles, could picture her so clearly. She had it so easy. Kate hated her for it, for her stupid normal life and her stupid normal life choices. Maybe Katie’s dad was still the same, but Katie wouldn’t know it, unlike Kate, who had to go sticking her nose into places she’d decided it belonged. Katie could find out about his death from some random authority figure who refused to tell her the details, and Katie would understand, would softly shut the door of her penthouse apartment, and cry quietly on her bed, before calling her sister to make funeral arrangements. She’d give a eulogy about how her father was a complex man but she loved him and would miss him. People would cry. Tastefully.

Fuck that. Let Katie understand what “complex” really meant. Let her deal with this squirming, gloopy, ball of gunked up feelings she couldn’t breathe around. For a moment, Kate imagined herself with America’s abilities. She pictured punching a star-shaped hole in the universe and lobbed the sticky mess through it, straight at that other Katie. It hit her, squarely, because of course it did. Whatever Katie was, Kate was Hawkeye and she didn’t miss. Her imaginary star closed around the shocked, imaginary Katie, and she was back, in the middle of Clint’s apartment, with Clint sitting on the couch next to her, his hand still on her shoulder.

And she could breathe again.

“Fine,” Kate repeated in a more normal voice. “Really. He was a shitty guy who did shitty things.” She stood up, leaving behind the comfort of Clint’s couch, dog, and hand. “So, we need to go in? Make a statement? Investigate who did this?”

“We?” Clint frowned. “Uh . . . no. Well, yes, I do. You—”

“Oh, right, time for the grown-ups again, right?” Kate snapped, not letting him finish, and began rummaging through the chaos of clothes and bedding around the couch to find something still clean enough to wear. “Wouldn’t want the sidekick getting in the way.” The words snapped like a bowstring against her forearm, satisfying at first, before the heat of the abrasion set in. He didn’t deserve that. Yeah? Well neither did I.

Clint recoiled as her words slapped him, then sighed, holding up his hands. “Guess I’ve been hogging the crazy stick lately, huh?” he muttered. Kate ignored him. “It’s okay to be—”

“—I am not upset! I just want something to do, so I’m not just sitting here useless on your couch!”

“It’s a great couch to be useless on, I should know—” he tried for a grin, but neither of them really believed it.

“Clint—”

“Bobbi’s being sent back out to LA,” he continued, and Kate’s heart leapt. They did want her in on this, just at a distance from SHIELD. I can go to LA, help Bobbi— “She’s offered to drop you off in Portland.”

“Oh.”

“Huh? I thought you wanted to go to Portland? I’m kinda wondering why you aren’t in Portland already!”

Which . . . okay, so Kate couldn’t really give a great answer to why she wasn’t in Portland either. She had a standing invitation and a job waiting for her, not to mention three weird-but-cool thieves offering to teach her quite a number of questionable skills. It would be like summer camp. Kate was great at summer camp. She’d spent the majority of her summers in tents and cabins far from home, which made for a nice change from the dorm rooms in boarding schools she’d spent the rest of the years in. It was great. It will be great, she’d been telling herself for the past week of not-sleeping on Clint's couch, not-calling Hardison, not-packing up her old apartment not-being paid for by her now not-living father.

“Why’s Bobbi heading back out to LA?” she asked, rather than try for an answer to his question.

“Madame Masque’s base of operations is there. Could be her father, Count Nefaria, is involved in all of this.”

“In killing his daughter? Seriously? I mean, sure the guy’s evil, but that’s like, evil evil.”

Something in Clint froze. Not just on the surface, where Kate could see the death-grip his fingers had on his kneecaps, but deeper too, down to the very core. And okay, so he’d made enough jokes about her joining the “Shitty Parent Club” in the last few days that Kate knew her own father’s betrayal was hitting close to home for him too. 

“All I’m saying is that . . .” She shrugged, waving her hands in the air as she tried to define categories of shitty parents. “I dunno, there’s spur of the moment evil, and there’s unintended crossfire evil, and then there’s actually planned evil. Which seems—what?”

Clint had stood up so abruptly his knees caught the coffee table and flipped it, sending various cups and books, and who knew what else spilling to the floor. He didn’t seem to care. “They—he—put a hit out on you.”

“What?” she repeated, so taken aback both by Clint’s words and the tight fury strung through them that she didn’t register the meaning behind them. At first.

“A hit. SHIELD has the internal recordings from their conference room.” He flung the words, each a sharp dagger thudding so close it raised the hairs on her arms. “It was proposed—they decided you caused too much trouble. Like me. The consortium voted on it. ALL of them. Understand?” 

“When did you . . .”

“Few days ago.” Clint shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his pajamas, just to give them somewhere to go. He didn’t meet her eyes as he continued, “Hill recommended I keep it to myself.”

And he did because even though we’re partners, apparently that means shit when it comes to SHIELD trusting me with threats against my own damn life. From my dad. And his ‘friends’. She could feel her throat start clawing at itself again, and swallowed, shoving the thought away. Better to be mad at the living than the dead. “WHY? So I can just walk into—”

“It’s not active. The Consortium’s in ruins, the Clown is dead, you’re safe, it’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay, but . . .”

“But SHIELD has deemed me not a real damsel in distress and decided I can stay in the dark.” Kate shoved down the urge to scream at Clint, whose hands had escaped from his pockets and spread, the message clear: This is out of my control.

That’s all SHIELD ever seemed to do. Shut her out or down or whatever. Even when she helped them, it had to be through back channels like Clint, Bobbi, or Natasha. Like they were responsible for Kate’s antics. Her babysitters. Her parents.

“I’m coming with you.” She made the announcement sound firm, as if she wasn’t standing in Clint’s living room, hair still a rat’s nest from a restless night, arms wrapped around the dregs of her clean(ish) clothes.

Clint raised his eyebrows at her. “No, nuh-uh, not happening.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll just get refused in the lobby? Unless you’re planning on breaking into SHIELD, which isn’t as easy as Natasha and Parker make it sound.”

Okay so maybe the eyebrows had a point there, but Kate wasn’t giving in yet, rationality be damned. “This involves me!”

“Which is pretty much the exact reason Hill gave for why you’re not allowed near it.”

“And you are?!”

“Because I’m an agent?! It’s my job?!” He threw his hands in the air. “Look, I know I’ve been a pile of suck masquerading as a partner lately, but trust me, you shouldn’t be near this. You can’t be near this. You don’t want to be near this.” Clint sighed, scrubbing at his face until whatever responsible adult demon that had briefly inhabited him fled the premises. “Fine. Don’t go to Portland. This shit is classified level 6, so it’ll be a few days to weeks before they inform anyone and definitely weeks before they release the body, but then your relatives—”

“It’s classified?” Level six meant it was very classified. Not top-top secret, but close. Much closer than Kate, The Other Hawkeye, was allowed to be. I shouldn’t know. Like the rest of my family. I should be in the dark same as them, but I’m not. Because Clint just broke protocol. To tell me.  

Clint started his own rummage for clothes that could pass as clean. He paused, straightening with an audible pop. “Either someone broke into a secure facility and murdered a bunch of people without getting caught—or we have a mole. Futz, I hate moles.”

Ah. SHIELD liked sending Clint after moles. He played stupid so convincingly they almost always got sloppy around him. And he couldn’t do that with the daughter of one of the dead guys around. Kate kicked a likely looking pair of pants in his general direction. “It’s classified. But you told me.” Would it be better if he hadn’t? No. As shitty and confusing as this felt, she preferred it to not knowing.

“Well, duh. You’re my partner. Quit staring at me while I get dressed. It’s weird.”

“You’ve called me to pick you up in the middle of the street basically ass-naked, and NOW you're self-conscious?”

“Hey, I didn’t . . .”

And just like that, the not-fight they’d been having was over. Clint continued to ramble on about his new-found propriety and Kate pulled out her phone, finally sending a text to Hardison.

“When’s Bobbi leaving?”

“Two hours as of half an hour ag—What?” He demanded as Kate swore at him and began a mad scramble around the apartment to gather her stuff.

~

Clint, continuing in this weird role reversal in which he’d suddenly become a marginally competent adult, dropped her off to meet Bobbi.

He dropped her off on the sky-cycle, which made the whole thing slightly less-adult-y, even though he kept swearing he’d be taking it back to Tony’s right after. “What, drive an unidentified flying object around the skies of New York in this day and age? You kidding? Tony just gets away with it because he IS the UFO. Or IFO. Whatever.”

Kate didn’t quite believe he’d actually stash the flying machine again—SHIELD had them and they’d come in handy in Madripoor the first time she’d encountered Madame Masque so they couldn’t be THAT rare—but Bobbi shooed him off with a quip about joint custody that hit a little too close to home, not that Kate was about to admit it. She ducked into the jet to stash her meager stuff: one suitcase and her bow case. Clint had also promised to grab everything else from her apartment and stick it in storage (“I know a very roomy storage unit, great place to spend an afternoon—”) and Kate actually believed he’d do it, hopefully without too many breakages. 

Bobbi, for her part, swept a careful look up and down Kate, didn’t say a single word about the circumstances, for which Kate was eternally grateful, and started guiding her through preflight checks as if she was actually expecting Kate to fly the plane, rather than just hitch a lift. Learning to fly was definitely on Kate’s list—Clint seemed to be able to fly just about anything, which meant she needed to acquire the skill on the general principle of anything he could do, she could do better—but as a long-term goal. Anything past this summer was long term, as far as she was concerned.

Still, information was information, so she reminded her brain that she’d made Clint stop for Starbucks, and it therefore had caffeine and no excuse for its sluggishness. Besides, it made for a good distraction.

Her brain, unamused by the rationale, threatened to go to sleep the moment Bobbi stopped talking, which happened to be the moment they hit cruising altitude. Half-hopeful it was being serious about the sleep thing, Kate shut her eyes but had to admit half an hour later that she’d called its bluff. No sleep for the soon-to-be-corrupted, apparently.

“You’re weirdly quiet.” If she wasn’t going to sleep, she needed to talk, and Bobbi had stopped volunteering information.

The older woman sighed, shifting in the seat next to her. “Internal debate.”

“Care to make it external?” Kate yawned and sat up straighter.

“Once I figure out the wording.” She paused to look over at Kate’s raised eyebrows of inquiry. They were powerful, her eyebrows. Lesser men quailed before them. Not that Bobbi was lesser or a man, but . . . God, Kate you have got to get a decent night’s sleep. “Between the two of us, we’ve got too many bird metaphors. I’m trying to avoid another one,” Bobbi said, thankfully dragging Kate away from her own thoughts.

“Um . . . let’s pretend I know what you’re talking about?”

“Mother hen. I’m trying not to be a mother hen.”

“Which would make me a chick . . . yeah no, I get that enough from idiot guys.”

“See what I mean?”

“About the metaphors, sure, but I think that bird’s flown the coop.” She grinned, enjoying the eyeroll Bobbi gave her.

“Shut up.”

“When you spit it out.”

“Fine, I always liked direct hits.” She took a deep breath. “You’re a project.”

“I’m a what?” She’d been expecting some harsh truth or platitude about her dad’s death, had mentally prepared the appropriate sarcastic responses, all of which were completely useless now.

“I told Hardison to find a summer project for the three of them. Not a job. Few minutes later, they’d zeroed in on you, like three children on a baby bird.”

“I thought you said no metaphors.”

“For me. I have plenty. You haven’t hit critical mass yet.”

Kate groaned. “Whatever. So why am I a project?”

“They have a thing about helping people, and—”

“Nooo, I mean, why do they need a project? I’m aware of my perceived baby bird status. Believe me. Fledgling. Can we say fledgling? It sounds better, somehow.”

“Scientifically speaking, sure.” Bobbi flicked a few toggles on the panels that didn’t seem to do anything. Probably just there for when a pilot needed to look busy. “They need a project that isn’t a job. Preferably something low on stress and violence.”

“Okay, I get that, what with Eliot taking a turn as a disco ball.”

Kate could see Bobbi’s jaw tighten, as if she didn’t appreciate Kate’s glib description. As if she didn’t say the same kinds of things about friends getting hurt on the job all the time. Finally, she continued. “About that. You were on your way as soon as you learned something was wrong. You grabbed what you needed and charged in.”

“Technically, Clint did the charging, I did the crashing. Through the window. I re-fenestrated.”

“Semantics,” Bobbi said, completely ignoring Kate’s pun. Should be a crime, ignoring that quality of pun-ishment. “You weren’t sitting in a room two blocks away weighing the life you value most in the world against the job you’d taken the night before.”

“Ah. No. I wasn’t.” She considered. “But that kinda comes with the territory, right?”

“In theory, sure. But I can promise in practice it gets a lot more complicated.”

“Oh.” She knew that, of course. But, well, they were professionals weren’t they? Hardened criminals? Parker sleeps hanging upside down off the edge of couches, Hardison can’t stop making puns any more than I can, and Eliot somehow manages to glare heart-eyes. They’re . . . softened criminals. Cookie-dough ice cream set out to thaw. If criminals were ice cream flavors . . .

Kate started upright in her seat as Bobbi continued, “And I know a thing or two about how that can turn something that used to be good into something that . . . isn’t. And won’t be. Ever again. I don’t want that. Not for them. Not for anyone, but especially not for them.”

Kate had enough of the details of Bobbi and Clint’s marriage flare-out to see where she was coming from, but still— “Are you sure you’re not being kinda . . .”

“Nosy?”

“No, you’re definitely being nosy. Paranoid, I was gonna say paranoid.”

“Sure, who isn’t? And sure, it’s none of my business, but that applies to plenty of things I’ve stuck my nose into.”

Kate wrinkled her own nose. “So I’m what, exactly?”

“I told you, a project.”

 “Yeah, not sure I’m entirely comfortable with the context here.”

“Well, you’ll feel better when you stop being so willfully obtuse, Hawkeye,” Bobbi teased. “How does that work anyway? Biology is pretty clear on genetics, but inheriting someone’s personality? Seriously?”

“Nurture over nature?” Kate suggested. She grinned at Bobbi’s growl of frustration, before returning to what she’d said earlier. “A diversion. I’m a diversion.”

“Yep. Because?”

She thought back to Eliot, declaring he’d tell Parker about him and Clint, but Hardison wasn’t allowed to listen. And Hardison handing her the comm—both then, and later, when Clint and Eliot were in the basement of the strip club, involved in their pseudo-torture session. For a trio that has the others in their ears so much, they don’t always listen to each other. At least Clint has an excuse. “To get them talking?” She bit her lip. “I’m not sure I’m really qualified for that.”

“You’ve never been concerned about qualifications before,” Bobbi pointed out, far too reasonably. “And I’m not saying your role is to be a marriage counselor. God, no.”

Kate breathed a sigh of relief. All of her relationship experiences boiled down to a list of what not to do. “Then what?”

“A . . . prism, I suppose.”

“Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m not the one being obtuse, here.”

“Opaque. Keep up with the metaphors. Imagine you’ve got three intense beams of light, focused on a center point.”

“Ooookaaay? You going to add a magnifying glass in there? Roast ants?”

“Trying to avoid that, actually. A job would be a magnifying glass. They need a prism. Something that refracts that light, redirects its focus.”

“And that’s me.”

“Yup.”

“Shit.”

“No pressure.”

“Well yeah, you wouldn’t want me to shatter into a flat surface or anything.”

Bobbi gave her a Look. The kind with a capital L and very little patience with whiny teenagers. “You’re about to live with a hacker, a hitter, and a thief. They’re going to teach you those things. This? The shit I’m saying about prisms and redirection? That’s what the grifter does. The three of them can grift; Sophie—and me to an extent—taught them. But it isn’t their specialty and, here’s the important thing, Sophie used grifting techniques on them. All the damn time. It’s what she does and she’s good at it. Probably the best there is. But she and Nate are off being “retired” until they get bored, and our trio of lovebirds are coming out of the honeymoon phase. Refraction will be necessary.”

“Still going with the not-qualified line here.” Sure, she barged in and did things she was unqualified for all the damn time, but action-y stuff. Not talky-feely stuff. 

“Kinda the point of a grifter, chickadee,” Bobbi said, blithe to the bone. 

Kate shifted in her seat. “So what do I do?”

“This is going to sound counterintuitive, but be yourself.”

“You just said—”

“Yup. But they like you, they’d know if you acted differently, and you’ve already proven that you’re nosy and persistent. Honestly you’d probably do just fine without this whole conversation.”

“Then why have it?” Great, now I’m going to be psyched out about failing as a prism, or whatever. Prismploding.

“Because no matter what Clint does, it’s better to look before you leap, and not just trust that there’s a dumpster to break your fall. Also, it’s better to avoid falling in dumpsters, if possible.”

“REALLY? Never would have figured that out on my own.”

“Okay, my summer project for you is to learn another language.”

“Which one?”

“English, sans sarcasm.”

“Yeah. Right.” She ducked Bobbi’s half-hearted swipe in her direction and spent the rest of the flight getting a crash course (not a literal one) in the basics of flying a plane. 

Whatever waited for her in Portland, at least she was leaving New York behind. 

Chapter Text

“Deer mom an DaD, I haat kamp. Wen can i cum hom? LuV KATIE.”

The first night was the hardest.

She’d cried for hours and spent the next week being called “crybaby” until she got tired of it and tackled the boy unlucky enough to be shouting it at the time. Katie wasn’t the one crying then. She learned things too: how fast the counselors in their sunshine t-shirts could drop their matching sunshine smiles. How powerless she felt with a hand clamped all the way around her upper arm. How quickly the hand went away when she found the sweet spot on a shin.

She sat in a dusty brown office, staring at a fly scrabbling desperately at a window, while the grown-up-iest of the grown-ups first lectured her on bullying and solving problems with violence and the importance of personal fortitude.

“But we had to share our forts!” Katie objected, though she wasn’t sure how the fort building they’d done earlier came into this. Nor was she entirely clear on “personal,” but she’d heard plenty about respecting personal bubbles, which apparently didn’t apply during fort building. Anyway, she hadn’t started the pillow fight in the forts. (Though she’d certainly ended it.) It didn’t seem fair to bring that incident into this.

“Young lady, fortitude is strength of character!”

The fort hadn’t been all that strong, really. All it took was a powerful swing from her pillow . . .

“This is stupid! I wanna go home!” Katie demanded, her tried and true course of action when she tired of debating without a clear understanding of the rules.

“Very well!” The grown-up—Katie had forgotten, or never bothered to remember, her name, picked up the phone on her desk and jabbed at the buttons. She listened to the faded ringing. Ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing until at last the answering machine picked it up and there was the robotic, disembodied voice of her father. She wasn’t going home.

The grown-up said quite a few words into the phone, that sounded quite a bit like the words she’d been saying to Katie, but even five-year-olds have better comprehension than an answering machine. Eventually she was sent back to her cabin, where the other girls stared at her in awe. She’d punched a boy, kicked a counselor, and survived the OFFICE, and she was still here. One girl snuck her a stolen pudding, and they listened, intent, as she told them all about it and how they were all supposed to have their own forts!

“DEare MoM and DAD, i am kween ov fort y tood! I hav frens and heare is a Bug I fouNd. Hopfuly it is not ded. LOVE KATIE.”

~

“You in town long?”

Kate started. The rideshare guy, Jim, hadn’t said much for the first few minutes of her ride from where Bobbi’d set down at a little airfield outside Portland, so she’d drifted off into something that was not quite a doze.

She shook her head, realizing the guy was still waiting for an answer. She could do idle chit chat. Hell, she should do idle chit chat, not stare out the window getting hung up on stuff she couldn’t help fix. “For the summer at least. Some friends invited me to stay with them.”

“Must be nice, being young and having that kind of freedom.” Jim, white and middling-old, kept his voice light and conversational, making the observation an invitation to engage.

She grimaced, then caught him watching her in the rearview mirror. Not in a creepy way, but he seemed to figure out he’d gotten it wrong.

“I apologize if I—”

“Nah, it’s fine.” She sighed. “You ever have your life abruptly fall apart around you? And you think, Maybe there’s something I should have done differently?, but really you know the problem is some people are just terrible?”

Now she was watching him in that mirror, and the way his knuckles tightened on the steering wheel reminded her of the ways hers could tighten on the shaft of a bow.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I know what that feels like.”

“What did you do?”

“Short answer? Lost control.” He shot her a glance through the mirror. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

She shrugged. “I don’t think I had that much to lose.”

“You’d be surprised.” He shook his head. “Look at us, dreary as that sky. Young thing like you? You’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, I’ve been told I can be over dramatic.” Kate huffed out a laugh. “Anyway, I guess it is a kind of freedom.”

“You even old enough to be going to one of these brewpub things?”

“Hey! I’m older than I look!” She was, thanks to dimension hopping time shenanigans, at least according to Prodigy, who’d done the math. Her team had celebrated her 21st because they needed something to celebrate. According to her Earth driver’s license, she was still 19. Could she serve drinks? Was that even legal? Kate, you’re here to learn how to hack, steal, and who knows what Eliot’s got planned, probably conditioning drills ugh, and you’re worried about legality? “Anyway, it’s just an easy meeting place.” At least I’ve got the lying down pat . . .

“Well, here we are.” He pulled over in front of a remodeled brick warehouse, helped haul her suitcase out of the trunk (she’d held the bow case on her lap, told him it was a viola), and luckily checked the backseat, retrieving the purse she’d forgotten there. She tipped him well.

“Y’know,” he said as he passed her the suitcase’s handle, “control’s a funny thing. You probably have more than you know. And less than you think.” And with that seriously weird sentence, he drove away.

Kate rolled her eyes—apparently weird drivers weren’t just an NYC thing—and wrestled her suitcase to the door of the brewpub. Ostensibly, the trio had a few hours’ warning of her arrival —it had been three in the morning here when she’d sent off a text to Hardison and gotten a truly unintelligible string of emojis back. (Bobbi’d taken one look at the reply and grunted, “Well it’s not Eliot.”)

According to her phone, it was 10:43 AM—she’d had two hours to pack and meet Bobbi at the SHIELD airfield, plus five hours in the air, plus almost another one getting here—and she hadn’t gotten another text, much less instructions for how this would work. But a couple passing her on their way in held the door for her, so she gave them a smile and walked in, surveying the high ceilings and low-key, semi-industrial feel to the place as the hostess seated the couple and returned for her.

“Hi! How many?”

“Um . . .” Do they use aliases here? Is there a code word? Does the hostess know it? Do I have an alias? “Hi! I’m here to see the owner?”

That earned her a considering frown and a glance down at her suitcase. Fair enough, that probably registered as weird, maybe even by Portland standards. “He’s not here right now. I’m the manager, can I help?”

She sounded pretty sincere, and Kate decided that if Hardison had already created a fake identity for her, it better have the same first name. “I’m Kate, I’m supposed to start working here, but my travel plans got uhhh, expedited?”

“OHTHANKGOD!” the girl—because she was a girl, not much older than Kate, really, and it showed in that moment—exclaimed. “Hardison mentioned you on his way out the door this morning, and I’m so glad you’re here early, the other waitress for the day is at a job interview—awesome for her, she’s just graduated—and Parker said she’d cover, but then she took off with the boss, becauseofcourseshedid.” She stopped for breath and to lift her eyes skyward for a moment and Kate liked her immediately. “Anyway, you don’t need all of that rundown, come on in the back and put your stuff down.”

“I . . . I don’t know much about waiting tables?” Kate admitted as she navigated her way past said tables filled with people. The place was packed. “Also, it’s like 11 AM, why is it this full?”

“Beer Brunch. I’m Amy, by the way. I basically manage the day-to-day stuff.” She held the swinging door to the back and Kate bumped her way past, trying to scan the kitchen for Eliot, but it was chaos back there and she couldn’t find him before Amy pointed her to a little break room off to the side. “That,” she pointed at Kate’s purple spaghetti strap cami, “is super cute, but it’s going to get the wrong kind of attention from certain assholes and I don’t want that for you. I’ve got a spare black t-shirt you can borrow. Don’t get me wrong, if someone gives you trouble, just point Eliot at them and watch the fireworks, but if I did that for every single asshole, we’d lose half the customers. Ugh, men.” 

Kate made an immediate, fervent promise to herself that if she saw any asshole try something with Amy, she’d be the one they dealt with, not Eliot.

Amy headed to a locker and started rummaging. “I honestly didn’t think the Beer Brunch thing would work, and neither did Eliot. You should have heard THAT argument,” she paused and handed her the shirt, before turning back around to give her some privacy. “You’ll hear a lot of arguments between them, by the way. Don’t worry about it, that just seems to be the way they communicate. If Eliot yells at you, let me know and I’ll give him a piece of my mind. He’s been grumpier than usual since they got back from their last trip, but he’s not taking it out on my staff, I can tell you that.”

Kate tried to imagine Eliot getting berated by someone as cute and tiny as Amy. Maybe she should arrange for him to yell at her, just so she could see it. “Beer Brunch?” she prompted.

“Right! Sorry, usually my brain’s slightly more together.” Amy nodded in approval. “Shirt looks good on you.”

“Th-thanks?” She winced at the flustered stammer in her voice. It’s a t-shirt Katie-Kate, and a basic compliment, what’s wrong with you? So many things, probably. Kate swallowed, brushed away the cobwebs of New York, refocusing on Amy. She was here, she should be here.

“I didn’t think this thing would be that popular, even in Portland, which loves its brunch and its beer,” Amy was saying. “But the cyclists discovered it, and now it’s become one of their traditions, and we get a herd of them in every Sunday. And Eliot may yell a lot, but he’s a scary good chef, and the rest of the kitchen staff would probably die for him at this point.” She tossed Kate an apron and nodded briskly. “Okay! Let’s see how fast you learn!”

Kate learned fast. Working under pressure always focused her, and while she didn’t quite have the trick of balancing a row of plates up her arm, she did have excellent balance (score for ballet training), and memorizing which plates went to what table was essentially like remembering which arrows went to which targets. Amy put her on food delivery, and two more servers turned up at noon, which relieved the stress a bit. Plate delivery also meant she was going back and forth between the kitchen constantly, so she wasn’t quite surprised when her fifth trip back brought her face to face with Eliot.

He stopped short, glaring in surprise. Until that moment, she hadn’t known what a surprised glare looked like, but Eliot’s face managed both that, and did a top-notch impression of someone who’d been eaten by a tiger and spat back out again.

Good news: survived tiger.

Bad news: slightly mauled.

“Where’d you come from?” he demanded.

Well, that wasn’t a good sign. “A couch in Bedstuy?”

“What’re you doin’ here?” Eliot’s hand waved vaguely around, making Kate unsure if he meant the kitchen, the restaurant, the city, or the planet. Possibly the dimension? Who could really tell with Eliot. He seemed like the type who’d done some dimension hopping and never bothered to mention it. “Don’t matter. If you’re already at it, run that out, ‘fore it gets cold.”

“Been here for an hour and some, where the hell have you been?” Not to mention the others, she thought, trying not to be disappointed in that. At camp, they always got a welcome ceremony. Sure it was corny and this wasn’t camp, but—

“Cookin’!” He shot back and disappeared into the bowels of the kitchen, leaving her alone. You’re here to work, remember? Work and learn and keep out of your own head.

She ran the plate out, followed by more plates, and never got a chance to ask Eliot anything else until the rush calmed down around two, when Amy gave her a pleased nod that warmed her cheeks far more than it should have. “Nice job surviving. Take a breather—the fridge in the breakroom has food prepped today and up for grabs. When you’re done, we’ll start going over some other stuff.”

Kate escaped, rolling her eyes at herself for blushing at the slightest bit of praise. She was tempted to go find Eliot, but she still didn’t know what kind of cover story she should be abiding by, especially if the trio were using their real names here. Did Amy know what they did? Or anyone else here?

Too many unknowns. What she did know was the sound her stomach made since she hadn’t bothered to feed it anything but coffee hours ago. She headed to the breakroom . . . where Eliot was leaning against the wall waiting for her. “Wasn’t expectin’ you yet.” The word held a possible hint of apology.

“Wasn’t expecting you in a chef’s outfit.” He’d borrowed one of her aprons in New York without any self-consciousness, but this looked . . . official. And the three-quarter sleeves and high collar helped cover up most of the cuts he’d sustained in the presence of the Clown, leaving just the half-healed scabs on his face, neck, and hands visible. “Where’s the hat?”

He shrugged, pointing at the bandana holding back his hair—and covering a long gash near his hairline, she remembered. “This works better.”

“Looks good.” He didn’t answer, so she continued, “Bobbi got called down to LA, uh, for SHIELD business, so they cleared her to fly a quinjet out and she let me hitch a ride.” She didn’t mention her dad. Or the other murders. Or the past-tense price on her head. Eliot would want to know those things, but Bobbi’d said no jobs and a whole bunch of people dying in SHIELD custody sounded like a big job.

And you don’t want the pity, said the snide little voice in her head. Kate brushed it away. Not that the voice was wrong, but it wasn’t important enough to matter. If Clint and Bobbi and SHIELD all told her not to concern herself with it, then she wouldn’t. Out of spite more than anything. She deserved a break and this made for a better break than laying on a beach somewhere. Lying on a beach didn’t sound awesome, but she’d just start thinking all over again. Here she’d be busy, too busy to think about a row of corpses, one of them who . . . she shook her head.

“I texted Hardison, last night or early this morning, depending on your definition. Got an answer back in really weird emojis?”

Eliot pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’d be Parker. She’s driving me crazy with those things.” Is the wire running through his tone at normal tension or close to snapping? Since this was Eliot, she had no clue. “Guess that explains why they took off early, not why they didn’t bother to tell me about it in actual English.” He took out his own phone and showed her his own string of emojis, beginning with an eggplant:

🍆💘🛩️🔪💤💰🎮🏗️🥨

“She keeps using that symbol. I don’t think it means what she thinks it means.” From his tone, Kate got the distinct impression that unlike Parker, Eliot knew exactly what the eggplant meant and had been anticipating activities that definitely did not involve a broke teenager turning up in his kitchen. Stop right there, brain.

“Maybe I’m the eggplant? Because purple?” she suggested instead, pulling on her experience decoding emoji code from Clint and definitely not bringing up alternative meanings for eggplants. Mmm, eggplant parmesan... “Also Amy said something about food?”

Eliot jerked his head at the fridge. “Plates that are returned, extras from batches, they come back here first for employees to eat and the rest get redistributed dependin’ on quality. Take your pick.”

She built a plate of pasta salad, fries, and bacon, which got Eliot glaring all over again at her, probably due to the lack of vegetables. “Am I supposed to know you? Do I have an alias? It better be Kate, because I had no other name for Amy. And just where are Parker and Hardison?”

“What did’ya tell Amy?”

“That my name was Kate and the owner hired me.” Kate was beginning to doubt he knew where his partners were. Prism. Be a prism. So not helpful, Bobbi.

Eliot raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

“I didn’t exactly have a long time to be interrogated. She’s the one who brought up your ‘real names.’” She stuck finger quotes around the words.

“Amy’s not really the interrogatin’ type.”

“She know?” Kate asked, forced to agree with Amy’s accepting nature. So far, she’d been the one most excited to see Kate and . . . oh shut up Hawkeye. She seriously needed to turn off whatever piece of Clint had lodged in her brain.

“Not specifics, and she keeps her nose out of the rest.”

Amy walked in a moment later, saying, “When you’re ready, we can—oh!”

Kate waved, nodded at Eliot, and decided to practice her truth-skating. “Should have maaaybe mentioned this earlier, but I kinda know Eliot. Still want to see you yell at him though.” She gave her a quick smile and shrug. “My best friend’s an army buddy of his.”

“Also a grade-A idiot,” Eliot muttered, though she could see the way his mouth quirked up at the mention of Clint.

“I’ll tell him you said that.”

“You better.” He shoved off the wall as if it had been holding him up. “Gotta head back out. See ya after your shift.”

Kate watched him leave and took another bite of the pasta salad before telling Amy, “Sorry, wanted to avoid the whole nepotism thing? But he—they—are helping me out of a tight spot.”

Amy just nodded and smiled. “They do that.”

~

Eliot hadn’t told her where Parker and Hardison had gone, if he even knew, but he emerged from the kitchen after the dinner rush died down, informed Amy that Kate was done for the day, and led her up the back stairs.

“I should get my stuff?”

“Taken care of,” he said, biting off the words sharply. “Good lie earlier.” It came as an oddly gentle amendment.

She’d thought, back in New York, that she had a handle on Eliot’s version of good and bad moods. But here, on his home turf, a week removed, she couldn’t figure out where she stood with him. “Mostly truth, right?” Kate followed him down a hallway, until he paused at one of the doors leading off it.

“End of the hall’s the living area—kitchen, couches, Hardison’s briefing setup. You’re welcome there. Not that you’re not welcome other places, just . . .” He cleared his throat. Yup, was definitely anticipating other activities. Which means everything’s fine and that whole talk with Bobbi was pointless. “Anyway, this’s your room.” He opened the door, or at least tried to. Something got in the way. “Dammit! Parker!”

“We’re not ready!”

“Too bad!” He shoved hard, and she could hear Parker sliding with the door as it opened.

“Stallin’ is a very simple tactic, man, we use it all the goddamn time.” Hardison yelled from inside the room. “Hell, you use it on girls ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.”

“You suggestin’ I flirt with KATE?” Eliot shot back. Kate squirmed past him as he and Hardison continued to bicker, staring around at her temporary living space.

“Conversations with girls don’t have t’be flirting—”

“How the hell would you know?”

“GUYS. I LOVE IT.” She did. Hardison and Parker hadn’t been around because they’d apparently spent the day in here, decorating the room—in purple of course. A simple queen bed (with lavender bedding) sat in one corner. A bookshelf and a small desk with a chair took up part of another wall, but most of the floor space was left open and covered in a thick (purple) rug. Hardison was screwing some brackets into a wall, and it took her a moment to realize they were for her bow.

Kate bit her lip. “You didn’t have to—”

Parker hadn’t moved from her braced position on the door. Now she stepped forward, leaving Eliot to stumble slightly at the lack of resistance, growling. “Of course not. We don’t have to do anything.” Which was sweet, in a Parker sort of way.

Hardison finished with the bracket, and suddenly she found herself in one of his big hugs. “We were gonna have this ready before you got here.”

“Sorry I screwed up your plans,” Kate mumbled into his sleeve, feeling better than she had all week.

He held her out at arm’s length, studying her face. “You okay?”

Does he know about Dad? Kate didn’t think so, and decided she preferred it that way. “Of course! Just a long day. Though not as long as Eliot’s!” She meant it as a joke about the emojis, but from the way Hardison’s mouth twisted, he didn’t find it funny at all. But he didn’t say anything, just pulled her in for another quick hug before releasing her. Already screwing up the prisming and I’ve been with the three of them all of five minutes.

“You only screwed up plans A through D and those usually don’t survive first contact anyway,” Parker was saying as if she could read Kate’s mind. “Sorry you had to be a normal person for a whole day.”

“That’s part of my job right? Being a waitress?”

“Server,” Eliot corrected, leaning against the door frame. “And yeah, having a job’s part of the deal.” Hardison’s mouth twisted again.

“Jobs are bor-ring.” Parker said. By the way her eyes darted between the two men she was clearly aware of, but ignoring whatever silent squabble was flying through the air around her head. “Unless I can teach her to pickpocket using the guests?”

“NO.” Well on that point Hardison and Eliot agreed at least. Okay, so maybe Bobbi wasn’t completely off the mark. Prism-up Kate.

“I want to do both! Everything! Seriously. What’s the plan? When do I start?”

“Get settled,” Hardison ordered, sharper than he’d been just a moment before. “Then we’ll discuss plans.”

Chapter Text

It was the prettiest dress she’d ever worn, bright yellow-gold—Daddy’s favorite color—with a beaded bodice and lace and a flouncy, layered skirt that bounced around her thighs when she twirled. Daddy said it made her his little flower when he’d brought it back for her on one of his trips and promised then that she could wear it to the Christmas party—which was months away, how was she supposed to wait that long?—even though it wasn’t red or green.

Sarah said it made her look like a bumblebee with her black hair, but Sarah was stupid like all big sisters.

On the day of the party, Katie got distracted by the first big snowfall of the season and spent the morning hurling snowballs at the gardener’s boy until they both got yelled at, Katie for her soaking clothes and Brian for Katie’s soaking clothes and being a nuisance when he was only allowed on the grounds if he was helping his father and did he want to get his dad fired right before Christmas.

“I started it!” Katie yelled at Mrs. Perkins, her nanny.

“Sorry,” Brian mumbled, staring at his shoes.

“Don’t apologize! You didn’t do anything!”

“Katherine, come up upstairs this instant.”

“But—”

“Don’t you want to try on your dress?”

“OH RIGHT! BYE, BRIAN!” Following closely at Mrs. Perkin’s heels, Katie remembered the injustice down below. “I did start it,” she told her nanny. “I should be the one saying sorry. Anyway, Brian’s twelve! That’s only five years older than me! Why does he have to work? WAIT? Do I have to work in five years? What will I do? Can I be a gardener? That sounds like fun, is it fun?”

“Katherine . . .” Mrs. Perkins sighed. She always said Katie’s full name like that when Katie managed to fit too many questions in too little time. “Brian goes to school, but it’s winter break, and likely his father needs the help, or just doesn’t know who’s going to look after him.”

“Twelve-year olds don’t get nannies? Are you going to leave before I’m twelve? Is there a cut off?”

“No dear, just, most people don’t ‘get’ nannies. Your parents pay me to look after you and your sister because they have . . . other responsibilities. I don’t know if Brian’s mother is . . . in the picture. Perhaps she isn’t. Or she’s at work too.”

“Oh.” Katie chewed on that particular piece of gristle until the sight of the dress hanging in front of her closet distracted her. It was still the most beautiful dress she’d ever seen, even months after she’d first gotten it. She bounced in anticipation. Sarah, already securely zipped and buttoned into boring red velvet, rolled her eyes. Whatever. She was just huffy because Katie was going through a growth spurt and they were almost eye to eye now. Some lady had even thought Katie was the older one the last time they’d gone out together.

She pulled the dress off its hanger, sliding it over her head and wiggling and shimmying and wiggling and—uh oh. “MRS. PERKIINNNNS!!!”

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Perkins, not at all getting into the spirit of the tragedy. “Looks like you’ll have to wear something else.” She wrestled the now too-small dress back over Katie’s head.

“NOOO! It’s Daddy’s favorite and he bought it for me and told me to wear it! I HAVE TO!”

“Katie, stop it—”

“Are you crying? Over a stupid dress?” Sarah grabbed her book. “I’m going somewhere quiet.”

“I’m not crying!” Katie hiccuped, determined to make that the new reality of the situation. “Please fix it?”

Mrs. Perkins studied the inside of the dress. “Looks like there is some seam allowance I can work with, but you’ll have to be on your best behavior tonight. Any of your usual shenanigans and this will pop right down the side, understand?” Katie nodded solemnly. “And I don’t have time to do anything about the length, so be sure to sit with your legs crossed.”

“Wh-why?”

Mrs. Perkins looked oddly flustered. “Be-because it’s not nice to show people your underthings, and the way you usually carry on, they just might.”

“It’s not nice for them to look.” Katie muttered, then caught sight of Mrs. Perkin’s expression. “I promise!”

The dress, after Mrs. Perkins’s magic touch, fit, if just barely. Katie, terrified that if she ate too much she would burst out at the seams, only picked at her dinner, and didn’t join the other children indulging in what the grown-ups kept calling a “sugar high.” Instead she sat quietly, legs carefully crossed, experimenting with different ways of breathing to see how much air she could fit in her lungs without straining the fabric. Not much.

But Daddy told her she looked absolutely beautiful, and was behaving so well, like a proper young lady, that Katie decided it was all worth it. She would have swelled with pride if she’d had any room. Everything was perfect.

As she got up and walked past a group of chatting grown-ups, she felt a sweaty hand clutch the back of her thigh, just under the too-short skirt. Katie froze for the amount of time it took to gather her currently limited lungful of air, before shouting, “DON’T TOUCH ME!” to the white-haired man nearest to her. His smile turned her stomach.

Everyone gasped and fell silent.

“How dare you accuse my husband, you brat!” Katie whirled at a woman’s voice and found her wrist caught tight in Daddy’s hand, his grasp squeezing the bones of her wrist until they grated together.

“Katherine! Apologize to our guests at once!” he snapped. “Mr. Ambassador, I’m so sorry about my daughter, she tends to be overdramatic.” The low fury in his voice vanished as he spoke to the white-haired man, as if Katie had imagined it.

“BUT DADDY—”

Her father leaned in close. Daddy didn’t like to yell, but she’d certainly not imagined his anger. “Do not cause a scene. You are being disrespectful and rude. You will apologize—”

“—but—”

“No buts. I do not care what you think happened. You will apologize and go immediately to your room. Little girls who cannot behave themselves do not get to attend parties.”

Kate burned with anger and embarrassment. “Sorry,” she gritted out, unable to look at the man. The moment Daddy released her, she fled.

~

None of the trio, Kate reflected as she lay, wide awake in her comfy bed in her beautiful room, had asked why she’d come out to Portland so suddenly, after avoiding the invitation (and Hardison’s texts) for a week. She was glad, obviously. The last thing she wanted to do was think about her dad, lying in SHIELD’s cold storage—stoppit—or about him signing off on her murder for the convenience of his business deals. SERIOUSLY BRAIN, NO.

Worse than thinking about it, which apparently she couldn’t avoid (UGH), was talking about it, because that would result in pitying looks and them treating her like she was something fragile. Asking constantly if she was okay.

You almost had hysterics on Clint’s couch. That sound okay to you?

Right, but I didn’t. I handled it like an adult in control of her own shit. Freaking out about it isn’t going to help, or solve anything, and anyway, I’m just mad that someone else killed the asshole before I could get answers. What’s done is done. Concerned hovering isn’t going to make it better.

Maybe they won’t—

Hardison will. Like he had with Eliot. All evening. 

It had started out simple enough, with his too-casual question of what Kate was in the mood for and they’d order in food. Followed by Eliot adamantly refuting that plan by insisting that for Kate’s first night there, he was cooking something special, as was only right.

Kate, feeling like only the sharp edges and corners of the prism she was supposed to be, tried to say either was fine with her, but then Hardison had said the stupid words. The “are you sure that’s a good idea, man” words that translated, in Kate’s ears, and most definitely in Eliot’s, as “are you sure you’re up to it, you were recently sliced up by a sadistic clown using you as target practice so maybe take it easy.”

Bad move.

Eliot had stormed back downstairs, as Hardison muttered that this wasn’t what he’d intended the restaurant for, and Parker, after pressing her lips together, ponytail twitching from her barely-concealed tension, pulled up the security cameras to watch Eliot in the Brewpub’s industrial kitchen.

Kate got the distinct impression that Parker was just as on edge about Eliot’s well-being as Hardison, she just contained it better, which made way more sense to Kate. Making a big deal about Eliot’s current Franken-state wasn’t going to make him take it easy, and Hardison had to know that, right? Dude was as stubborn as they come. And Hardison isn’t, in his own way?

Eliot had returned with a huge serving bowl, piled high with spicy-sweet sambal pork noodles and it wasn’t like anyone, even Hardison, was going to refuse. Kate made sure to compliment the dish, which was delish and gave Eliot the chance to wave it off as not a big deal and people made too much fuss over nothing. 

That last, pointedly directed at Hardison, signaled it was time for her to plead mild jetlag and retreat to her room. Not the most auspicious start, but fixing other people’s problems was still a way better use of her time than not having any recourse to fix her own.

You don’t have a problem. Your problem was your dad. He’s dead. Solved. You’re broke, thanks to him, but now you have a job. Solved. So quit feeling sorry for yourself and do something useful.

Kate rolled over, punched her pillow a few times and tried to get comfortable in the unfamiliar surroundings. She’d slept in much weirder places than this.

Okay, Kate-o-matic, what’s the plan?

She was so not good at plans.

Somewhere, further down the hall, three voices raised in a brief argument, though Kate couldn’t make out any of the words, just the muffled high-stress pitch of Hardison, interrupted by a lower sound from Eliot and something sharp that was probably Parker.

Bobbi said to just be myself. Okay self, WWKD?

What Kate would do is tell Hardison he’s being an idiot, because Kate doesn’t know when to keep her big mouth shut. Besides. Bobbi didn’t say to get that involved. You’re not a relationship counselor.

Right. Exactly. I’m not. They’re not allowed to say things like that, even if it is true. Anyway, Bobbi’s a spy. She has to think in circumspect terms. 

So go spy.

Well, not like sleep was happening anyway, and she could always say she was getting some water if they caught her eavesdropping. It would be useful information gathering.

But whatever the argument was, it had died down by the time she slipped out of her room, ghosting along the rough brickwork toward the Common Room. (Hardison’s term, big surprise, the nerd.) Instead, she caught a glimpse of Eliot pressing Hardison up against a wall, and while their tongues were very, ah, active, they were definitely not arguing. Okay, so not a total relationship breakdown. And definitely not the type of spying I’m down for. She was about to beat a hasty retreat when Parker’s head popped out of a vent further down the hall, hissing at her to follow.

Kate, blushing furiously, obeyed.

Enclosed tubes of metal were not quiet places. Even when sitting perfectly still, they groaned and creaked, and the air flowing through them made impossible to pinpoint whistling sounds. A few feet down the shaft, Parker snapped her head around. “SHHHHH!”

“It’s a metal tube! Tell it to SHHHH!”

Thus began her first lesson.

Kate didn’t believe in talent, exactly. Predisposition maybe, but gaining a skill involved mostly hard work and sheer bloody-mindedness. Parker’s ability to move silently down a slightly flexing, majorly echoing tube of metal was beyond what Kate could comfortably call a skill. She’d worked with magic users, and watching Parker navigate the metal here still managed to be surreal.

And then Parker showed her how to do it.

“It’s about anticipating the tensile strength and acoustic properties of the metal,” she explained, pushing down on the very center of a segment of metal, until it bent with an audible pop under her hand. “These are nice and strong and wide! Alec made sure. But there’s lots of smaller weaker ones. Sometimes they have too many flex points to be totally silent, but you can get close.” Parker frowned. “That’s not a normal person thing is it. Alec said I need to think about how to explain things to a normal person, so you’d understand.” Like the metal, her tone flexed some point between statement and question.

Am I (comparatively) normal? Kate decided to forgo analyzing the question for now. “It sounds like the Archer’s Paradox, actually,” she said, testing another middle point between two seams. It bent and rebounded with the same noise Parker’s had made. Moving slightly to either side created a slightly different sound.

“What’s that?” When curious, Parker became all wide eyes and forgotten personal space.

Kate, pleased to be able to trade esoteric knowledge, crossed her index fingers, bending one slightly so it formed the “bow” and the other one the “arrow.”

“When you shoot an arrow, the shaft is actually pointing slightly off to the side. So every shot should go wide. But it doesn’t, because the arrow is slightly flexible, and it bends back and forth in both directions as it travels from the bow to the target. The smaller the target, the more aware you need to be about the amount of flex your arrows have so that you can account for it when you’re releasing the shot. And it changes with the type of arrow and the draw weight of a bow. Because force.” She “released” her arrow finger and let it fly, wiggling slightly. “It took forever for me to get the hang of it, but now it’s second nature. I dunno if I could teach anyone. Clint had a hell of a time teaching me, because he didn’t even think about it anymore. He basically just told me what was happening and to be aware of it and practice.” Which is pretty much what Bobbi said about being a “project”. So helpful.

“You should teach me. I like sharp things and distance.” Parker said, unconcerned about the normalcy of that, and continued on down the shaft.

They ended up on the roof. Parker had wanted to see how Kate handled a vertical braced climb and seemed pleased with the results. It was a nice and breezy night, the low clouds of the day clearing. They sat on the edge of the roof in silence for long enough that Kate was almost dozing when Parker finally spoke.

“How’d you get here?”

“Huh?”

Parker waved a hand. “To Portland.”

“Bobbi—”

“Flew you, yes, but then?”

“Oh, rideshare. From the airfield.”

“Anything . . . distinctive? About the ride?”

She shook her head. “Driver was nice, we chatted a bit?” Chatted made their conversation sound much lighter than it was, but then she’d had some truly bizarre conversations with cabbies before. They were a font of weird. “Nothing distinctive, why?” She tried not to smile at their use of Eliot’s word.

“Unknown element.” Parker said, staring down at the street below. She didn’t seem all that concerned about it, or really about whatever was going on beneath them. At least not outside the building.

This morning already felt like weeks ago, but the conversation with Bobbi refused to clear like the clouds above them. Not a marriage counselor. A prism. And okay, so she didn’t have a plan, but when did she ever? “The lesson on navigating air vents was cool. Sooo… what else are you guys gonna teach me?”

Parker shifted and pulled a padlock and a small roll of fabric out of her pocket. “Picking locks,” she said, tossing both to Kate. It wasn’t easy, catching two separate items while on the edge of a rooftop. She managed, pleased with herself, but Parker had already moved on. “Scouting entrance and exit routes, memorizing security systems and how to beat them, laser web dancing, safe cracking, counting haircuts.”

“Haircuts?”

“Haircuts,” Parker confirmed without further explanation. She grinned. “Hardison has lots of plans involving other ways to beat security systems, dig up information on people, create new identities—”

“I get to make my own fake IDs? Cool.” Pause. “What about Eliot?”

Even in the gloom she could see Parker’s spine go bowstring-taut. “Not fighting.” The order bore the weight of an ultimatum.

Okay, not totally unexpected, but if not fighting then, what? “Sooo . . . cooking then?” Kate tried.

Parker shrugged. “Just not fighting. Not yet.”

“He down with that?”

“I don’t care. I’m telling you.” Parker’s stare, when applied to the space behind her eyeballs, burned like one of those flash tips Clint put magnesium in. “I see him naked. You're not cover.”

Kate choked, blushing. “Uh. Okay. Not sure how that applies?” Yeah, the conversation with Jim the driver was definitely normal compared to this. “I’m not planning on covering any—oh.” She shifted. “You’re saying that Eliot will use teaching me as justification for getting too . . . active.”

Shit. This felt like an extremely unprism-y situation. More magnifying glass and ants. Or ancient Greek mirror death-ray, no matter what the Mythbusters said. And telling Hardison he was being an over-protective idiot was one thing. Telling Parker… new plan.

Parker was also the boss. Both Eliot and Hardison had made that abundantly clear back in New York, and it wasn’t like Kate wanted to make Eliot rip stitches or do something risky. She was well acquainted with the type of dumbass who would do exactly that without any help from her.

“He won’t get hurt because of me,” she said finally. That at least she could promise. “I’ll do my best—I mean I won’t spar with him or anything, but I have some experience with guys stubborn to the point of stupidity.”

Parker gave her a sharp nod of acceptance. Then, as if a switch flipped, she bounced up. “Roof race?” Without waiting for Kate’s response, she added, “3, 2, 1, GO!” and took off across the roof, leaping into the abyss beyond with a gleeful shout.

“No fair!” Kate yelled at the abrupt redirect and threw herself in pursuit.

~

The next morning, when Kate's self-induced alarm went off at 7, she peeled herself off the bed to glare at it, hissing at the stiffness in her shoulders, back, and everywhere. At least roof racing had knocked her solidly out for a few hours. Time to hit the gym.

Standing up greeted her with more shouts from various muscle groups, but Kate had been waking up to that chorus for years now. She noted the angriest as targets for the roller, tested the ankle she’d turned on an awkward landing—sore, but it held; she’d danced on worse, in her ballet days—and headed downstairs to the long, narrow room the trio had shown her during their tour the night before. While the front—hah, front—of the building served as a restaurant and brewery, the back half of the old, remodeled warehouse served a range of different functions, including a briefing setup, with huge screens and a long bar for them to sit around, various storage rooms, and this spot, tucked away behind an unobtrusive door. Inside were mats, sets of free weights, ropes and laser courses for Parker, and currently, Eliot, working a punching bag, his shirt soaked with sweat. The bag got a reprieve the moment he saw Kate.

“What’dya do to your ankle?” he demanded, catching the bag and his breath as he stared at her.

“How did you—?” I’m not limping and even if I was, he hasn’t even seen me walk yet, just stand here… 

“Way you stand, it’s a distinctive weight distribution,” he swiped a towel off the machine behind him, drying off without particular care to his half-healed cuts.

They must sting, what with all that sweat, Kate winced in sympathy at the thought.

Eliot’s eyes narrowed. “C’mere and sit.” He retrieved a roll of KT tape from a small bin of supplies in the corner.

“It’s fine,” Kate protested, proving it as she walked perfectly over to the weight bench and sat. “Just the aftermath of Parker parkour.”

He snorted at that; knelt to pull off her shoe and sock. “Parker ain’t normal,” he said flatly. “Don’t let her run you ragged.” Rough fingers traced the tendons in her ankle.

“It’s fine!” She felt like a broken record, defending both Parker and her totally useable ankle, not to mention every other half-asked question that didn’t need another answer. Some things were bad, some things were good, cancel them out, you got fine. And she was fine. You and Hardison had a whole conversation about what F.I.N.E. stands for back in New York.

But that was New York. And anyway, I am fine.

“Oughta be taped.” He tore a strip of tape, before Kate could even volunteer to do it herself. “Better to baby it now than deal with it later.”

Kate rolled her eyes far more dramatically than she’d rolled the ankle. “I’ve been doing this for a while. Ballet, gymnastics, fencing, judo, aikido, jiu jitsu, not to mention the actual street fighting and oh yeah, superheroes, robots, aliens . . . I know what I’m doing and I know my limits.” Still, this did give her an opportunity. “I know how to fight.”

Eliot grunted. “That so,” he said, completely non committal.  

“So-so. I mean very so. Sooooo much so . . . um, so, if I’m supposed to baby the ankle we should work on non-fighty things.” How’s that for prisming, Bobbi?

“Cause there’s nuthin new under the sun I can show your highness, that it?” He set her foot down, braced his hands on his knees to rise. “Don’t think I can’t kick your ass.”

Kate lifted her chin. “Don’t think I won’t give you a run for your money.”

“Got more of that than you.” He grinned, offering her a hand. 

“Low blow, dude,” she said and took it, standing and testing her weight. Okay, so the tape did help stabilize the ankle. “My point is, you’ve only got a few months—is fighting really the thing you want to focus on teaching me?”

“Not plannin’ on stickin’ around?” The tape sailed through the air to hit squarely in the bin it came from.

Kate bit her lip. She hadn’t seriously considered the option, wasn’t sure it was on the table, to be perfectly honest. And now that it sounded like it was? “I haven’t really planned beyond that. Living in the moment right now, that’s me.”

“People always say that like it’s a peaceful thing,” Eliot muttered, clearly implying that it wasn’t, then shrugged, as if it made no difference to him. “Kinda figured you for a plannin’ type, though.”

“I used to be. But then every plan I made fell apart and not necessarily in a bad way? Not all of them anyway.” The punching bag suddenly looked real inviting. “I didn’t plan to be Hawkeye. I planned to not be Hawkeye. To find my own name, my own place. But Cap gave me the bow for mouthing off to him, which definitely wasn’t planned. And while that was an honor, it’s not what makes me . . . me. If that makes any sense.”

“Some.” Eliot’s mouth quirked oddly, but she didn’t think he was laughing at her. "I’d say the mouthing off was definitely you.”

“Yeah, fair.”

“So what do you want to learn, Hawkeye?”

Kate didn’t even pause to consider. “The distinctive thing.”

“Huh?”

“That thing you do? Where you identify something and you say it’s distinctive? What you just did with my ankle. I want to learn that.”

Eliot scratched his jaw. “That . . . ain’t one skill.”

“So, teach me all the skills! That’s what I’m here for. Anyway, it seems like a type of target. I’m great at targets.”

He considered her, eyes narrowed, then finally nodded in agreement. “I’m teachin’ ya to cook too.”

“Hey! I had the stocked kitchen remember?! Not Clint.”

“You use it, or you order out on daddy’s card more often than not?”

The face she made was answer enough. Look, there was always the intention of cooking. It just regularly lost to the temptation of the order in pile.

“Whatever you decide to do, can’t go wrong knowin’ food.”

~

Hardison hadn’t put Kate on the restaurant schedule for the day, declaring she needed a day to get settled and unwind. She helped Eliot make omelets for breakfast, while Parker watched, hanging from the rafters above them in one of her harnesses. That should have been weird, but Kate had long since gotten used to looking for people on planes other than the one under her feet. Hardison perched on a barstool with his laptop, keeping up a string of commentary mostly directed at whatever was on the screen, with Eliot muttering to Kate, “Jus’ ignore him.” They seemed to have made up from the fight the previous evening, if the subsequent makeout session, and familiar way they got into each other’s space this morning was any indication. In any case, she’d decided to stay out of that for the time being. Plenty of non-relationship prisming possibilities to try first. 

“Is this some weird, literal demonstration of that saying about breaking a few eggs?” she asked Eliot, only half kidding.

“No,” he answered, then seriously considered it for a moment before giving her a half shrug. “If ya want it to.”

She’d figured out Eliot enough by now to know that if he’d intended it, he’d be invested. So, the omelet thing wasn’t about breaking eggs. Or at least not as a metaphor. She did break a lot of eggs, just not correctly.

“One-handed. It’s in the wrist, do it again.”

“Fine, but my name isn’t Sabrina. I refuse to end up chic and French, with a tiny dog, married to a too old, grumpy dude.”

“Ain’t so bad.” Eliot could do a lot of things, but winking wasn’t one of them. Kate didn’t tell him that, of course. She was too busy taunting him with egg-related puns in a terrible French accent.

Parker dropped down, hovering over the counter to steal Kate’s last egg, frown at it for a moment, then crack it one-handed, without dropping a single eggshell in the batter.

“Excellente,” she praised herself.

Kate couldn’t resist. “Don’t you mean, egg-cellente?”

Eliot glared at both of them. “Imma ‘bout to ban you both from my kitchen.”

The omelet ended up being a scramble, but it tasted great.

~

Hardison’s distraction lasted all the way until after breakfast, when he called her over to get a picture for her fake ID and ended up taking her through the process of creating an entire fake life, complete with a birth certificate, report cards, credit score, social media accounts, and a sprinkling of mistakes on her taxes. It was surprising, how much and how comparatively little went into building a life. She lost track of Eliot, Parker, and time, blinking in surprise when Amy knocked on the door, holding two plates of food.

“Eliot asked me to run these up,” she said, winking at Kate over the top of the laptop.

“Ain’t lunchtime ye—oh. He still down there?”

“Yeah, it’s like four in the afternoon, boss, so yes, it’s past lunchtime and yes, he’s been down there all day. Currently working on dinner prep.” To Kate, she added, “I thought he was giving you a day to settle in?”

“This is settling! We settling!” Hardison protested. Kate could see him pull up a security camera in the corner of his screen, to monitor Eliot. Can Hardison tell anything by the way he’s standing? Kate couldn’t, but she didn’t get more than a glimpse before Hardison noticed her watching him watching Eliot and guiltily shut the feed down. 

“Riiight,” Amy, having deposited the plates on the table, waved as she headed for the door. “If those are still sitting there untouched when Eliot comes up, it’s your hide, not mine!” Hardison made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat.

Amy’s threat turned out to be true, though for different reasons, when Eliot returned, hours later. They’d finished by then, Katherine Bishop becoming Kaitlyn L. Stewart. The L ostensibly stood for Lila—Kate’s choice, when she’d seen the initial—but Hardison kept getting this odd gleeful grin that could only mean he’d snuck some geeky reference in and wouldn’t tell her what it was. Kate, or Kaitlyn, she supposed, didn’t intend to give him the satisfaction of asking.

Parker’d turned up half an hour before Eliot, dropping a cardboard shoe box onto the table next to Kate with a resounding thud. Inside, she discovered an array of padlocks, reminding her of the one Parker had given her last night. “Cool! Time for lock picking lessons?” She glanced up at Parker, in expectation, but the woman was already walking away.

“You figure it out!” she hoisted herself up into a vent and disappeared again.

“She’s . . . well she’s Parker, but she’s been extra Parker for the last week,” Hardison told Kate, “I can tell you the basics, or pull up YouTube if you want.”

She shook her head. “Probably a lesson in there somewhere,” she muttered and picked up one of the most basic padlocks. “I’ll take a stab at it.” Kate selected a tool at random, and, well, stabbed it into the mechanism.

“Pssst!” Parker stuck her head back out and held up two fingers before disappearing again.

Two picks. Got it.

Half an hour later, when Eliot came in, pulling off a stained apron, Kate still hadn’t managed to open the lock, though she felt she was getting further. Hardison had offered help a few more times before leaving her to it, and gleefully started listing off to Eliot everything they’d forged that day.

“. . . made Kate 21, which she says she sorta is, and backdated a food handler’s card so she’s all set on—”

“You. What.”

“Well, I didn’t think about it yesterd—”

“Dammit, Hardison! You can’t jus’ forge that, she actually needs to know it! Kate—” he whirled to face her. “What’s the minimum temperature hot food should be held at?”

“Uhhh . . .” God, she hated not knowing an answer. Sent her back to too many classrooms.

“See?! She doesn’t know shit! This ain’t the way you run a restaurant, man!”

“I spent the entire day building a whole new person here and—”

“GUYS. It’s fine.” Kate stood, shoving away the box of locks. “Give me a few hours to study and then quiz me again, Eliot.” That should have put an end to the argument, Kate figured, as she ditched them for her room and her computer. By the sounds that continued after she shut her door, it didn’t, but neither could she find it in her to care.

~

Several hours later, Kate heard heavy footsteps, followed by a knock and Eliot calling quietly, “Kate? Still up?”

She stood behind the door for a moment before opening it to tell Eliot primly: “Hot food should be held at 140 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer.”

His eyebrows rose briefly. “You google that?”

“Hardison sent me a whole packet, said in the email he’d normally just slide me the answers too, like he used to charge kids for in high school—”

“He was hackin’ the Bank of Iceland in high school, what’d he need to go rollin’ teenagers for?” This was directed partially out her door, in case Hardison was in the vicinity.

“. . . but since some people are concerned about the principle of the thing, he’s sending the test to you so make sure I . . . how’d you put it? Oh right, know my shit.” She bit the words off, letting just a sprinkle of saltiness come through. She wasn’t really mad at him anyway. 

Eliot ran a hand through his hair. “It wasn’t at you, but I shouldn’t’ve yelled.”

Kate gave him a nod, feeling quite generous and mature as she said, “Apology accepted.” She sat back down in her desk chair, as Eliot’s face attempted to mix and match several extremely disparate expressions for some reason.

“I hadn’t—who the hell raised you t’ think that counted as an apology?”

Kate blinked. “Sorry?” It’d been a long night, she’d almost fallen asleep twice over the stupid food handler’s packet and Eliot couldn’t make up his mind about what constituted the apology he was making.

“Right, that word’s usually attached.” 

Kate shrugged. “Whatever.” She pointed at a card he was holding. “What’s that?”

“It’s—” He held up an index card with what looked like a recipe printed on it. “Better if I jus’ show you.” Kate watched as Eliot tacked the index card to the cork board above her desk, so it would be at eye level when she sat down. He pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket, twisting the top until the beam narrowed to only illuminate a small surface area, and wedged it at an angle so it would point up at the index card, only shining on it. “I’ll ask Hardison to set up somethin’ better.”

Kate studied the set up. She hadn’t read the card yet, but she thought she’d seen the word “pie.” Okay, well, she’d definitely not object to Eliot teaching her to bake pies, but… “Uh, better for what?”

“Gettin’ a photographic memory.”

Yeah, she was lost. Or Eliot was. “How, exactly, does a light and a pie recipe get me to,” she deepened her voice, “It’s a very distinctive ankle, DUH.”

“I don-I don’t sound like that!” He must have realized the protesting didn’t help his case. “It’s like a camera. An actual camera, not your phone. Camera has a shutter, right?”

“I know how a camera works, Eliot.”

He shrugged. “How’m I supposed to know that? Kids your age don’t know shit that ain’t digital!”

“I took photography classes? Only because there was a sliiight misunderstanding about the sentence ‘I like to shoot’ when I was on the phone with my advisor—also the connection sucked seeing as she was on another continent and I was sulking, but anyway, I ended up in photography classes. Dark rooms: Great place to make out,” she added, just to make Eliot squirm. He grinned instead; so that was a definite fail on Kate’s part. “Anyway, shutter opens, light sensitive film captures the image in front of the shutter, shutter closes.”

“Right. We’re gonna teach your brain the same thing.” He turned off the lights. Now, the only thing Kate could see in the room was the recipe card, illuminated by the narrow beam of the flashlight. “Stare at it for fifteen minutes, then write down everything you remember, words, order, format, everything.”

“That’s it? Does that work?”

He shrugged. “Method they used on me. I’ll test ya on the memory and the food safety tomorrow.” He shut the door behind him. 

They?

~

Kate opened her eyes to snowballs. Several stiff blinks later, the fuzzy white shapes resolved themselves into crumpled pieces of paper, all filled, she knew, with attempts to memorize and replicate a pie recipe. She lifted her head off the desk, an uncrumpled—mostly—sheet of paper coming with it, stuck to the corner of her mouth. Great. I drooled on my final success.

Smoothing it flat on the desk, the thing did give her a bubble of satisfaction. Okay, so she hadn’t stared at it for just fifteen minutes. Well, she had, just many times over. Stare at paper, recall what she remembered, turn on desk lamp, compare, swear, study the stupid food safety rules, turn the lamp off and the flashlight on, and repeat. Took her most of the night and her head felt heavy and crammed full of temperatures to store food at, and bake pies—god I better not get those mixed up—but she was ready.

Eliot picked up the paper as she set it down on the kitchen counter, eyeing it over the coffee cup he didn’t bother remove from his lips.

Coffee, brilliant idea. She poured herself some (okay, more than some) as his eyes traced over her work. “Hardest part was the typographical errors,” she said finally into the silence. “Which ‘c’ was followed by a period and all that.”

He nodded and crumpled the paper one-handed into yet another snowball, letting it roll onto the counter. It sat there, rejected. She gulped a mouthful of coffee to cover the burn in her throat.

“Didn’t take ya fifteen minutes.”

Kate glared at Eliot. “I didn’t cheat, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“You didn’t follow instructions. I said fifteen minutes, not fifteen multiplied by however many it took for you to prove you’re perfect at somethin’ straight out the gate.”

“That’s not—”

“You get any sleep?”

“Yes,” Kate glared at him mulishly, “and I memorized all the stupid food rules, test me!”

“I believe ya,” Eliot said, infuriatingly calm. “Maybe later.” He picked up his coffee mug and wandered off, leaving Kate and her coffee steaming.

God, I need to punch something.

The something ended up being the battered punching bag in the gym, which left her sweaty and buzzing with that euphoric high she always got from increasing her heart rate. Usually, she’d finish with archery, since the best time to shoot was while her breath and heart raced and her arms felt like noodles. Didn’t quite replicate real life, but it got close. And the length of the gym could accommodate her, as long as she didn’t use her compound, but her schedule today could not. As it was, she barely had enough time to scramble upstairs for a shower, before scrambling back downstairs, braiding her damp hair as she went, to find Amy laying out napkin-wrapped utensils on all the tables.

“Hey!” she called, giving Kate a big, warm smile. “Missed you yesterday. You get settled in?”

“For the time being,” Kate told her, for lack of a better answer, and because seeing Amy and her open smile did settle her, in a way Kate couldn’t quite pinpoint. She returned the smile and picked up a bin of candles. Back to work.

~

Eliot did test her on food safety and not just her. If he shouted out a question, everyone in the kitchen at the time was expected to answer, immediately and loudly, punctuated by “Chef!” It took the pressure off Kate, while giving her a window into the way Eliot ran his kitchen: strict, but communal. Part of her balked at not being able to demonstrate—c’mon, you mean show off—her knowledge, but it made her part of the team, rather than the newbie being quizzed on something she should already know.

“He’s in some kinda mood today,” Amy commented as she slipped past her, her ponytail brushing Kate’s arm.

“Kaitlyn! Get over here!” Eliot yelled, and it took Kate a moment longer than it took Amy to realize he was yelling at her.

“Zone out for a moment, there?” Amy gave her a light push. “Better see what he wants.”

“‘Sup?” Kate asked him, followed hurriedly by “uh, Chef?”

Eliot’s serious, down to business cooking face came with its own range of patented expressions that Kate was still adding into her dictionary of Eliot-speak. (Parker also had a dictionary, a short one where the definitions kept changing. Hardison didn’t need one, open book that he was.) “How many customers are wearing jewelry?”

“Huh?”

“Ooh!” Parker stuck her head out of a vent above their heads. No one else in the kitchen seemed to notice. Or care. “Can we finally start Kate on lifts?”

“No. Stop tryin’ to rob the clientele, Parker.” Eliot muttered in a rote monotone, as if that sentence came up at least several times a day. Which it probably did, knowing Parker.

“There is no try,” Parker garbled into Yoda-speak. “Only do.”

Kate could see the corner of Eliot’s mouth struggling to resist the temptation to quirk upward. “I’m havin’ her work on situational observation, go bug Alec.”

“CGI Yoda the best is.” She disappeared back into the vent.

“I said bug him! Not start a war!” He sighed and repeated his earlier question. “How many customers are wearin’ jewelry?”

“. . . no clue? Should I be counting them? In case Parker does, um…”

“Keep a tally, report back at the end of shift. Starin’ at a patch of text ain’t the whole picture. You gotta make noticing things a habit.”

Okay, so that made sense. “Got it.”

She did catch Parker lifting jewelry and wallets, though “catch” might not have been the right term, since Kate was pretty sure the thief meant it as a demonstration. She put it all back immediately in any case. Kate, determined to impress Eliot on his terms, kept a tally of total jewelry, but also the types—earrings, other piercings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, subcategory of wedding rings . . . By the end of her shift, her head was spinning with all the data. Amy had to prod her before Kate realized she’d been saying good night.

“Sorry, just . . . a lot in my head right now.”

“I know, it’s like that at first. There’s a ton to keep track of,” Amy agreed, oblivious to just how true that was. “But you did great today! Go relax.”

Kate nodded absently, waved goodbye, and went to report to Eliot.

Instead, when she went upstairs she found Parker, perched on the edge of their personal kitchen counter, her feet dangling. “How are the padlocks coming?” She hopped down. “What’s your fastest time?”

“Fastest?” Kate spluttered, shoving against the twinge of anxiety that she should have succeeded at the locks by now. Maybe they were easy and she was just an idiot? “I’m still working on them, but I’ll figure it out.”

Parker frowned, but before she could respond, Eliot turned up to hear Kate info-dump about jewelry, compared to Parker’s own count, which included three extra wedding rings, two stuffed in pockets, one in a purse.

“Nice work,” he told her, interrupting Kate’s complaints that Parker’d cheated, and handed her a new recipe card. “Only fifteen minutes this time. I ain’t lookin for perfection, I’m lookin’ for what ya miss.”

“Survivor bias!” Hardison called from the couch, his feet propped up on the coffee table to support the computer on his lap. “Sometimes what’s there ain’t the whole picture, an’ what’s missing tells you more’n what’s there. Like what I’m missin’ right now is all y’all standin’ over there when I’m sittin’ alone on this comfy couch with a movie loaded and ready to go.”

“That ain’t the same thing at all!” Eliot yelled back at him. “I’m makin’ popcorn first, an’ you ain’t getting any till those feet are off the table!”

Hardison’s feet came off the table so fast they took at least two remotes with them. “I’ll make it El, come sit—”

“I got it, you always do the microwave shit and burn—”

“Eliot—”

“SIDDOWN, ALEC.”

Parker dragged Kate over the couch, pausing to grab the shoebox of lockpicks, and yank Hardison back down with a muttered “leave him.” While Eliot remained alone in the kitchen area with the popcorn, Parker distracted Kate and Hardison both by explaining, in extensive detail, how a lock worked, hijacking Hardison’s computer (and the rest of him) to find them videos of the process. Eliot came over, settling down with Parker between him and Hardison. It didn’t go unnoticed by any of them, particularly not Hardison, who chose The Empire Strikes Back as their movie, probably as revenge for Parker’s earlier Yoda comments.

Kate practiced as the movie played and the trio bickered about physics inaccuracies, in Star Wars of all things. It washed over her and she let it, paused the jiggling lockpicks in her hands to lean her head back against the couch and shut her eyes, just for a moment.

~

BANG.

Kate jerked awake out of the now familiar dream. Familiar bullshit like that should not make her heart race anymore. The movie was over, room dark, though Hardison still sat near her on the couch, face illuminated by his screen.

“Bad dream?”

“Stupid one,” she muttered, stretching and shifting to see what he was working on. It looked like Facebook.

“Like one of those terrible horror movies that shouldn’t be scary but you end up…” he stopped at her raised eyebrows. “Sometimes it helps. Talkin’ them out,” he said softly, the words as careful as footsteps through a minefield.

Kate flashed him a brief smile and plopped down next to him. Talking this out wasn’t going to change the dream, or the reality, but it was nice of him to offer. “Where’d Parker and Eliot get to?”

She felt him tense beside her. “Bedroom. Had a few things I wanted to get done first.” Hardison gave her a similar quick smile to the one she’d given him. Liar. Which made her one too. If I shared, would he share too? 

“Whatcha working on?” she asked instead. 

“Right now? Diggin’ up dirt.” He flipped through tabs, showing her images and a surprising number of Wikipedia and LinkedIn pages. “Plenty of times, you don’t need a full con to take down some shithead. You just need to bring certain information to light. Like this cop wearin’ a slightly different uniform.” Tabs rotated and Kate found herself staring at a figure in a pointy white hood.

“Damn. That’s real?”

“Yup, not that it would have to be to make a certain section of the population believe it. And another group won’t believe it—or won’t care—that it is totally, one hundred percent real.”

“How’d you find out? Hack into bank statements?”

“Nah, didn’t need to. Surprising amount of stuff is public, just need to know how to look. It’s called OSINT—Open Source Intelligence. FBI, Homeland Security, they all use it. We volunteered to become a surveillance society, might as well use the tools . . . ” he trailed off. “I’m ramblin’. You should get to bed.”

Right. And kill Dad again. Great way to spend the night. “Soon. Teach me Google powers.”

“Well alrighty then,” he grinned, unable to resist and Kate could feel him relax as he explained, the stuff that was bothering both of them taking a backseat for the moment. Damn good prisming, if I do say so myself.

Chapter Text

“Now line up your feet, both feet pointing perpendicular to the target—you know what I mean by perpendicular? It’s okay if you don’t.” Sarah, the bestest camp counselor Kate had ever known, shook her bangs out of her eyes as she glanced up from adjusting Kate’s stance.

“Um, it’s like a T shape?”

“Yup! That’s a great way to describe it! Can I borrow that?”

“If you want.” Katie answered, secretly pleased but trying to hide it. “When can I shoot the arrow?”

“You release when I say you can.” Sarah stepped back, pitching her voice to reach the ragged row of eight-year-olds carefully gripping bows and arrows. “RETURN TO REST!” Most had already pulled back the string awkwardly, their arms shaking as they tried to hold their position. They relaxed their grip, some dropping arrows at their feet, and hastily scooping them up. “BACK STRAIGHT! DRAW BACK! ELBOW LEVEL! ANCHOR! AND RELEASE!”

Arrows flew more or less in one direction, some hitting the grass well short of the targets, some arching over the top. A few managed to at least hit the targets, though most bounced off. Only one, and Kate knew with all her heart it was hers, stuck fast, dead in the bull’s-eye.

“BULL’S-EYE! BULL’S-EYE I GOT A BULL’S-EYE! I WIN I WIN!”

Sarah held up a hand, shushing Kate. In the silence, Brianna Roberts muttered, “Beginner’s luck.”

Kate whirled on her. “NO IT WASN’T!”

“Fine. Then do it again.” Brianna smiled a challenge.

“This is not a competition,” Sarah told them all, though Kate knew that wasn’t really true. Sure they weren’t getting prizes now, but you got prizes on the last day, when you proved you were the best. But that was just for the parents that showed up to watch. The other kids watched all week. They knew when someone really did win and when it was a fluke. And there was no way Kate was going to be a fluke. Besides, she had to get the trophy. Dad never came to Parents’ Day because he was too busy and important, so she needed to take the trophy back to him.

“RESUME YOUR POSITIONS!”

Kate did, confident that here, on her second shot she’d prove herself. She’d only been doing it for ten minutes and already archery was nothing like running, or swimming, or identifying edible plants, or any of the other things she won at. (Or nearly, anyway. She definitely didn’t lose.) Hitting a target didn’t depend on just moving your arms and legs faster than anyone else, until you gasped for breath and had spots at the edge of your vision. It didn’t depend on staying up all night with a flashlight and guidebook under the covers, and yawning through the rest of the day until she could get to her moment of triumph. No, archery depended on the choices and small adjustments she made at the start, and then, it was all in the arrow. She liked the surprise when it hit the target. But it would hit the target. She was Kate Bishop and she did not miss.

“RELEASE!”

Kate’s shot went high, sailing over the straw bales along with a good half of her peers, most overcorrecting from their first attempt.

“Told you.” Brianna said softly, with great satisfaction.

Kate felt her face flush bright red. Brianna’s smile was back, wider than ever.

Sarah, gestured to one of the other counselors, who nodded and started fixing positions and giving tips before they released another arrow. She beckoned Kate and Brianna over to her. “Okay, so here’s the thing. Technically, Brianna’s right”— she held up a hand at Kate’s sharp breath and soon to be sharp comeback— “but archery, like everything else, is about practice, not luck. Understand?”

Kate met Sarah’s steady gaze and nodded solemnly. “I understand,” she said formally.

By the end of camp, her fingers were blistered, her forearm had constant rope burn from the bowstring, and she carried home the first-place archery trophy and set it on her dad’s desk so he could see it when he got home.

~

VBBBBT. VBBBBT. VBBBT. Dammit. Nap time’s over.

Kate groaned, forced her eyelids open and found Amy beyond them, leaning against one of the big kettles that stored whatever hoppy horror Hardison intended to release on the menu next. Kate groaned again, checked her phone, had she screwed up her alarm system? Nope, by her count she had two minutes left of break.

“Watching people sleep is creepy,” she informed Amy, pulling herself to her feet. She tugged at her shirt self-consciously. It looked as rumpled as her brain felt.

Amy sighed the sigh of a long-suffering sane person. A week into her stay at Chez-Brewpub and Kate knew the sigh well. “I wondered where your new hiding spot would be.”

“It’s not for hiding, it’s for privacy. And no one comes back here. This is the weird beer.” And in a security camera blindspot.

“Hardison might,” Amy argued, trotting to keep with Kate’s ever quickening steps. These conversations always seemed to become a literal race, since Amy, as much as she drove Kate insane with her big worried eyes, was actually cool. She wouldn’t tell any of the trio about Kate’s breaktime naps, as long as Kate didn’t majorly mess up. It gave Kate a powerful piece of (hah) leverage, particularly since her legs were longer.

“He’s probably napping now. We were up late playing video games.”

“You used that excuse last time.”

“Doesn’t make it less true,” Kate lied airily.

Amy sighed. “Maybe don’t do that tonight?”

“When I’m just starting to get back my Mario Kart reputation?” Honestly, Kate wasn’t sure how any of this had gotten to the point that she had a whole semi-fictional Mario Kart feud going with Hardison. They’d played a few times, and both won a few times, but she’d built it into this thing to make an excuse for Amy about why she kept napping on breaks. ‘Cause explaining that you have insomnia is so terrible and shameful, right, Compli-Kate-r?

No, just stupid. Stupid and frustrating, which was way worse than terrible and shameful, seriously. Terrible and shameful secrets had soap opera drama to keep viewers invested. Stupid and frustrating secrets just had a teenage girl spending way too much time researching her dad’s acquaintances on the internet at four in the morning and conning Parker into teaching her to cat nap in increasingly weird places. At least terrible and shameful secrets came with appropriately suitable reasons.

Kate’s stupid and frustrating insomnia secret came with an Amy, and Amy came with helpful suggestions like don’t stay up so late and tell Hardison you need a few days off. Kate got days off, obviously. On her last one, Parker had taken her to case a building and map the night security guard patterns. She’d finally learned what the haircut trick was. Awesome way to spend a day—and night—off.

As for staying up late, well, she was hanging out with a bunch of criminals whose schedule made a mockery of circadian rhythms, but it’s not like she could tell Amy that. All three of them could bicker on just about any topic, except telling Amy what went on in the back.

“If she wants to know, the girl can ask.” Hardison stated when Kate brought it up.

“And you’ll tell her?”

“Depends.” Eliot had grunted at the same moment Parker said, “Yes.”

Okay, so they could bicker on that topic too. 

Kate wouldn’t have minded the bickering, if she’d had a reliable way of determining what was just them bullshitting and what was serious. But that seemed downright impossible these days, with any topic equally likely to explode from nothing. It felt like walking on a minefield, hanging out with all three of them. 

But she could always find at least one, regardless of the time of night. If she went by Hardison’s logic about survivor bias, that probably meant they weren’t sleeping together, a casual inference her brain wandered into and refused to back out of, no matter how little of her business it was. 

The realization made her feel weird. Not like, the weird of suddenly comprehending your parent’s dysfunctional marriage. Kate had that one already under belt for comparison. Anyway, Hardison, Parker, and Eliot were nothing like her parents. One was obsessed with philanthropy and one was a criminal. Careful comparing apples and oranges, you might just end up with a smoothie. 

No, it was the observation itself that bugged her. Figuring it out. And then feeling...satisfied? Like she was some PI on a stake out and had just gotten the money shot. Or a grifter, analyzing the angles of a mark. It was becoming second nature, looking for those cracks, even when she had no clue how to use (or fix) them. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t like the person she was becoming. The problem was...she did.

See? Crime does run in the family.

Thoughts like that were pointless, and stupid, so of course they felt right at home with everything else swirling around in her brain all night, every night, until Kate gave up and went looking for a distraction. And whoever she found, face lit by the glow of a computer screen, or building finger strength hanging from brickwork, or going at the punching bag in the dead of night— they were all happy to see her. And none of them asked why she too was awake at three in the morning. 

Prisming had turned into a job in and of itself and that was just fine by Kate, who preferred it to tossing and turning through the same stupid nightmare or just an old fashioned, breakneck rampage through her subconscious, like a merry-go-round on a bad acid trip.

But naps. Naps didn’t do that. Naps were nice. She just had to schedule them.

Oh, and her phone actually had a limit to how many alarms it would set. Traitorous bastard.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Amy asked, just before Kate hit the safety of the busy kitchen, where this conversation was verboten.

“Fine!” Kate called over her shoulder, possibly smearing too much cream cheese on that particular bagel. “Gonna get back to work now!”

~

“Um, excuse me?”

Kate almost didn’t register the guy that hesitant voice belonged to. She’d dropped off his water and was just passing his table to get to other customers, expectantly watching her with oh-there-comes-our-waitress-finally-we-can-order expressions. She held up a finger to let them know she’d seen them and turned briefly to face a white man in a pricey, slightly sweaty, blue button-down shirt, nice slacks, a gold Rolex, but an old one, something he’d inherited. Rich off of daddy, she categorized, the thought mostly automatic by this point, she’d been practicing it so much. Kate Bishop did not believe in half-assing a skillset.

“Hi, what can I do for you?” She added just a slight pressure onto the words, to let him know she was busy and on her way somewhere when he interrupted.

“Uh, I don’t really know how this works, but I’d like to speak with Nate Ford? Or uh, a particularly intense blonde woman?”

Kate’s categorization algorithm: “server mode” stuttered and died. Oh, said the thought that bloomed in its absence, this is a Job. “Let me get back to you on that, I have a table waiting.”

The delay irritated him, she could tell, in that all too familiar way of people accustomed to getting what they want. Look, I’m one of them—was one of them—I’m allowed to be all judgy. Technically, everyone’s allowed to be all judgy, it’s called punching up right? And I’m great at punching, I should hit the bag some tonight . . . oh, right. Table 6.

He did, Kate had to admit, patiently wait for her to finish taking the other table’s order, pass it along to the kitchen, and come back around to see him. And while he patiently waited, Kate’s brain not so patiently ran through her options like a choose-your-own-adventure speedrun.

Option 1: Tell the others they had a client. Turn to page 34 to see how Eliot and Hardison handle a job when most interactions become either a fight or an icy silence!

Option 2: Deny she had any idea what the dude was on about: Turn to page 60 to read about his horrific murder after being denied help!

Option 3: Provide her services on the down-low: Turn to page 81 to read about . . .

. . . about what? About Kate actually putting all these random skills to use? About her having a purpose and actually feeling like a fucking hero again? About helping a guy who seemed to need a hand, however nice his shirts were? You have some nice shirts too and look how great you’re doing. 

And okay, so this probably wasn’t what Bobbi meant when she’d told Kate they shouldn’t take a job, and there was a very real chance the trio would figure out something was going on, but well, that would be an interesting test too, right? Hardison had shown her how to loop and edit security cam footage, by accessing the Brewpub’s cameras the other day (and she’d scored a new mostly-secret napping spot to boot). And besides, Kate needed to get out into the city more. And maybe if she gave the trio more space they’d actually have a conversation about the giant boulder in the middle of their relationship.

She came to a halt in front of the rich anxious dude, mind made up. “Hi, I’m back. The people you requested aren’t available, unfortunately, they’re on another case. But I might be able to help. We’re . . . associates.” She gave him a bright, reassuring smile. “Kaitlyn Stewart.”

Rich guy tilted his head, studying her. “Charles. Dodgson,” he said finally, and didn’t offer anything more.

“Well, Charles, I’m on the clock right now—long story,” she added, waving away any explanation with her fingers, “but if you want to meet me in about two hours at the coffee shop down the street, we can chat there.”

Charles looked as if he had several questions about the way she was handling this, but also as if he had no idea how it was supposed to be handled. He nodded acceptance. “Okay.”

“Awes—um, anything I can get you while you’re here?”

He ordered an appetizer, and Kate put that ticket up before going to find Amy.

“Hey, sorry about earlier,” she began when Amy pushed through the swinging doors on the way back to the kitchen.

“It’s fine, I shouldn’t get on you about your life choices. I know I hate it when people do that to me.”

How dare she be all understanding when I’m about to uhh, well . . . “No, you’re right, I’m being stupid. Which is why—” she felt the yawn at the back of her throat and rather than clench her jaw against it, as had become habit, she let it engulf her mouth, hand providing a minimum of cover. “Would you mind if I took off after dinner rush is done? I really should crash.” Skating across truth came the problem of feeling the ice get thin and threaten to drop her into freezing waters she really wanted to avoid. She should crash, would need to, sooner rather than later. Just, the longer she held off, drew it out, the deeper, longer she’d manage to stay under without dreaming. Still, using Amy made her feel like shit.

“Of course! If you want to take off now, I’m sure we’ll manage . . .”

“Nah,” Kate shook her head. “I’m not leaving you short.” I’m not that shitty, okay? Not to mention, Eliot would probably notice.

~

Two hours later, she had a triple-shot Americano—which even at 10 PM, went unquestioned by Portland baristas—and her first client. A quick Google on the way over had given her some information on him, but she made him spill it all over again, to see what he chose to mention.

“Hi. Again. You said your name was Charles?”

“Yes. Or Charlie?”

“Is that a question? Which do you prefer?”

He looked sheepish. “I--everyone calls me Charles.”

“That’s . . . not really an answer. I prefer Kate to Katie, for example.” 

“Not Kaitlin?”

“Hmm? Oh right. Yeah, I generally go by Kate.”

“Makes sense. Seeing as you’re Kate Bishop.” He sat back, watching for her reaction.

Crap. She probably should have seen that coming. She took a sip, a much too hot sip, ohmygodOW, wincing. “So much for anonymity.”

“I’ve watched you before, at a party or two.” He held up his hands, correctly guessing she considered that super-duper creepy. “Seen, I’ve seen you at parties. Long time ago. I think our dads dragged us both.”

“Probably. Shoulda come said hi then, instead of watching. Like a creeper.” She didn’t remember him, but he seemed like the quiet type who’d sit in a corner until he had an opportunity to slip out. Very much not her style.

“I’m . . . not great with social situations,” Charlie offered with some hesitation.

Called it. Kate thought, noting the way his eyes darted around the room and the tense way he hunched forward again, unable to hold that relaxed, in control posture for long.

“Well, if my name precedes me, hopefully my reputation does as well?”

“You have a few contradictory ones, but yeah it does.” His eyes finally came to rest on her, actually focusing on their conversation. “So tell me, why are we meeting in a coffee shop?”

“Because I’m staying with friends and trying to avoid a media circus,” Kate blithely dismissed his question and lobbed one back: “Why are you coming to ask for help in the brewpub where I work?”

“Because my floor manager Alex recommended I come talk to this guy he met there. He said he’d found him on the internet, which is weird—Alex isn’t really an internet type.” 

Right, because that’s the only weird thing about you actually following that advice. “Why’d he recommend you come?”

“He . . . it’s complicated, and honestly I’m glad I got you?” Okay, definitely some weird background there. “But, I think someone has stolen Dodgson Electronics IP—intellectual property. Also physical property.”

“Corporate espionage? For reals?” You’re going to need Hardis—Shut up, brain.

Charlie sipped at his drink. “We develop and produce high-end batteries, for electric cars mostly. Used to have some military contracts, but those have gone to Stark now. Still, we have a partnership with a small Norwegian carmaker and it’s keeping us afloat.”

“Well, that’s better than sinking, but not . . . ideal?”

“Yeahhh,” he drew the word out in a sigh. “I kinda . . . lost it for a bit. I inherited this company from my father, who’d do anything to make a buck, and he’d inherited it from his father, who . . . wouldn’t. He was a good guy. Cared about the employees. Anyway, I had a nervous breakdown and tried to crash the company and sell it off for scrap.”

“It happens,” Kate said. She’d intended it to be sarcastic, but when Charlie lifted his eyebrows in response, she realized she’d meant it. “It does! And it sucks, and it’s hard to tell that’s what’s going on when you’re in the middle of it.”

“Sounds like experience talking.” He was watching her again. Not watching her like she happened to be the person in front of him who he was talking to, but watching her, like he was trying to see past the surface. 

Kate rubbed the back of her neck, disliking that level of scrutiny. “Second-hand. Superheroes are not a stable bunch. Sounds like you got help?”

“Yeah, so, that’s where we get into Alex coming to talk to a guy named Nate Ford and a . . . lot of weird stuff happened then, with this hypnotist and crazy dreams and I almost jumped off the roof . . .” he trailed off, lost for moment, then shook his head to clear it. Kate resisted the urge to do the same, swept back to her own nightmare rooftop. That version was beginning to take on the solidity of reality, shoving back what had actually happened. What happened was you turned your father over to SHIELD and he d— “And then a weird blonde woman yelled at me to get my head straight and pay attention to the people who needed me.”

What the fuck? Kate blinked as his words registered and forced her back to the present. “It . . . worked?”

“I know it sounds crazy—”

“Understatement.” It also sounded like Parker.

“—but yeah, it did. Company is back under my control, that deal with the Norwegians went through, and I had our accountants go over our finances with a fine-toothed comb to make sure I hadn’t done anything extremely stupid that Wes didn’t manage to catch.”

“Wait,” she held up a hand, hoping she just hadn’t missed this detail earlier, “who’s Wes?”

“Oh! Wes Carroll, my right hand. And left, during that time. He did his best, but I was determined to drive us into the ground, and I’m the boss, for better or for worse.”

Kate made a mental note about Wes. Seemed like the type of person Hardison would do some digging on. “Okay, so the accountants . . .”

“Discovered the sale and delivery of batteries, but no corresponding income. Multiple orders to different shell companies I can’t trace back. According to my computer guys, once I had them look deeper, they found evidence that we’d been hacked, but they can’t tell what data—if any—was stolen.” 

“Hmm, inside job or outside job?” You are so going to need Hardison. Unless you want to call some old friends…

“Outside.” Now it was Kate’s turn to raise doubtful eyebrows, as Charlie protested. “We’re a small company and a big family! I’m the one that broke it, not them. No one there would do something like this. On the razor-thin profit margin we have right now, they need the company to survive to keep their jobs. And it’s a small town. We are the job.”

Right, but self-interest is a powerful motivator, as long as you’re willing to screw other people. She didn’t tell Charlie that, though. Not yet. Might has well eliminate other suspects first. “Okay then, we’ll start with outside. Any likely culprits?”

In answer, Charlie brought out his phone and pulled up a video. On the screen, a motorcycle hugged tight curves and roared . . . no wait, it didn’t roar. Sure, the coffee shop was noisy and there was music playing over the video, but motorcycle commercials made bikes roar. That was standard. Harley-Davidson LIVEWIRE flashed across the screen.

Kate almost knocked over her cup. “You think HD stole your battery? For an electric bike?”

“Developed right here in Portland.” He leaned forward. “Industry people talk. About batteries and the future of electric vehicles and the focus on Silicon Valley. And they talk about the projects not getting off the ground, which, up until surprisingly recently, given that finished bike is about to go on sale included their work on ebikes. Timeline fits, if they raced through testing and didn’t have to worry about R&D.”

“Okay, but they’re like the biggest name in the industry, wouldn’t they just buy the batteries from you if they need them?”

“I’d hope so, but they can save a lot of money if they make it work in house. If someone had recently left my company and gone to work for Harley, then I’d suspect them, but no one has. They’re loyal.”

There are definitely some holes in that logic. “Your people are loyal, but Harley’s people are dicks who possibly stole the designs,” Kate said flatly. Not that it wasn’t a possibility, but Charlie seemed to have some serious blindspots when it came to his own company. His own people.

“Could be a rogue engineer under pressure,” he suggested. “I am an engineer. I know how it is.”

Right, an engineer with a guaranteed job at daddy’s company. Kate understood all too well the pros and cons of that position. In any case, rogue engineer or company-wide conspiracy, breaking into HD sounded like a good way to get arrested. Not that Kate’s skills in that arena hadn’t improved, but she also wasn’t entirely convinced Charlie was on the right track here. Problem was, she had no idea how to verify the hack, or where to start on investigating Charlie’s own people when he trusted them implicitly. She did have some ideas on how to acquire that bike, though. Eliminate the outlier, then move on to the real target. He’ll agree when you prove it’s not them. And if it is, cool. Mystery solved!

“If I bring you one of these Livewire bikes, can you determine if the battery is yours?”

Charlie frowned. “You’re going to steal a bike?”

“Acquire. I’m going to acquire a bike.” Kate grinned and did not elaborate.

“Uh, yeah, I should be able to verify.”

“Cool, don’t break it, I’m going through all this trouble, I’m going to want the bike afterward. Looks sweet, and I don’t have a ride currently.”

“How are you—”

“Leave it to me.”

Chapter Text

“I didn’t mean to,” Kate whispered, voice rough and clawing her way up her throat. Don’t start coughing, don’t start coughing. Every time she coughed, the camp counselors started talking about taking her to the hospital, and then she’d really be in trouble.

“Miss Bishop, your intentions are irrelevant! What were you thinking?”

Kate shrugged. She’d been thinking about Vikings, and floating funeral pyres, and the fire starter kit she’d just learned to use. She’d been thinking about Dummystiltskin, the straw-stuffed target that had been more holes than target and how they’d been joking that he was dead and they should give him a proper warrior’s send-off. She’d been thinking about stealing a canoe, and wisely deciding against it, rallying her group to lasso together a makeshift raft, place Dummy on it, still with a few arrows in him, as a way of honoring his dedication to the cause, and shove it out into the lake. She’d been thinking of the way everyone’s faces lit up as the fire ignited on the rag wrapped around the tip of her arrow. She’d been thinking of arc, and force, and trajectory, and the way the orange flickering shaft shot out over the lake, plunging into the dark shadow of Dummy, barely lit. It caught, and then she’d been thinking of organizing the others, so they all had a chance to fire a flaming arrow and the points of light hitting the burning straw, the raft, and mostly, the water surrounding it. She’d been thinking this was the best idea she ever had.

She had not been thinking that what floats out on to the lake, will eventually float back. Sure she set a bunch of highly flammable materials ablaze, but surrounded by water. What could go wrong?

“Your actions burned down half the camp!”

The small half, Kate wanted to argue, but pointing that out would probably be a bad idea. She tried for a pitiful cough instead, but her lungs took the sympathy ploy as permission to go all out and for a while she couldn’t say anything, stupid or otherwise.

The small half had mostly been cabins. The ones closest to the edge of the water, where the burning raft pyre bumped up into some unhelpfully placed underbrush and caught, in the early hours of the morning. Kate had been dreaming of smoke and fire and awoke to find it, licking outside the window.

After that, everything was a blur of screams and shouts and running from cabin to cabin, dragging bleary kids out while shrieking warnings at the top of her lungs. And running back into cabin 7, because the stupid new counselor in that cabin forgot Roz, Miles’s bear, and everyone knew that Miles needed that bear more than he needed oxygen.

Kate was discovering a great personal need for oxygen by the time she managed to calm the coughing fit. It did the trick of halting the lecture, though. The nurse gave her an inhaler, showed her how to shake, press, and gasp, and escorted her to the familiar cot in the corner of her office, with a reassuring, “Your parents will be here soon, and we’ll sort this all out, don’t worry.”

But her parents didn’t come.

Instead, they sent Mr. Jordan, who Kate knew vaguely, as a large, imposing man she’d seen in her father’s study, shortly before he’d shut the door. He came with his checkbook and with the clear understanding that should enough money change hands, Kate would be permitted to stay at camp rather than be sent home, as they wouldn’t want to ruin anyone’s summer.

“She can’t stay at camp!” Kate heard the director shouting in exasperation. “No one can stay! Everyone is sleeping in the rec hall until their parents can come! If her parents authorized you to deal with the situation, then she is yours to handle and good riddance!”

The nurse glared at the door, which should have protected Kate from hearing the exchange, but Kate just sat, listening to the interesting wheeze her lungs made until the door opened and Mr. Jordan stood there, arms folded. “Get your stuff. We’re leaving.”

“I don’t have any stuff,” Kate whispered. “It burnt.”

“One less thing to worry about, then.” He turned on his heel and she followed him. Hours down the road, she realized she’d forgotten the inhaler and spent the rest of the trip trying to swallow coughs down the ragged edges of her throat, while Mr. Jordan glared daggers in the rearview mirror.

Mrs. Perkins had called the doctor the moment Kate got home, and now she had a new inhaler and more control over her own lungs again. She’d also called Mom, who’d talked to Kate all the way from Africa, where she was helping build some orphanage. Mom called her “brave.”

“That’s it,” her father said, as she stood in his study that night. “You’re going to boarding school to learn some discipline. No more running around half wild, with these crazy ideas. Do you realize how much money you’ve cost me today?”

“I can help—”

“Help? You’re a child. One who’s just cost me millions in property damage. Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

“Sorry, daddy,” Kate whispered, her mind full of the arc of lights in the black of the night sky.

~

A job. She had a job, an actual, real, case to solve! Kate practically skipped back to the Brewpub, hurrying upstairs, only to slow at the sound of raised voices. 

“Dammit, Eliot! Quit tryin’ to fuck your way outta this conversation!”

“Damn sight more productive than having it.”

Kate froze. That did not sound like the type of conversation she ought to be walking in on, prism-in-training or not.

Parker came out of the common area, phone pressed to her ear, rolling her eyes. “Yes, they’re at it again,” she said as she walked past. For a moment Kate thought Parker was talking to her, but she kept walking, listening to whoever was on the other end of the line. She watched Parker’s retreating back, feeling utterly useless.

“...then don’t look! If the reality bugs ya so much, go stick your head back into your computer games where it’s just a buncha stats on a screen!”

“At least there I know the damn stats!”

Definitely not getting in the middle of that one. Kate quietly slipped into her room. At least she had a new project now, something actually useful to work on. 

When she’d told Charlie she intended to “acquire” a bike, she hadn’t yet figured out exactly how she intended to go about said acquisition. But the walk back cleared her head, leaving her feeling sharp and full of ideas.

How to find a bike that wasn’t yet on sale? Look for someone who knows someone and got a prototype.

How to look for someone in that category? Instagram. Like Hardison showed me. #livewire #ebike #harley #savingtheplanetbro #keepportlandweird

“Gotcha.” Kate grinned at her phone in satisfaction. She’d thought it might take a few days to find her mark, if it worked at all and here he was, right on her first try. Kevin Dougherty, latest post a few minutes ago, taking a selfie with his bike, outside some dive joint. He’d even included his location data.

“Dude? You’re slumming with that thing?” she muttered at the screen. It was close to midnight, but hopefully he’d just arrived there. No harm in going to see for herself.

If bro wanted to be an idiot, Kate could help him be truly legendary at it. She changed clothes to something more inclined to make a guy forget his own name, and slipped back out, not bothering to tell the trio where she was off to. They had other things to worry about, and Kate had plenty of practice in taking care of herself.

~

Reardan’s was not Kate’s first dive bar experience. Thanks to her life choices, she’d found herself in a number of them, across the multiverse, for that matter, which never really seemed to affect the overall atmosphere of the places. Sticky floors, dim lighting, except for directly above the two pool tables, and a certain sour smell originating in spilled beer, cheap whiskey, and irregularly cleaned bathrooms. Cozy.

A summer storm had rolled in and begun dumping rain during Kate’s walk over, so she decided to use it, making sure to get good and soaked as she walked slowly through the bikes—Kevin’s electric Harley sitting along with the rest—outside in the parking lot. Made it all the easier to spin a story about her car dying and dropping her phone in a puddle and could she use theirs? She’d be happy to buy a drink in return.

“Won’t be necessary,” said a voice. Kate had clocked him already, thanks to the distinctive noise rubber soles made on a sticky floor. She pretended she hadn’t, turned in surprise, and gave her mark a megawatt smile.

“Aren’t you the gentleman.” She swept her eyes up and down, faking appreciation.

Kevin Dougherty, late twenties, hair in a top knot he thought he wore well, with a half-completed sleeve on his left arm. Motorcycle boots, pre-ripped three hundred-dollar jeans, and a linen henley that would have gotten him tossed out of any biker bar not located in Portland, Oregon.

He bought her a long island iced tea, asking, “You ever been to Long Island, baby?” breath hot on her ear as he leaned past her, much too close. She giggled as if she was into it, as if she hadn’t lived in Manhattan, vacationed in the Hamptons, wandered through the society he dreamed of.

“A looong time ago,” she drew out the word, a joke he could wrap his head around. The others around the pool table shouted for him to get back or forfeit the game. “I’ve never played pool, though.”

“C’mon, I’ll let you shoot for me.” He guided Kate away from the bar, her “phone call” forgotten.

Everything was going according to plan.

She tried a shot for Kevin, almost scratching the cue ball, and after that stood back to watch as he handily beat the other guy, even down a turn thanks to her clumsiness.

“Wanna try?” he asked, causing some of the other guys to groan and a few to chuckle in a way she didn’t like. If they try anything, it’s their loss.

“Sure!” In between shots—on the pool table, Kate was many things, but a fool wasn’t one of them; at this point her half-empty glass was just a Long Island Tea, sans ice—it was easy to reroute him to talking about his bike, a prototype electric Harley a friend of his dad’s had given him. “It’s called the LiveWire. They make ‘em right here in Portland. Should be rolling off the lot for the plebes to buy soon, but those won’t have all the bells and whistles mine does.”

“Bells and . . . whistles?” She should feel dirtier about this, she thought, but it felt like a distant concern, held back by a slight buzz and the wide, scattered expanse of her attention, busy noting where everyone was in the bar, the game she was intentionally, sloppily, losing on the table, the hand of Top Knot Kevin, drifting closer to areas that would earn him at least two broken fingers if he went there. She didn’t have enough room to feel skeazy about the innuendo and part of her relished that. Something she didn’t need to overthink.

“Yeah, no speed limiter for one thing. Wanna get out of here, take a ride?”

She pulled away, pouting. “I’m doing good at this game!” she said, pointing to the table where she was definitely not doing good.

“You’re gonna lose and lose bad, girly.” A few of the other guys laughed.

Kate raised her chin, trying to appear proud and more than a little drunk. Not all that hard to do, though she’d been careful to watch her glass all night. “If I win, how ‘bout I take you on a ride? On MY new bike.” She smirked a challenge at him, feeling a thrill as Kevin laughed and dangled his key fob in front of her (keyless, easy to hack with a receiver—see? Brain’s working just fine).

“You got a deal,” he told her. Rich kids. So bored with their safety net, they cut holes in it for a thrill.

Kate scanned and came up with a napkin and a pen from the bar. “Write it down. Make it all”—she hiccuped—“official.” There’s a weird power in this. It was coming easier now, like following beats she’d always known. This is the way Bobbi and Nat work. And that made it more than okay.

Kevin scribbled something on the napkin and Kate stared at it blearily, but not as blearily as they thought she was staring at it, before signing her own fake name and straightening. “Gentlemen,” she began in her best posh British, which was pretty damn good if she did say so herself, “let’s play some billililiards.”

Kate was not a pool expert. She’d never actually played seriously, just knocked a few balls around a table at various gatherings, but usually the billiards room was the men’s domain, and she, the daughter, was summarily uninvited to the fun. Plus, cigars tended to be involved and she hated cigars. Still, she figured she’d be pretty awesome at it, considering her other skills. And she was right. What, like calculating angles and force is hard?

Possibly a little too good. Really, that explained everything that happened in the next few hours.

She felt a little too good, after too much time not feeling good at all.

She played a little too good of a game, forgetting after a while to be careful to keep the score close, make stupid mistakes, be a rookie with beginner’s luck. She was a beginner, sure, but this wasn’t luck, just a transfer of work: angles and force.

She was a little too good at extracting that fob from Kevin’s hand when he protested she must have cheated and refused to turn over the bike that was now rightly hers. She hadn’t cheated. Kate Bishop did not cheat.

Feeling good about the hustle and the game and the relaxed state her brain had finally, blissfully arrived at, she sauntered out of the bar, into the rain to find her new ride. Okay, so it would be taking a quick detour to be briefly disemboweled by Charlie, but then, all hers. And if the thing has a tracker? Are you telling Parker and Hardison then? Somehow hiding the bike when you live with them? Kate shook the buzzing questions out of her head. Problems for later. She swung her leg up over the engine.

Five of them jumped her.

Usually, time slowed in fights. Usually, she could feel milliseconds tick by as she lined up shots, anticipated where her target would be, took aim, and fired. Usually.

Now, time became a blur of rain and blunt fists and shadows of men. She couldn’t find her focus or her footing, off-balance and dragged backward. She kicked, twisted to get away and muscle memory took over, serving her well as she went on the attack, dealing with the first two that came at her in quick sharp movements that felt disconnected from her brain.

Third down, and she was turning toward the fourth, whipping strings of hair out of her face, when the fifth came up from behind and got in a solid punch to her temple, dropping her to rough asphalt, and then the fight wasn’t over, but suddenly things seemed a hell of a lot more real.

In the wet dark, hair still in her fucking face, Kate listened to them laughing, brain finally producing enough adrenaline to snap into focus and mentally track the voices. Definitely more than the original five. Her fingers scrabbled the pavement for loose stones and came away with nothing but ripped fingernails and yeah, this looked bad.

Someone grabbed her from behind, and she screamed, really hoping to get some bystander to provide just a few seconds of distraction. She could do a lot with a few seconds of attention elsewhere. He tried to cover her mouth with his hand, so she bit him, obviously, and got punched soundly, for that, but the stinging ear and ringing head were worth it. She would make this as unpleasant as possible for them even if it made it worse for her, because they would think twice, they would.

Someone roared. The laughter turned into yells, and she had her distraction. Kate used it, barreling forward as heads turned, lashing out a foot to kick one in the throat, whipping to the left to deliver a sound punch to another’s kidneys. He dropped. No one takes a kidney punch well.

Backing off to take stock, she found half the occupants of the bar on the ground, groaning, with six still standing, and a snarling Eliot between her and them, blood and rainwater dripping from his fingers.

“C’mon,” he growled and at first she thought the direction was for her, but no, he’d beckoned them forward, using his body as a sentient bowling ball, sending his opponents falling into each other like pins. She dove in to help. This had stopped being fun a long time ago. Now it was just grim, bitter work.

She almost missed the gun one of the guys pulled out, surprisingly late given how badly they’d been getting their asses whupped by the two of them. Eliot didn’t, though he was too far away to do anything but yell “GUN!” in time for her to see the extension of a hand into the silhouette of a pistol. She dropped, rolled, and ducked behind one of the bikes, as the gun barked.

“Eliot!?” she screamed, as her fingers finally located a fucking rock and she rose from behind the bike to pitch it full force at the shooter’s temple. He dropped, and she glanced over at Eliot, who’d become the last one standing in that short amount of time, his right hand carefully clamped over his left bicep.

“Graze. Strip that,” he ordered sharply, jerking his head at the gun. Kate obeyed, trying very hard to think about things like fingerprints on every single piece, and how Hardison had shown her how to hack and compile fingerprint data from myriad different databases last week, so they could go in and wipe her prints from the system. Except—Hardison won’t forgive you for this. Or Parker. You fucked up. 

1. I fucked up.

She found the fob she’d dropped earlier on the ground. See if this had been an actual key . . . basic girl defense 101, that.

“C’mon,” Eliot growled, this time to her, and she felt the disgust in his tone vibrate in the pit of her stomach. “We gotta get movin’.”

“I won it.” Kate stared at the bike, the garish lightning bolt along its tank distorted by raindrops. Like that matters now. She held up the fob.

Eliot stared at her, rain dripping from strands of hair. “Fuckin’ Hawkeyes,” he muttered, snatching the fob out of her hand and swinging his leg over the bike, biting back a curse. “Let’s go.”

“I should dri—”

“Not on slick streets with limited visibility, the aftereffects of adrenaline kickin’ in, and no safety gear. That’s too much stupid for one night, now get on.”

She didn’t dare argue with that tone. It simply left no space for the possibility. Kate got on the back of the bike. 

They didn’t go to the Brewpub.

Instead, Eliot took the bike off in another direction entirely, north, to a small house in a quiet neighborhood near St. John’s bridge. The roar of a standard bike wouldn’t be welcome there, this time of night, but the e-bike coasted through dark, slick streets, no louder than the rain. He stopped in the driveway, had her dismount as he punched a code into a keypad by the garage, and walked the bike in, muttering about stupid electric bikes that behaved all wrong and how Parker and Hardison weren’t allowed near that thing.

Kate followed him through to the house proper, blinking as he flipped on a light switch. The house looked plain, neat, and barely lived in. Eliot, in proper light, looked like shit. She probably didn’t look much better, but she didn’t have patches of blood seeping through her shirt from reopened cuts either. Or a coagulated mess of blood and henley drying on her bicep.

“Bathroom’s down that hall, go get cleaned up,” he ordered, as if she was the one bleeding everywhere. She glanced down at her clothes, soaked in both water and, yup, blood, though she knew most of it wasn’t hers.

“I can help—”

“You’ve done enough,” Eliot snapped, already turning away.

Kate bit her lip. “Should I call—”

“NO.” He limped to the kitchen, opened one of the cupboards and pulled out the type of first-aid kit that would have been ludicrously overstocked in most kitchens. Kate had had a similar one back in her apartment. So did Clint. Natasha and Bobbi too probably. Came with the territory. “I’ll handle it,” he said, dismissing her. Again.

Kate, all too aware of how much she’d fucked everything else up tonight, left him to it.

The bathroom was like the rest of the house, functional and nondescript, but the shower had plenty of hot water, so she rinsed the blood, rain, and gravel out of her hair, relishing the sting of soap in the cuts on her hands. If she focused on that, she could ignore how they were starting to shake, the looming awareness of how close that fight had been, what would have happened to her if Eliot hadn’t—

Stop. Now. Don’t go there. Problem was, she didn’t have any better place to go. If that was Door #1, then Door #2 asked why Eliot had been following her in the first place and for how long, and Door #3 asked what Parker would do to her when she found out. It probably wouldn’t involve being dangled by her ankles off a high building. Parker found that fun. What torture would Parker actually deem terrifying?

The giggle started deep in her chest and rose, like particularly excitable champagne bubbles, up through her nose and throat, making her snort and gasp, unable to stop. It wasn’t funny. She couldn’t breathe; almost lost her balance as she slid down the shower wall to sit in the bathtub. Water pounded down her back. She couldn’t stop shaking.

Eventually the giggles abandoned her, as quickly as they’d come, leaving her somehow wrung out and brittle, while also sopping wet. That thought almost started them again, but Kate clamped her jaw against that betrayal. Next came the process of getting her body back under her control. She turned off the water, slither-banged out of the tub, onto a cushy floor mat—plush memory foam that sunk under her knees. The towel she pulled off the rack beside her was thick and full as well. Kate buried her face in it, wiping away snot and tears along with the water. The shakes became shivers and goosebumps, easy enough to trick with the help of the comfy robe hanging on the back of the door. It’s Eliot’s. You should leave it for him. But he’d ordered her to take a shower, and her skimpy clothes were filthy, torn, soaking wet. Not to mention, not something she wanted Eliot to see her in anyway.

There. Warm now, almost too warm with all the steam in the air. Kate cracked the door and took a careful breath of cooler air before she stepped out into the chilly atmosphere of the living room.

She found Eliot sitting at the small kitchen table, wearing only boxers, the remains of the rest of his clothes cut away and piled on the floor. Even cutting them away from the angry red wounds—two older ones on his back and thigh, and the new bullet graze on his arm—must have sucked. Eliot sat very still, slightly shivering, his breathing carefully controlled, his hand not so much. It shook badly as he tried to slide the curved suture needle through the torn skin on his arm.

I’m not the only one with the shakes. It didn’t make her feel better exactly, but somehow, steadier. Something she could actually fix.

“This is handling it?” Kate’s mouth asked, because her mouth, like the rest of her, had left sense back in New York. A small part of her brain kicked her, insisting she be more contrite, that this was all her fault. She’d never been good at listening to it. Anyway, doing was better than not doing. She grabbed a pair of gloves.

Eliot’s jaw clenched. “I got—”

“A tear that needs both subdermal and dermal sutures here, and I’d love to know how you were planning on fixing up your back.” She took the needle from him, hands completely steady now that they had a purpose. At this point, Kate just felt like a passenger to whatever her body decided to do next.

“You know what you’re doin’?” Considering how pissed he’d been earlier, and the way his hands shook, Kate was surprised at the calm steadiness of the question.

“My partner’s Clint Barton, remember?” As if he was likely to forget. Eliot sighed and handed her the needle.

She slid the needle through, slow and steady, bracing the skin against Eliot’s involuntary tensing. “And I’ve been fighting monsters across the multiverse since I was sixteen.” Pull silk through, knot off, start again. “Comes with the territory.”

Eliot grunted, which was pretty substantive conversation, both for Eliot, and for anyone having a needle repeatedly pulled through traumatized flesh. Focus on what’s in front of you.

“I’m probably not as good as Park—watch it!” she said as Eliot flinched and the needle bit deeper.

“DAMMIT, KATE. Careful!”

“I am being careful! You get your guilt reflex under control!”

“My guilt—You call tonight bein’ careful??”

See this is what happens when you let your mouth have its say, Kate. “No, I—Things got out of hand.”

“That what you call it.” Eliot muttered dryly, still again, except for the remaining runnels of rainwater, still dripping from his hair.

“Yes, that’s what I call it. And why the fuck were you following me around Portland in the middle of the night?!”

“Because you’re runnin’ off to be an idiot in the middle of the night!”

“I can handle myself!”

“Clearly.”

“Hey, you’re the one who ended up shot, not me.” Oh, fantastic comeback. Great job Kate-monster.

“You would have! And then what’d I tell your folks, huh?”

“What fucking folks?!?” Kate didn’t realize she shouted the words until they were out. She sat back, scrubbing eyes that had no business being blurry against the shoulder of her robe.

“Kate—”

“Shut up and hold still.” Focus on the job in front of you.

He did, though the holding still lasted longer than the shutting up. “I didn’t mean your shithead of a father rottin’ in SHIELD. Circus—”

“Clint isn’t my guardian,” she interrupted. “He’s not responsible for me, and he sure as hell doesn’t stalk me all night to make sure I’m a good little girl who makes good little choices. That’s not his job.” Though he did ambush me on a date dressed as a ninja to test my abilities, but that’s basically normal for Central Park. “And I’m not a kid. I’m twenty . . . something, I’d have to check in with Prodigy to get the math, but I spent years bouncing around dimensions with my team trying to defeat an evil entity who took over their parents. Not mine, though! Even a multiverse conquering being could figure out that was a dead end.” She snipped off the final thread on his arm, pleased at how her stitches and tone stayed mostly even. “Turn so I can do your back.”

“Make sure you clean it. Thoroughly.” He shifted, grunting slightly as she started cleaning the wound in the small of his back. This one wasn’t too bad, though the stitches seemed newer than the others she’d seen and something was...different about the cut as well. Only a few of the sutures had popped, however, the rest neat and holding strong. Parker was good at this. She just wished she knew enough to understand why it was different. Distinctive. Briefly, Kate weighed the possibility of asking Eliot to explain. He generally liked explaining things. Probably not gashes in his own flesh though. Just a suspicion.

“That doesn’t mean no one’s lookin’ out for you, Kate,” Eliot said finally, interrupting her internal debate. “You don—UNNG”

Her stupid hand had started shaking again. “Sorry.” At least stabbing him had stopped whatever stupid platitude he’d been about to impart. For a badass, Eliot could be nauseatingly earnest. And also kind of a hypocrite? “But that’s a moot point when you’ve been Simon and Garfunkling it up with Hardison.” 

Eliot choked, the skin around the nape of his neck turning bright red. She’d meant the whole I am a rock, I am an iiiiiiislllaaaand” thing (and a bit of the Boxer, too, considering how much she found him at the bag in the gym) but Eliot’s mind had definitely found another meaning.

“Stay outta my relationships, darlin’.”

“You seem to be doing that just fine without my help,” Kate couldn’t help needling him, relieved they were moving away from her own fucked up life. Needling! She bit the inside of her cheek to stop the laugh. 

Eliot growled in frustration.

“Oh, am I getting under your skin?” She slid the needle in again to make her point. Ha. Skin. Point. Oh goddammit. She tried to stop the rising giggle, but it escaped through her nose in an ugly snort instead.

“You’re doin’ fine,” Eliot said, after a slight pause and in a softer tone. He’d realized how close to the edge she was. Shit. Kate forced her breathing back in control, her hands to follow suit. She couldn’t stop the flush of shame that boiled and rose from her core. Eliot was the one who’d been hurt. Not her. He had the right to lose it. Not her.

She finished closing the gap. “Done.” The tremors started again as she pulled off her gloves. Folding her arms helped hide them as Eliot shifted, testing his range of movement.

“Thanks.” He stood, carefully, and disappeared down the hall. She waited for him, focusing on deep breaths and nothing else until her hands stilled, just before he returned in loose sweatpants and a zipped-up hoodie and headed for the kitchen. Oh, and now he’s going to insist on cooking for us too.

“Nuh-uh, sit your ass down.” I’m beginning to sound like Hardison. Standing herself made the room dance briefly—god we’re a mess—but it settled again as she faced off against an equally stubborn Eliot. “You insisted on teaching me to cook, right? I’ll make us food.”

He opened his mouth, probably to argue, because that’s what Eliot did. She stepped around him, banging open cupboards as she searched for something quick and easy that she wouldn’t screw up too badly.

“I ain’t gonna cook us a three-course meal—” It almost sounded like a whine. Eliot. Whining.

“No, because you’re going to sit and let someone else in the kitchen, Chef.” Ramen. Eliot stocked his safehouse with actual ramen packets. Not like, that really bad cup ramen stuff America loved to slurp down, but definitely dried ramen. Cool. She could totally make ramen and god that sounded good right about now.

Eliot didn’t sit, hovering at the counter next to the stove, as if anticipating he’d need to step in and rescue the ramen. Like he’d needed to rescue her. Kate filled the pot, brought it over to the stove, setting it down with enough force that water sloshed. When she turned on the gas, igniting the burner, the spilled liquid sizzled. Eliot was watching her and she had no idea what he was seeing. What about her was distinctive right now? Nothing good, probably.

“Right, like you wouldn’t have tried to make it all fancy and gourmet,” Kate said aloud to his silent judging.

His mouth twisted. “Don’t use the packets. They’re full of shit.”

“SEE!”

“Boullion, in the fridge door.”

Kate rolled her eyes but went to yank it open and retrieve a cube of the stuff. She dropped it in the boiling water with a plonk. “Happy now?”

“It’ll do.”

“Good, then sit down.” And stop watching me. Please.

“Nah, I sit down, I stiffen up, and it’s gonna suck.” She opened her mouth to argue, but Eliot plunged on, “An’ I don’t need some snot-nosed teenager tryin’ to tell me how to handle myself!”

Kate almost forgot to add the ramen packets before she turned to yell, “Well, I don’t need some old geezer who’s using the counter to keep from falling over trying to teach me how to make ramen. It’s FUCKING RAMEN, ELIOT.”

The pot boiled over and Kate swore at it, in language that made Eliot raise his eyebrows.

“Lay a wooden spoon across it,” he told her, completely calm as if they hadn’t just been screaming at each other. He was using the counter as a support though, even after she called him on it, which meant he needed the assist. 

She laid the spoon across, like he said, and the water, for some reason Kate would really like to understand the physics of, calmed down. She tried to do the same. “Sorry I called you a geezer. And old. Only one of those is true.” Eliot snorted, and Kate cracked a slight, wobbly smile. “But seriously, you don’t look so hot and Parker’s already going to murder me as it is.”

“I’ll handle Parker,” Eliot promised. He swayed as he pushed himself off the counter, but he made it to the kitchen table and sat without crumpling into a heap, so Kate decided to call that a win. She found bowls and utensils, dividing the pot into two equal portions.

“And Hardison?” She took the bowls over to the kitchen table and set them down to clear the medical supplies from earlier. “He’s not as scary as Parker, but—”

Eliot stirred his ramen, but didn’t eat any, just stared at it. “It’s me they’re gonna be yellin’ at, not you.”

I should push this. Prisming and all that. This is my window. But she just felt…tired. Too exhausted to force that window into a door. No excuses. This is what you’re here to do. Unless you want to fail at yet another thing. “They’re worried. Parker made me promise not to get you hurt. I got you hurt. I should be yelled at.” The words stumbled out, tripping over themselves to escape before she could realize and stop them.

Eliot straightened. “SHE WHA—” his phone, half-buried amid the hastily shoved-aside first-aid supplies, jangled. The noise effectively cut short the eruption of Mount St Hel-iot, thank god.

Great prisming there, Kate. Just. Spectacular. She stared into the remains of her ramen as Eliot found his phone and answered, voice sharp.

Hardison always seemed to talk like he didn’t care who was listening in. Kate had gotten into that habit as a kid, once she’d realized no one was listening, even when they were in the room. She wondered how he’d picked it up, or maybe this was a nature thing, and both of them were predestined to run their mouths while their partners answered in monosyllabic grunts.

It occurred to her, toward the end of this thought, that she should be listening to what was being said, rather than analyzing how loud he was saying it. She blinked, trying to summon wariness to the forefront of her brain. If Eliot told Hardison and Hardison told Parker, Parker might just murder Kate—shit I forgot to listen again. Weariness kept overriding the wariness. Hah. My brain can’t summon two minutes of attention, but wordplay, that it can handle. Eliot said something that sounded suspiciously like her name.

“—hustled some asshole out of his bike and he an’ his friends didn’t take kindly to bein’ beaten by a girl.” Kate summoned the energy to glare at him as he listened to Hardison’s response. “. . . Yeah, of course I had her back, man! She’s okay, we’re okay . . . Well, I was gonna call, soon as I got the . . . fine, come over, the bike needs flippin, don’t it?” He hung up the phone without saying goodbye and flung it down on the table, growling.

“Coulda gone better,” Kate said, or intended to say, though it didn’t sound quite right coming out. “A gentleman woulda covered for my stupidididity.” Okay, that definitely came out wrong.

Eliot grunted. “That’s some adrenaline crash you’re ridin’. Less someone slipped somethin’ in your drink?”

“Nah, I was careful,” she yawned, jaw popping audibly. “Constant vigilance, right, Mad-Eye Moody?” Oh no, that’s fucking hilarious. The giggles welled up in her throat, only to be  interrupted by Eliot shining a light straight into her eyes. . . And that’s not. OW. “What’re you . . . ?”

“No concussion or dilated pupils, jus’ real bloodshot, an’ you’re gonna have a bit of a shiner there. Y’need sleep. Spare room’s up the hall.”

“I should expl—”

“Go, or I’ll carry ya, and both of us will regret it,” Eliot ordered. Only so many battles she could win with him in one night. Have I won any? She was having a hard time remembering. 

Kate stumbled into the bedroom, flopped on the bed, and forgot to care.

Chapter Text

“Arthur, I’m sure your daughter’s very talented, but are you sure this is the best use of investors’ time?”

Kate, careful to keep her back elongated, toes pointed in their fullest stretch, peeked under her arm as she bent double, noting the careful pull of muscles warming up as much as she did the frustration in Johnson’s voice. He wouldn’t actually contradict Dad, he was too much of a toady for that, but he had to be aware he was walking on thin ice here. Dad loved her dancing.

“Of course,” Dad answered smoothly, and Kate could hear the confidence and pride in his voice. “Particularly after Reggie canceled our last meeting to go to his kid’s flute recital. Besides, the wives love it, and at a dinner like this, the most important thing is keeping the wives happy. They’re the ones talking in the cab ride on the way home.” He clapped Johnson on the shoulder, and moved over to where Kate continued stretching, pretending she hadn’t heard a thing.

And of course, rationales like that were important. She knew that. Dad needed to give others reasons they should see her dance. Without those reasons, she wouldn’t be here at all and Dad would be working and miss out too. It was smart, combining their talents.

“Ready, Katie?”

“Kate, Dad,” she said, straightening. “I asked you to call me Kate.”

 “Not this again.” Her father sighed. “You’re a beautiful girl, and I’ve finally found a suitable activity for you that shows it. Only tomboys and hellions go by Kate, and you’re neither of those things,” he said, brushing at the artfully arranged curl pinned and sprayed to look loose. He didn’t move it, couldn’t probably, and Kate shoved back a wonder of why he bothered. She’d finally found a way to make them both happy and she wasn’t going to ruin it. Not this time. “Now go out there and make me proud.”

Kate smiled, let it widen into her stage expression, bright and as plastered down as her hair. The opening strains of her music started, and she left his side to dance for his audience. And for him.

~

Kate gasped awake from a nightmare that someone was holding her down, hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream, to discover Parker standing over her and doing exactly those two things.

“MMMMF!”

“Quiet!” Parker hissed and took her hand away.

Kate, heart slamming inside her rib cage, swallowed the scream bubbling up in her throat and ordered her lungs that they better not start hyperventilating, however well-deserved, because she didn’t think she’d be able to stop.

Parker watched, head tilted like some giant shadowy bird. “Did I scare you?”

“No, this is a totally normal way of waking up,” Kate muttered under her breath, thankful she had any breath to mutter under. She scrubbed at gritty eyes. What time was it?

“Oh,” said Parker. She sounded distracted.

Kate had never quite figured out Parker’s comprehension of sarcasm, or of inappropriate wake-up calls, or what things would freak someone out. “Eliot’s down the hall. Probably.”

“Was it you? He’s telling the truth?” Kate could hear the recrimination even in her flat tone. 

“Y-yeah.” I promised. That’s the one thing I promised. Not to get Eliot hurt. And I managed to fuck it up. “I’m sorry, Parker.”

“I didn’t ask for an apology.” She turned, pausing at the door to toss back over her shoulder: “It’s a nice bike. Won’t be tracked now.” Kate listened for her footsteps down the hall, but of course, the thief didn’t make a sound.

She sat there in the dark, arms wrapping around her knees as her heart calmed down and her thoughts did not. The bike was clear. They’d solved a problem she hadn’t had a solution for but barged in anyway, because that was what she did, always. 

Red numbers on the basic alarm clock by the bed rudely informed her it was just after four. She didn’t know when she’d collapsed in here— great job noticing your surroundings last night —maybe an hour and half of unconsciousness to her sleep tally.

I am so fucking tired of that tally. Just. So. Fucking. Tired.

She should tell them about the job. Eventually, they’d ask why she’d suddenly decided to hit the town and hustle a prototype e-bike from a hipster douche at a dive bar in the wee hours of the morning. Charlie didn’t deserve her screwing something else up and with Eliot involved— because he followed me —tonight wouldn’t be the end of the questions. She should just get it over with. Barge into one more room and explain that she’d . . . what? Failed at that too? 

Technically not yet, despite how shitty last night had gone. She’d gotten the bike. The one thing she hadn’t failed at.

But you will, whispered the voice that followed her always. It had grown louder over the past month, louder than it had dared to be since she was a kid, reckless and defiant, determined to silence the thought that she wasn’t good enough. That everything she touched broke.

No. I won’t. She swung her legs off the bed and stood, wincing at new bruises. Clothes. She was still wearing that bathrobe. She had her stuff from last night, but . . . she finally noticed the duffel bag at the foot of the bed. Parker. Maybe she doesn’t hate me?

Or maybe it’s just a practicality. They’re practical like that. They think things through.

Kate got dressed and slipped out into the hall as silently as possible, then realized it didn’t matter. Eliot and Hardison were at it again.

“Look, I’m tryin’ hard to be cool with it.”

“Cool with it, huh? When have I ever needed your permission?”

“Hey now—”

“What Alec means—”

“I don’t care what he means, Parker, when what he’s sayin’ is that I shoulda left her there to fend for herse—”

“Oh, that is not what I’m saying, are you serious right now? I’m saying you shouldn’t have been there—”

“How is that BETTER?”

“Kate shouldn’t have been there either.”

“She’s a teenaged vigilante goin’ by the name of Hawkeye! What’d you expect?!”

Kate glared at the closed door at the end of the hall. Plan A it was then. She located her phone in the pile of discarded clothes in the bathroom and the fob Eliot had left on the kitchen table. Time to vigilante it up. 

There was barely any battery left in her phone, but enough to send Charlie a message that she had the bike and to meet her in Cathedral Park, under the bridge. Rather than risk the garage door, she guided the bike awkwardly through the side door and walked it down the block before starting the almost silent engine. The arches of the bridge loomed in the predawn light, as she cruised down to the park.

Charlie arrived about an hour later, hauling a trailer and looking like he’d slept about as much as Kate had. He didn’t come alone.

“So you didn’t have another psychotic break,” called the man who climbed out of the driver’s side of their truck. “That really is Kate Bishop, Miss Hawkeye, herself!”

Amazing how a tone can place you on a pedestal and a plinth at the same time. Or a pyre. What is a plinth anyway? Kate turned to face the new person, sighing. “The one, the only,” she muttered, going heavy on the sarcasm. Tall, handsome, confident . . . Kate had a type and he should have been nailing— ewww no, goddammit brain .

“Yeah, but not really, am I right?” he smirked. Kate tried not to emulate Eliot and growl, but god was it tempting.

“Hey Kate, this is Wes Carroll, the guy I told you about. Seriously, the company would not exist if it wasn’t for him.”

“Also, no one in their right mind should trust Mr. Dodgson to haul a trailer from Oxford to Portland. Worst. Driver. Ever.” Wes winked at her, like Kate should have been in on some joke. Whatever it was, clearly not a funny one. 

Charlie rubbed his palms against his pant leg. “There’s the bike,” she said, speaking only to him, which got Wes’s hackles up, based on the way his lip curled and smoothed out again. Dude does not like being ignored, does he. “I expect it back in one piece.”

“Where’d you get one so fast?”

“Doesn’t matter, it won’t be tracked. But no one else ,” she stressed, glancing at Wes, “can know about it, that’s your ass on the line.”

“Yeah, I know. Give me a day or two and I’ll let you know if we’re barking up the right tree.” Charlie gave her a reassuring smile. “Thanks for coming through for me.”

What’s the probability that he’s stealing the bike in some sort of weird reverse IP theft? That’s crazy right? Totally stupid idea generated by a lack of sleep? Okay, great brain, thanks for reassuring me on that front. Kate watched the trailer pull off, as the sun rose, hitting the points of the bridge high above her.

She should walk back to the safehouse. It wasn’t that far, and either the trio were still arguing, had argued themselves to a standstill and moved on to . . . other activities . . . or they’d noticed she was gone. Her only mostly dead phone revealed the last one to not be the case, which made Kate oddly relieved. She hadn’t quite forgiven Eliot for the vigilante thing yet.

He’s not wrong.  

Right. Sure. Of course not. They’re the experts and I’m the...the fledgling. Except I’m not. I’m capable of making my own choices and fighting my own battles —

— Last night —

I said fighting. Not necessarily winning.

So he shouldn’t have been there? Rescued you?

Kate rubbed at her temple, wishing that the other, practical Katie in her head would just shut up for once. Take a nap. A long one. One without any alarms to wake her and ask questions Kate didn’t have answers to. If I don’t get to sleep, the least she could do is get some for me.

I need to make my own choices. Even the shitty ones. 

Are they stopping you?

No, not technically. Just. Watching. Parker in her vents, and Hardison with his cameras, and Eliot, who simply looked and saw everything as if it was illuminated by a flashlight in the dark. All three of them, keeping an eye on her , like. Like. 

Surveillance photos. Hidden in Dad’s desk. In that stupid red safe Clint stole. 

It’s not the same , Thought-Katie protested, but her heart wasn’t in it. 

Without really thinking about it, her feet had started setting themselves down, one after the other, heading back in the direction of downtown, and away from the safehouse.

She didn’t really intend to walk back to the Brewpub, until she’d walked for two hours, getting already more than halfway there, and she hadn’t come up with anything better. She’d figured she’d plan what to tell them, or how, or something while she walked, but mostly she gathered only snippets of thoughts, too small to be any use, that swirled around in her head, like particulate matter.

A few blocks away from her inevitable destination, she heard someone call her name, tensed at the sound of running footsteps, and turned to find an out-of-breath Amy, who still managed to gasp, “What happened?!” when she saw Kate’s face.

“I . . .” . . . had my ass whupped, then saved . . . “. . . didn’t take your advice.” She’d forgotten, until that moment, that Amy’d covered for her, because Kate had lied to her. “I’m sorry. I used you, and your niceness, and I’m not entirely sure it was for a good reason.”

Amy looked concerned, which made Kate feel even worse. “Did they get what’s coming to them?”

An odd question for her to ask, but it might have been the only question that helped. “Yeah,” Kate said, feeling a small, fierce smile shape her expression as if it belonged to someone else. “They absolutely did.”

“Good. Not that I’m forgetting the other thing—but I’m on my way to grab coffee and breakfast before opening up. Hardison texted me last night that you might not be coming in today, which, now I can see why, but you’re here, sooo . . . ?” she left the question trailing, for Kate to pick up if she wanted to.

Kate blinked, not quite sure which implied question she should be answering. “I could use like, a gallon of coffee.”

She was answered with a grin Kate doubted she deserved as Amy fell in to walk next to her, their hands brushing. The contact stung Kate’s battered knuckles and she would have accepted that, but Amy glanced down and saw the cuts and bruises. She gently claimed Kate’s hand to study them. “In movies, punching people never seems to hurt the puncher.”

Kate decided not to ask how Amy knew she’d been punching people. Her face definitely looked like someone’d done the same to her, and besides, she was just grateful Amy kept dancing around the questions Kate didn’t want to answer. “Basic principle of physics.”

“Equal and opposite force,” Amy supplied, and slid her fingers loosely through Kate’s, without closing them.

It felt . . . nice . Kate swallowed, thrown by the way her heart thudded in her chest. 

They magically found the last free table in a crowded coffee shop awash with too many bodies and their too-loud voices. Kate stayed at the table to mark their territory, her back up against the wall, arms folded. A few people approached to see if they could share or borrow the other chair and left in a hurry when they saw her expression.

Amy, returning to the table with her arms full, giggled. Not at her, which was important, though Kate couldn’t have identified how she knew that. “You’re starting to look like Eliot.”

She felt her face twitch at that, biting her lip against saying anything she’d regret, which was probably anything that came out right about now. Everything felt too bright, too loud, too on edge, but that was probably just her, and Amy didn’t deserve to get Kate’s baggage rerouted onto her flight. Just where did THAT metaphor come from? Amy didn’t push it, sliding Kate’s coffee and a cheese danish over to her and digging in her bag to pull out a battered pad of paper.

“What’s that?” Kate asked, desperate for anything outside of her own personal thought cyclone. Hah, brainstorm!! The coffee slid down her throat, hot enough that she could feel it travel through her esophagus and down into her rib cage. She sent the danish after it in a couple of bites.

“This is a good place for people watching,” Amy answered, scanning the crowd. “I like to see how quickly I can capture what makes them . . . them. You know—whatever caught my eye in the first place.” She glanced over at Kate. “You’d definitely qualify.” 

“Need practice drawing bruises?”

“No. Well, yes, I need practice drawing everything, but your face—it’s got a lot more going on than just bruises.”

She’d hidden a question in there, tucked it just out of sight, but Kate heard it anyway, and shifted, caught between deciding to leave and making her excuses to do so. Yet another person watching you.

Amy smiled and turned away, rather than press, and began sketching a service dog curled out of the way under his owner’s chair. Kate watched her work, realizing she hadn’t really minded Amy’s gaze. It held no pressure or expectations, real or imagined. Then, because staring at Amy was getting slightly obvious, she too ended up studying the service dog, and missing Clint and Lucky back in New York. She pulled out her phone to text him, but it was dead. Damn, she really could have used a pic of his goofy one-eyed dog grin right now.

“I know who you are.” Amy’s eyes were still on her pad of paper, but her hand had stilled.

“Excuse me?” Kate stammered, dragging her brain back across the country.

“Your name isn’t Kaitlyn.” Now the girl’s dark eyes were on her, open and honest and knowing. Now, Kate felt seen .

Kate’s breath caught in her throat. “I can’t talk about this here.” You talked about it in a coffee shop with Charlie last night . Yeah, but I was being an idiot last night. That’s been firmly established.

“Okay then, c’mon.” Amy gathered up their trash and tossed it on their way out the door, something in her tone pulling Kate to follow as if they were tied together by a string. She didn’t say anything as they walked back a block and turned, Amy leading Kate up a sheltered flight of stairs to a nondescript door. “Welcome to my place.”

Kate stepped past the door into a riot of color. It should have been overwhelming. Peachy sunshine curtains let light in to stream over bright blue walls, paintings, tapestries, plants . . . Kate didn’t know where to look first, but the whole effect wasn’t one of chaos, but cohesion.

“This is . . . incredible.”

Amy blushed, ducking her head. “Portland’s gray most of the year; in here, I get my own private jungle.” She pointed to a cushy, deep red sofa. “Sit.”

“I’m fi—” Kate began, got a flashback of last night’s argument with Eliot, and sat. The couch dipped as Amy sat as well. Kate, surprised to find her eyes had closed in that short time, blinked them open. “So, I didn’t mean if you brought me up to your incredible jungle escape I would talk about . . . stuff,” she warned, figuring going on the defensive was her best bet.

“Okay,” Amy said. “I was almost kidnapped from the Brewpub’s loading dock.”

Whatever she’d been expecting, that wasn’t it. “Almost?” Of all the dumb responses, Kate.

“Yeah. Parker stopped them.” She rubbed her palms on her thighs. Had Parker explained who she was? Also, only Parker? Where were the others while bad guys were kidnapping their best waitress. Wait—why were bad guys kidnapping a waitress?? Server, growled her mental Eliot. 

“No offense, but why would someone want to kidnap you?”

“My dad runs a multinational, billion-dollar company.” She took a deep breath, meeting Kate’s eyes. “Better than your dad, it sounds like.”

Ah.

Amy gave her a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“That boat sailed last night, actually. You’re the third person to recognize me in the past twelve hours. But how did you . . . ?”

“Oh, I just have a weird confluence of information, thanks to weekly family dinners where Dad only talks about the business world in hopes that I’ll suddenly find it super fascinating and give up my dreams of art school. After I finally get up the courage to tell him about said art school dreams.” She blew out a breath. “Which, to answer the question you haven’t asked, is why I’m working as a server. Anyway, you and your dad, uh, came up in the news and thus in family dinner conversation.”

“Should be some pretty good ammunition for your argument right there.” She tried not to sound bitter. “So, what, you saw a picture and realized I was—”

“No, I didn’t put it together until I saw you all beat up this morning. Do you want some ice for that eye, by the way?”

“It’s fine.”

“Okay . . . Anyway, I promise I wasn’t trying to spy on you, like I didn’t even look up a picture of you—Kate Bishop you—to check until I was waiting in line at the coffee shop. And even then, I wasn’t sure I should say anything; it’s none of my business. But...I don’t know...you looked like you could use someone to talk to. Honestly. And I get that. I don’t know how to talk about what happened to me with anyone except Parker, and she’s cool but you get the feeling being kidnapped is a pretty boring activity in her life.”  

Kate didn’t say anything, mostly because her brain had stopped providing her with coherent options. That’s new. 

“That’s another thing,” Amy continued, plunging headfirst into the silence between them, “they’re all kinda like that, even if they don’t mean to be. I started thinking about that and how you turned up right after Parker, Hardison, and Eliot got back from one of their weird trips—Eliot looking like he’d been thrown through a window—and I’ve never asked about what they do, but like I said, Parker stopped me from being kidnapped once, and they all randomly drop weird bits of information . . . are they Avengers? Like you?” 

Kate choked at the sudden question, which didn’t lend itself well to brushing off suspicion in a smooth and effortless way. “Uhm.” Yeah, she had nothing.

Amy leaned forward on the couch as she gained momentum into direct questions. “You said Eliot was army buddies with your best friend. That’s Hawkeye, right?”

Kate sighed. “Yeah. I was trying to keep that as close to the truth as possible.”

“So . . . I’m right?”

What happened to ‘Amy isn’t nosy about what we do?’

“Nooot exactly—um.” Kate forced herself to sit up a little straighter. Her couch has no right being this comfy. Focus, Kate. Don’t screw this up. “Okay, here’s the thing. It’s kinda like outing people, right? Only person I get to out is myself.”

“Are you . . . outing yourself?” Amy asked carefully, head tilted just so.

God, America’s going to be pissed she missed this convo. “Okay, yes, I am Kate Bishop, one of two people using the Hawkeye name. Yes, Eliot has a . . . let’s say ‘history’ with the other one. But it would be really uncool for me to explain that, confirm or deny any suspicions you have about any of them, or tell you literally anything else that isn’t about me. Understand?”

“You’re right,” Amy nodded in total, serious understanding. “It’s exactly like outing someone.”

Uhm. “Right. Though, I think they trust you, and if you asked them, I think they’d give you something resembling a straight answer.”

Amy smirked and looked far cuter than she had any right to doing it. “How straight are your answers?”

America’s going to die laughing, the jerk. Still . . . it would be a relief, to actually give straight answers. Kate sighed, leaning her head back until it was supported by the couch. “Ask me and find out.”

“Why are you in Portland?”

“Avoiding being fodder for the society pages. Some stuff . . . happened, in New York, and me clearing out meant less attention on people who need some space and quiet. Also, Dad disowned me, so I had no apartment, no job, and no car.” The rest slid out like a slimy gloop of hair pulled from a clogged drain: “and then he got murdered. In SHIELD custody.” 

“WHAT!” Amy sat bolt upright, tone demanding Kate open her eyes. Which had closed. Again. Traitors. “Kate, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t bother.” I’m too tired to care anyway. “Or, whatever, be sorry if you want to be. You mentioned family dinners? I spent my last one with him being patronized while I milked him for information on his literal partners in crime.” Kate closed her eyes again. “I’m over it. Or not, but it’s . . . what it is.” And then there was that . . . other thing. The secondary clump of gunk clogging her esophagus. “Apparently, he signed off on having me killed, so grieving that asshole’s kinda tough.”

She couldn’t see Amy’s face at that bombshell of family drama, but Amy didn’t say anything. Kate felt her lean back against the couch, close enough to press against her side, which was better than talking, though now that she’d started, it felt impossible to stop.

“So they invited me to come to Portland, work in the Brewpub, stay in one of the spare rooms upstairs.”

“. . . work day and night on weird projects . . . or was that just you being you?”

She shrugged. “Go hard or go home.”

“Is . . . that an option?” Amy asked carefully. “Not that I want you gone, you’re….um, an amazing server, but if you could go back . . .?”

“Uhhm . . . I don’t . . . I work hard. I like mastering stuff and being awesome at it. But I’m not . . . like that at the basics? Like working for a living. It’s all been handed to me. And I hated that, but I relied on it and told myself I didn’t.”

“I don’t think hard work and receiving help are incompatible,” Amy pointed out, far too reasonably.

“I know, I know.” She tried to marshal her thoughts into words that made sense. It felt like slogging through mud. “But. I want something that’s… mine. Not given to me. That’s the problem.”

“Is the problem in the gift? Or in the strings attached?”

Good question. Very good question. I’m going to have to think about that for a minute before I answer.

Chapter Text

After. After the park. And the too-long, too-hot shower. And the sitting, her knees up to her chin, shivering as her wet hair dried into strings and other . . . parts . . . went numb as the rest of her slowly came back to life. 

After reliving it over and over and over and overandoverandoverandoverandover. And over.

Morning came.

She got out of bed. Stiff and sore in unpleasant, unfamiliar places. In her closet hung identical uniforms to the one she’d been wearing last night. Pleated skirt. Knee highs. Blouse. Blazer. Tie. She stared at them, willing herself to just pull them out, get it over with.

She barely made it to the bathroom in time.

~

“You are out of uniform, Miss Bishop.”

Kate didn’t bother looking up at the looming specter of her homeroom teacher. “None were clean.” 

Sharp inhale of breath meant a lecture on the exhale in three, two, one… “Which only shows unpreparedness and poor hygiene on your—” No. 

“Not today. I’m not doing this today.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sure. fine. BEG. I’m not wearing that stupid fucking uniform.”

“That uniform represents your respect for your classmates; not to distract—”

Kate surged to her feet, flipping her desk sideways. It crashed to the floor. The building crescendo of titters and whispers slashed into silence. “Now. Now I’m a distraction.” She walked out.

~

“Katie, I can’t believe you. We have so few opportunities to have a real dinner together as a family and you go and disrupt it with your foul mood!”

Susan picked up where Dad left off, poking Kate in the shoulder. She flinched away. “You could have at least dressed nicely for the occasion. Seriously, you’re not trying to bring back grunge are you?”

Kate had been determined to get through dinner with as little interaction as possible. No outbursts. No insults. Just pick at her food, keep her head down, and ignore Dad and Susan. She could get through this. I wish Mom was still . . . here? She’d spent most of her time not here, helping people in the far corners of the world. Right. And if she were alive I could go be not here with her.

“First your tantrum at school and now this sulking. Really, dear, just because you’re a teenager now doesn’t mean you have to act like one.”

“You should go see my shrink. He always makes me feel better,” Susan said primly.

“That’s the diazepram,” Kate muttered.

“Which he prescribes. That’s what a shrink does.”

Dad’s lackey, Mr. Jordan, approached the table discreetly. “Phone call for you, sir.”

“About time, they were supposed to ring me an hour ago.” He stood, “Girls, I have to take this. Susan, take Katie to see your . . . what was his name?”

“Dr. Feelgood?” Kate suggested. Susan kicked her under the table.

“I’ll set it up, don’t worry Daddy,” she promised, the perfect elder sister.

“Good. I want my happy little girl back.”

“It really does help,” Susan said quietly, when he was gone. “I know you miss her—”

“You know nothing about me,” Kate snapped. “I’ll find my own shrink.”

~

“So, why did you decide to come talk to me, Katherine?”

Candice—Dr. Roberts, but she told Kate to call her Candice—had the ability to watch people without it feeling like she was drilling a hole into the back of their skulls. That, really, was why. Kate had come to this office to try a different therapist. A younger guy had sounded cool online, but it hadn’t gone well. And she’d met Candice on her way out the door. Something told her she’d listen.

“Something . . . happened. I know it wasn’t my fault. But I don’t know how to fix it. Me. I don’t know how to fix me. Usually I do. My dad and sister are worried. They think I should take something. But I—I like being in control.”

“Well, then we’ll start by looking at ways of getting you that control back. On your terms. How does that sound, Katherine?”

“Kate, please. I prefer Kate. And yeah, that sounds good.”

“Kate, it is. Do you feel comfortable talking about what happened to you?”

~~~

Kate drifted lazily toward consciousness, urged on only by the nagging awareness that she really needed to pee.

All other bodily complaints remained patiently on hold, just subtle twinges reminding her of the crick in her neck, the soreness of stiff muscles, the sticky dryness of her mouth—UGH FINE.

She rolled blearily upright and stumbled for the bathroom. Ohgod, I’m at Amy’s. Where is Amy? More urgently, where is the bathroom?

Locating the correct door—out of three, it wasn’t a large apartment—she solved her first problem, and moved on to the second: When the fuck is it? And okay, look, that was a question best reserved for time travel (she would know), but it felt like she had time traveled. The world seemed . . . different.

Shit, maybe I have time traveled. Or America kidnapped me while I was out . . . uh, more basic question, how long was I out?

Amy, smart, practical, and fastidiously on time, had a clock in her bathroom, because of course she did. It was shaped like a sun, with rays as the hands, and Kate grinned delightedly as she recognized the wooden cutout base—Kid Amy made this at camp! The sunshine clock informed her that it was nearing 9:00.

Okay, good. Not that long. She’d check her phone—no, phone’s dead—she’d walk back to the Brewpub, thank Amy for nap space on the couch—did I spill classified secrets to her? Yes. Yes I did.—and figure out what to tell the trio about where that stupid motorcycle went.

She walked back to the living room, where the last rays of golden sunlight struck her square in the face. From the west.

PM! PM! NOT AM! FUCK!

Her mad scramble out of the empty apartment was brought up short by the note Amy’d left on the inside of the door.

Hey Kate,

You’re off the schedule today and your phone is dead—good riddance—so take a breath, raid my fridge, and hang out as long as you like.

(No strings.)

~Amy

Below, she’d taped a key.

Kate did in fact release the breath she’d been holding, and followed that up by another, and another. Yeah. Okay. 

Fifteen minutes later, stomach full of some seriously delicious concoction of spice and chickpeas, her hair brushed, mouth rinsed, and face washed, she carefully locked Amy’s front door and stepped out into the last of the evening light.

She couldn't stop thinking about Amy’s assurance at the end of the note. No strings. Which meant Amy thought Kate would be looking for them. The expectations. You already used her niceness and lied to her, so they’re probably pretty low. But she just didn’t get that feeling from her, from the conversation they’d had, or the note she’d left. Just understanding. Acceptance. The thought warmed the pit of her stomach, then left the rest of her hot with shame that she didn’t deserve it. Amy wasn’t the only one she'd lied to.

So fix it. Part of her balked at the idea. It meant that she’d failed and she’d have to admit she couldn’t do the job on her own. That’s a super Clint thing to think. Kate scrubbed a hand over her face wondering if dumbassery was contagious. It sure as hell seemed like it, in the fresh light of...nine-thirty PM. 

So. Fix. It. Yes, it would suck, but it was the adult thing to do. Suck it up. Come clean. 

Okay. Kate straightened her spine as she went in through the loading bay, where Amy’d said she’d almost been kidnapped. But she still takes out the trash every day, hell, she still works here. Then again, if she’d been working elsewhere, she wouldn’t have had Parker. Still, that took guts.

She decided she’d find Amy, briefly tell her thanks for the couch, the leftovers, and especially the listening, before dragging Eliot out of the kitchen if he was in there (probably) and heading upstairs to have a talk with all three of them. She liked this plan. It was proactive, had three steps, and made her feel like the archer again, rather than the arrow. 

“. . . all I’m askin’ is have you seen her?!”

“And I’m telling you, she’s not on the schedule and therefore doesn’t need to be here!”

Kate’s plan slammed on the brakes, the three steps colliding in a fender bender as she listened to Eliot and Amy going at it in the back-room meeting space behind the kitchen.

She’s doing it! She’s literally yelling at Eliot about staffing! This is the best eavesdropping ever!

“You don’t decide—”

“I do actually! Hardison has final call, but he leaves it up to me most of the time, because he trusts me to know what I’m doing! You have a problem with that, he’s the one to bitch at, not me.” Kate imagined Amy folding her arms and staring Eliot down. The image pleased her. A lot. Oh. Uh. Later. Think about that later.

“There’s stuff goin’ on in Kaitlyn’s life, that you ain’t aware of!” Eliot snapped, and Kate had to hand it to him, sticking to her fake name like that.

“Funny, I was just about to say the same thing—”

Okay, that’s probably gone far enough. Reluctantly, Kate swung the door open. “Hi guys,” she said, as her plan, slightly crumpled but still driveable, got up to cruising speed again.

“Kate—” they both started, and maybe she got just a little bit of a thrill from being the name on everyone’s lips . . .

“Thanks,” she told Amy, trying to put how much she meant it into the word. “For this morning. And uh, the couch.”

“It’s always open,” Amy grinned, adding lightly, “No strings.”

Kate wanted to ask her, well everything right then. About her family growing up, and her dreams, and how she navigated the two. She wanted Amy to teach her how to cook that chickpea thing, and maybe Amy would like some sparring lessons, and no brain no stop imaging sparring, apply brakes immediately. “Uhmm, and thanks for making my eavesdropping dreams come true,” Kate hastily added, “but I got this.”

“You sure?” Amy’s bright eyes darted to Eliot.

“Sure,” Kate promised. Later, she tried to say with her own eyes and newly rested brain. It may have just made her face look weird, though. Ohgod what if it did? What if she thinks my face looks weird? Oh pull yourself together, Kate.

Amy nodded to both of them, gave Kate a grin which could have been because of her possibly weird face, and left Kate and Eliot staring at each other.

“Where’d you disappear to?” Eliot folded his arms, carefully. He still looked tired and pale, but not swaying and ashen, as he had last night. “They were worried.”

They were worried. Kate almost asked, were you? with a heavy dollop of sarcasm to disguise the petulant need in her tone. “Vigilant-ing it up,” she tossed at him instead, which wasn’t much better. They. They were worried. She knew Eliot cared. That he used gruff disregard the same way she used sarcasm. As defensive mechanisms they worked great. 

Sarcasm on that last word or no?

No—wait, yes?—oh shut up.

“Ya’ eavesdropped, huh.” Eliot was sighing, like he expected that of her. 

Kate felt her spine go rigid. “Y’all weren’t exactly quiet about it,” she snapped. 

Eliot raised an eyebrow. “I called you a vigilante because y’are one! So am I! We all are, with the exception of your knight in shinin’ armor out there!” He flung his injured arm out in a clearly unconsidered gesture, and hissed at the repercussions. 

Kate wasn’t quite sure if he meant Amy or Clint. But he kinda had a point. Not like anyone sanctioned her actions. 

You didn’t need anyone to. 

Because I had Dad’s money. Amazing how many things become a-okay when you’re rich. 

“Well, if you put it like that.” Kate muttered, indignation dissipating. “Sorry. Sleep-deprived me was all annoyed about it. Passing out on Amy’s couch for a full day should have fixed the glitch, but apparently systems are still resetting.” She gave him an open-handed shrug of apology.

He frowned at her, then walked over to the tiny kitchenette in the corner, and set the electric kettle there to boil. Tea. He was making tea. It seemed weirdly out of place, but an appropriately Eliot response at the same time. “How long? Since you started havin’ trouble sleepin’?”

For all that she’d worked so hard to hide that particular personal failing until thirty seconds ago, the admission came surprisingly easy. “Since New York. Finding out about… about Dad.” Kate followed him over, found mugs in the upper cupboard. She should tell him everything, but she should tell Hardison and Parker too, and she couldn’t imagine saying it all twice. Answering the same questions. Once would be bad enough. “I didn’t even like him,” she found herself saying instead. “I already knew that and still—”

“Likin’ and lovin’ someone ain’t always the same thing,” Eliot said, popping the lid off a tin of tea. Both it and his words registered as sharp and bitter, but somewhat mellowed by time. He glanced up to meet her eyes just as the kettle boiled. “Jus’ like teachin’ and learnin’ ain’t always the same either.”

“I don’t follow?” See, that was the other thing about Eliot. He’d be all defensive one moment and earnest the next. Like they were two sides of the same coin, only Kate figured she must have missed something during the flip.

“Then I did a shitty job explainin’.” He poured the steaming water into both mugs, and passed one to her. “You’re a vigilante. Or a superhero, or whatever ya want t’ call it. That means you care hard enough about people to take actions others won’t. T’ go further. But that life… it’s a knife’s edge, see? Because you have t’ love in order to do it. An’ that hurts. But not carin’ or shovin’ it aside because you can’t reconcile it with the shit you find yourself doin’... that’s worse. Believe me.”

The tea burned her lips, but only a little. “So I should forgive him?” she asked finally, unable to keep the distaste out of her tone. One year, Dad had sent her to Bible camp, a misjudgement of fairly epic proportions, but they’d been big on “forgiveness is love”. They’d been less charitable in the case of forgiving Katie for her slightly more specific sins. One bottle. I dropped one bottle of that wine. Made a pretty purple stain too. “That’s what love is.” 

“No, it ain’t, and fuck him. He made his choices and reaped the consequences.” He shrugged, took a sip of tea. Kate wondered if Eliot would think differently if he knew her dad was dead, not just rotting in a SHIELD cell. But probably not. “Love is service. Sacrifice. But it’s yours to give to who or what you choose. Not just ‘cause some asshole demands it.” 

And he didn’t choose to give it to me. She didn’t voice that particular nasty thought out loud.

Eliot seemed to hear it anyway. “Havin’ a kid is makin’ that choice,” he said gently. “Or at least it should be. Plenty of shitty parents out there provin’ me wrong, but that ain’t on you. Got that?”

Kate swallowed against the lump in her throat. She could feel the giant, gaping maw waiting behind her answer. “Who are you and what have you done with grouchy, asshole Eliot?” she teased instead. 

“I’ve been reliably informed I need to get my head outta my ass,” he said, and stared at her, clearly waiting for her to answer the previous question.

“Reliably informed?” Kate parried.

Eliot sighed, dropping his gaze and expectations. “Yeah, Parker decided she needed some help handling the… situation. She called a friend, an’ they came up from LA…”

Bobbi. Kate felt herself flush with embarrassment. She was the “situation” Parker didn’t want to deal with. It’s like camp all over again. Katie-Kate fucks up and gets her parents called. Eliot had basically said last night that he considered Clint and Bobbi her “folks” after all. And she dropped her investigation and came, which is so not my parents. 

“... anyway, we should head up, or they’ll be sendin’ out a search party for me this time.”

“Right,” Kate said, distractedly setting down her half-drunk tea with more force than absolutely necessary. “Let’s get this over with.”

Eliot gave her a side-long considering look. “Remember that thing I said about teachin’ and learnin’? Let’s just switch that to sayin’ versus hearin’.  This ain’t about you. Parker called Sophie because me n’ Hardison took our...disagreement too far.”

“Oh. I kinda thought I might be the “Situation”.” She put the word in over-exaggerated finger quotes. 

“That’s a terrible name for a superhero. I’d stick with Hawkeye.” 

“Oh shut up.” He grinned at her and Kate felt a smile start on her face as well. “Are things okay? With you and Hardison?” Not the most prism-y approach, but Kate was beginning to realize she just sucked at being a prism anyway, so why bother?

His smile turned a bit lopsided. “Yeah, both of us are just bein’ stubborn jackasses.”

“And the mysterious Sophie has declared you to be the bigger jack of asses?” Kate asked, half-teasing, as they climbed the stairs.

“One, don’t go callin’ Soph ‘mysterious’; she’s already bad enough. Two, Parker feelin’ the need to call her proved that, no need for Sophie to referee. Three, my relationship still ain’t none of your concern.”

Kate shrugged as if she didn’t quite accept that last point, and beat Eliot to pushing open the door to the common area. Inside, she could hear Hardison before they rounded the corner, saying, “If he ain’t back in another minute—”

“Found her,” Eliot called out, and the four people seated on the couches turned towards them. Hardison grinned at Kate like everything was totally cool. Parker didn’t, but she didn’t look angry either, seated next to an older, elegant woman with dark hair. Sophie. And the other man…

“Jim.” Her voice sounded flat and far away. “Jim-jim-jimmy-jim-jim-jim.” She heard her mouth saying, and couldn’t quite place the reference for a moment, her brain just short-circuiting to it like hold music on a call. Thank you for your patience. Our lines are busy right now, but stay on the line and we’ll be with you shortly.

“Jim” raised a scotch glass to her. “Uh, yeah, hi,” he said, and stood. “It’s not Jim—”

“Nate—?” Eliot growled, the name a question, warning, and confirmation. Or is it even a question? He acted surprised to see me the first day. But if Jim the Rideshare guy was Nate all along… what the fuck was the point? And Parker, asking if the ride was ‘distinctive’... 

At the same time, Sophie rolled her eyes, “Jim? Seriously Nate? Of all the fake names…”

Parker and Hardison were glancing at each other, then at everyone else, and for once, it took Hardison’s mouth a few extra seconds to get up to speed. 

“Yes. Eliot. I got it,” she said before Hardison could speak. “And I don’t choose to be spied on or manipulated.”

“Dammit, Kate, hold up—” 

She brushed past, ignoring him, walked into the purple room, and firmly shut the door. Pack. I need to pack. It would have been a grand gesture to just walk out, but I need clothes, and my bow, and my phone charger...fuck I need to charge my phone—

“What the hell, Nate?” she heard Eliot and Hardison chorus, and something about the indignation in their tones made her freeze.

“Her people were watching us for years, and you don’t think—”

“You don’t get to do that, Nate, not with her, you hear me?”

Maybe it’s a performance. They’re con artists. Eliot knows I’ve eavesdropped before. They could use that.

But she didn’t want to believe that. Not after the conversation with Eliot downstairs, after Hardison’s bright grin of relief at seeing her, after Parker brought her a duffle bag of clothes last night. All that said We have chosen to care about you.

Saying versus hearing, Eliot had told her. What we have here is failure to communicate. Maybe. Maybe I’m just not capable of trusting anyone. Including me.

Rather than begin a whirlwind of packing, Kate sat on the bed, and plugged in her phone. It took a few minutes to gain enough juice and cycle through the restart, with her staring at the loading notifications of the day she’d missed. Nothing from Charlie, which was both worrisome and a relief. Plenty from the trio, asking where she was, if she was okay. And from Clint, she had a series of pictures of Lucky, on his back, feet in the air. “Day oof!” the message read, which was just about the most Clint autocorrect she could think of. She hit the call button.

“Kate!” Clint yelled as a greeting, sounding slightly out of breath. “I was gonna send you more pictures of Lucky, but then he saw a squirrel and now he’s chasing the squirrel . . . which is a bad idea, dog! Squirrels are protected and I am not looking forward to explaining this to Doreen!”

Kate grinned. She couldn’t help it. Sure, her life was a mess, but Clint was out there risking the wrath of the most powerful entity in the known universe: Squirrel Girl. “Tell him to come! And why are you walking him at midnight?”

“He doesn’t listen to me! He only listens to you! And we were up. How’s Portland?”

“Kinda nearly lost a fight and got Eliot shot last night,” Kate’s mouth blurted without pausing to wait for directions. That wasn’t even on the top of my list of worries at this point.

“Damn, how’d you manage to resist for so long?”

“It’s not funny!”

“Hmm, right. Wrong take. I mean, how dare you break my record of two days by lasting two whole weeks? Seriously, I should take notes.” She heard a yelp and grunt followed by some less identifiable noises before Clint came back on the line. “Caught him. Fell into a bush, but it’s all good. No squirrels harmed.” Kate listened as he got his breath back and lectured the dog. “Hey, still no solid answers on the . . . the thing,” Clint said suddenly.

“Oh.” She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

“Have you told them?”

“It’s classified still, right?” Kate said, as if that had stopped her from telling Amy. “Also, didn’t really want to have a pity party over the guy who both fathered me and agreed to have me killed.”

“Fair enough, dunno what the color scheme for that would even look like. Nat might know.”

She laughed, and maybe it came out bitter, but it didn’t dissolve into hysterical giggles for a change.

“If you do want to tell them, I seriously wouldn’t mind a certain hacker sticking his nose back where he promised he wouldn’t,” Clint continued. “If he hasn’t already.”

“I think he’s been honoring that promise, actually. It hasn’t come up.” She sighed. “Things have been weird here. I thought about telling them, but Bobbi had this whole spiel about avoiding a job, and—”

“Bobbi? Avoiding jobs?”

“She was talking about the trio. And relationships. And prisms? Hard to explain, but she had a point. Things have been . . . on edge.”

“Could be she’s basing that on her own experiences, which involved me, so, uh . . . yeahhh. Use your judgment.”

“Are you actually trying to mentor me, Barton?”

“God no. I’m the last person you should be listening to.”

“Right now, you’re the only person I want to listen to.” She picked at her lavender comforter. “As a fellow member of the shitty parents club...does it ever stop screwing you up?”

“Not really.” She heard Clint sigh on the other end of the line. “Used to think so, but apparently that’s the stupid thing about uh, whatchamacallems... formative experiences.”

“Dammit.”

“You recalibrate though. Every time it comes back around to wallop you like some evil tetherball of doom, you get knocked down, and—”

“Lemme guess, you get up again?”

Clint started singing off-key, “Cause you’re never gonna keep me dow—aw crap, just saw someone get their bag snatched. Futzin’ New York. Call you back—sic ‘em Lucky!”

Kate set the phone down, grinning in spite of herself. In spite of everything. You recalibrate. Line up another shot, correcting what went wrong last time.

The yelling had calmed down by the time she opened her door and joined them at the semi-circle of couches, Sophie and Nate sitting together on the loveseat, Hardison and Eliot on the sofa, Parker perched on the back behind them, her fingers entwined in Eliot’s hair. It was strange to see him so still, after the last few weeks, when he’d bounced from one thing to the next, always busy. 

Sophie stood as Kate approached, her smile warm and welcoming. “We haven’t been properly introduced,” she said, reaching out a hand that Kate found herself shaking before she quite realized what was happening. “I’m Sophie.”

“I figured. Kate.” Freed from the handshake, Kate sat on the edge of the armchair, conscious that she’d intentionally separated herself from the others, made it easier for them to stare at her. She felt hyperaware of everything right now: the ice clinking in Nate’s mostly empty glass, the way Sophie sat and crossed her legs, the unbroken line of contact from Eliot and Hardison’s knees to their shoulders, the slight smile that lit Parker’s eyes as she surveyed them from her higher ground. 

“I, um… Clint sent me pics of Lucky,” she said, since everyone was being all careful, and polite, and sitting around a coffee table like this was a normal gathering in a normal living room in a normal family. 

“Ooh, I wanna see!” Parker flipped her legs over the back of the couch, bouncing from the seat, to the floor, to Kate’s side. “How is he?”

Kate decided she meant the dog, not Clint. “Trying to start Squirrel War 3 in Central Park. And stop a purse-snatcher. No offense.”

Parker dismissed that with a disgusted wave of her hand, returning to plop next to Eliot, who grunted at the jolt. “No finesse to purse-snatching. He deserves it. So.” And just like that, the switch flipped. “I didn’t tell Nate to spy on you, but I did text Sophie that you were coming.”

“If we can call it that,” Sophie murmured. “One of these days, Hardison, you should clarify to Parker what the eggplant symbol actually means.”

“Why the hell would I do that?” Hardison grinned. “Anyway, you got the gist.”

“Makes one of us,” Eliot muttered. “Nate?” His inflection carried an entire paragraph of questions, demands, and threats. Kate had to wonder on how many different levels the two men communicated, if Eliot regularly managed to shove all that just in the guy’s name. About as much as I fit into Clint’s, I guess.

Nate, in turn, spared Eliot only the barest glance before focusing intently on Kate. “They didn’t ask me to drive you, no. But given the circumstances...who you are...It’s not safe for any of us, given what we do—”

“Y’all retired,” Hardison interrupted under his breath.

“—to get involved with the likes of SHIELD, or other government agencies,” Nate continued, ignoring Hardison.

Kate snorted. “I’m not SHIELD. Like, so totally not SHIELD. SHIELD wants nothing to do with me! And it’s not like I know that much about you guys or SHIELD, compared to, hmm, oh wait, BOBBI. Even Eliot has had more to do with SHIELD than I have.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Nevertheless,” Nate continued evenly, “I felt the situation needed monitoring.”

Kate felt her jaw clench at his last word. 

“Ah,” Sophie said, leaning forward as if she’d just acquired a target. “Who else has been monitoring you, Kate?”

Despite the gentleness of the question, the fact that she’d walked into this of her own free will, and if she chose, she could run back out and none of them—except possibly Parker—would be fast enough to stop her… despite not being the one at fault here at all, Kate found herself standing at the edge of this particular rooftop, unable to take the plunge. Just say it. 

“I mean, us, kinda,” Hardison said instead, into her silence. “Not, y’know, malevolently or anything, but I’ve been watchin’ the security feeds, uh...one might say obsessively, and that’s not ‘cause of you, Kate, but I know it can be weird—”

“It’s not that,” Kate said, rescuing Hardison from his own mouth as Eliot rolled his eyes. “I mean, it was kinda that too, but… before I came, that morning, I found out why Dad had surveillance photos of me.”

And then it all flooded out.

My dad and everyone else arrested on Clint’s roof were murdered in SHIELD custody.

Clint and Bobbi are investigating, but they have no leads yet. Clint says if you want to hack into SHIELD, he’ll play dumb. Dumb-er anyway.

Oh. And just for funsies, Dad signed off on having me killed, that’s why the surveillance pictures, but since the Clown is dead, it never happened, so yay?

Seriously, I don’t know how to feel about any of this so don’t ask. Please.

Oh and totally unrelated to all of that, a guy named Charles Dodgson came to the Brewpub asking for Nate or Parker, but I offered to help him, because you guys had a lot going on and I wanted to have a purpose.

He thinks someone stole the plans for the batteries his company makes, and I ended up hustling the prototype Harley for him to check to see if they did it. No, even I think that’s probably not it.

I gave him and his VP, Wes Carroll, the Harley this morning, but I think that might have been a bad call . . .

At this point she was interrupted by a bark of sarcastic laughter from Eliot, which, okay, fair. “That’s basically it,” Kate finished. Aside from Eliot’s outburst, they were all totally silent.

“Well,” Nate said finally, “anyone else need a drink?” Sophie smacked him lightly on the arm.

“If he wasn’t dead, I’d offer to kill ‘im for you,” Eliot said, with the casual air of someone being deadly serious.

“You kinda solved that issue by taking on The Clown—”

“Takin’ out the guy who does it ain’t the same as takin’ out the one that made that call.” A steady fury threaded through Eliot’s calm voice. Kate saw Hardison thread his fingers through Eliot’s, while Parker burrowed in closer. Eliot drew a careful breath. “And I had some help.” He nodded at her.

Kate found her smile. “Speaking of, I could use some help with Charlie.” 

“Thought you’d never ask!” Hardison exclaimed with possibly too much enthusiasm, clearly trying to lighten the mood. “I’ll poke around SHIELD in a little bit, but it’s about time we took on a job! And today, after ah… everything, I did go back and watch the security tapes.”

“I was going to wipe those.”

“Just like I taught you! But seriously,” he continued, bending forward. “Don’t feel like there’s anythin’ you can’t tell us. Just because someone’s bein’ a butthead.” Hardison leaned back again, graciously accepting the elbow Eliot planted in his side. “Parker, babe, can you grab me my laptop—you,” Hardison added to Eliot, who’d started to shift himself, “don’t move.”

In the millisecond before Parker moved and Eliot (probably) argued, Sophie interjected smoothly, “Why don’t Nate and I handle the first round of intelligence gathering? It’s not that far to Oxford, and Nate can have a chat with Alex, Dodgson’s floor manager. He knows us. We’ll let you know what we find first thing in the morning.”

“Sounds good t’ me,” Eliot answered, ending any objections his partners might have voiced. He winked at Kate, eyes now half-closed. She hadn’t seen him this obviously relaxed since she’d arrived. Tired. He looks tired. Not the swaying with exhaustion we both were last night, but like he’s allowing himself to be tired. Like I kinda did, on Amy’s couch before passing out for a whole day. 

And despite that, she felt drained all over again, from just bracing herself and charging through words. Her lungs and limbs felt shuddery and loose with adrenaline as if she’d just been in a fight. There was a lightness there too, though, a relief to no longer packing all this tight within her.

Sophie and Nate made their exit as she considered this; Hardison waiting until the door shut behind them to remark dryly, “Retired my ass.”

“Makes ‘em feel useful,” Eliot agreed.

Parker shouldered him playfully, Eliot grumbling as she jostled the arm with a bullet graze in it. “Big baby,” she told him and kissed his shoulder.

I should leave them alone, Kate realized, but before she could, Hardison declared it a movie night and ordered her to stay put, so she transitioned onto the loveseat, legs dangling over the arm, feeling rather like a deflated balloon. 

~

Kate didn’t remember dozing off, was surprised she did after sleeping most of the day, but she woke to low lights and lower voices, murmuring on the larger couch behind her.

“He’s been a real big idiot lately, our El.”

“He didn’t want you to worry.”

“That’s exactly what makes him an idiot. Of course I’m gonna worry. That’s what I do. Workin’ eighteen hour days and anglin’ for sexy times all night ain’t gonna change that, just like it ain’t gonna change the fact that he was cut to ribbons by a psycho clown! I’m almost regrettin’ buyin’ him the damn restaurant if he’s gonna use it as an excuse.”

“You didn’t say you regretted the sex,” Parker noted. Kate bit down hard on her knuckle. 

“I don’t. Look, I’ll happily facilitate his coping strategies, which is what they are, until they turn self-destructive. Which they have.”

“You used to just grumble about it to me.”

“Right, that was my coping strategy. But now I’m datin’ him, and he agreed to that, so he gets to put up with my anxious ass.”

“So, you’re okay with me calling Sophie? I could have just drugged him so he had no choice but to sleep.”

“Babe, NO. Sophie was the right call.”

“Just lightly?”

“Parker, I can hear you.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was, till someone decided he needed to run his mouth and someone else started talkin’ about druggin’ me.”

“Lightly. Bobbi knows about that stuff, she’d—”

“Parker.”

“Fine. Then you have to swear to us instead.”

“I’m tempted to swear at you, how ‘bout that?”

“Swear on . . . what’s a bigger swear than money?”

“Pinky swear,” Hardison immediately volunteered.

“Seriously, Alec?”

“Ooh, I’ve heard of those. Right, Eliot, you have to pinky swear you’ll take time to heal and not scare Alec . . . and me,” she added in a quiet, careful rush, “by trying to prove you’re fine.”

“I am—fine. Whatever. But it can’t change the shots you call, Parker.”

“What, you making it easier for me to judge which shots to call?”

“I’m still—”

“—the one standing between us and whatever’s coming at us, I know. That’s why I made the call I did in Bedstuy. And I’d do it again, if I needed to . . . but I missed that you were off the board for too long then. There were so many people involved, and you were usually off comms and I . . .” Parker’s rush of words faded into silence. Bobbi was right.

“Handled ever’thing while I kept that asshole occupied till the cavalry could get there. You did good.”

“Thanks, Sparky,” Parker sniffed. “So, you swear?”

“Yeah. I swear.”

“Hang on, you gotta lock pinkies, like this . . .” Kate clamped her jaw down on the giggles that threatened to rise up. No way she was disturbing this very solemn occasion. “There, now we all formal.”

“Happy now?” Eliot grumped.

Parker’s answer wasn’t verbal, but from the sounds of it, definitely involved her mouth.

“Guys, Kate’s sleepin’ right there.”

“Good, girl needs it. We should’ve noticed something extra wasn’t right there. Half a mind to call Circus an’—”

“An’ what? Give him a piece of the rest? That don’t leave much mind for me to call an idiot.”

“Fucker signed off on killin’ his daughter. Even the people I’ve worked for only signed off on killin’ other people’s kids.” Kate, lying silent on the loveseat, shuddered. 

“Too bad he’s dead. Otherwise we’d ruin him. And then you could kill him Eliot, if you wanted to. I think that would be an okay murder.”

Eliot hummed something that sounded like an agreement.

“Okay, okay, bloodthirsty babes, but dude’s dead and Kate’s been emulatin’ El here—”

“Nuthin’ like seein’ yourself in a teenage girl to make a man realize he’s gone off the rails.”

“Oh, is that why you’re suddenly bein’ all reasonable. Eliot, the role model.”

“Shuddup.”

“Never. Look, as big a game as that girl talks, I don’t think she gets how amazin’ she is.”

“She’s trying to be all three of us.”

“And she ain’t half bad at it,” Hardison agreed, making Kate’s cheeks go hot at the compliment.

“She ain’t plannin’ on staying, though I think that’s just her not plannin’ on plannin’ anything period.”

“If she wants to, she’s welcome though, right? We could use her.”

“‘Course.”

“Obviously.”

“Good. C’mon, let’s get to bed. I am expectin’ some amazin’ cuddles for what you put me through, El.”

“Really, ‘cause I was plannin’ on just passin’ out for several days straight… ”

Kate stayed on the couch, face hot. Tears pricked at her eyes, then fell, like quiet summer rain. She let them come.

Chapter Text

Before knocking on the door to her physics teacher’s rooms— ahem. Chambers— Kate schooled her face into something neutral and pleasant. She’d been informed by too many teachers, and not a small number of the other students, that she came across as too brash, too American for this institution. Normally she didn’t give a fuck.

Which, in Dad’s eyes, is exactly why I should be here.   

Oh, Susan could spend his money any way she liked, especially now that she was off partying at college. But when Kate decided to take a break from ballet to fit in an MMA class in addition to the kickboxing, judo, and aikido she’d crammed in on various days after school, she was running up his credit card for no reason. He didn’t want his little girl getting violent . She’d tried the “it’s giving me discipline” argument, but thanks to the black eye and broken wrist she’d been sporting, trophies from a sparring match with a guy determined to prove he wasn’t afraid to fight a girl, that had gone over poorly. (Much like sparring with an overcompensating jackass.)

The worst of it was, he’d flipped that argument back on her. Yes, she did need discipline. And refinement . And where could she acquire these qualities she so clearly lacked? Boarding school. Again. But this time, in England. Where no one even liked her Harry Potter jokes.

Kate doubted she’d become any more refined in the weeks she’d been here, but she could fake it while begging for a make-up on the physics test she’d bombed. At least her posture was perfect, and she’d done nothing (today) to mess up her hair or her uniform.

“Come in!” came a breathless voice directly on the heels of her knock.

Kate took a deep breath before opening the door, saying in a rush, “Excuse me for bothering you, Professor, but I had some questions about the exam?” She stopped, staring at her surroundings.

Everything burst with color. Outside the sky had been the typical English grey for weeks, while here, large splotches of primary reds and blues and yellows vied for dominance on the walls, the carpet, and several large, seriously weird sculptures.

Professor Peel, her ancient, perpetually amused physics instructor, grinned at her. “Well, you’re hardly going to get answers while standing in the doorway. Physics is rarely that simple.” She waved the— yes, that’s definitely a rapier —that she was holding at the door. “Shut that, would you? I’m old enough that drafts are unfortunately a concern.”

Kate hastily shut the door. “This place is . . . something.” Understatement.

“Isn’t it?!” She sounded absolutely gleeful. “The rest of the faculty are horrified. I adore it. The sixties were my decade and I loved all of it: the color, the art, the cars, the clothes . . . everything seemed possible—and much of it was, at least in my line of work.”

“What did you do?” Kate eyed the rapier, considering the possibility that her slightly kooky professor might have a few too many screws loose.

“I was a spy.” She beamed at Kate’s surprise. “Well, technically a consultant to a spy. We made a good team.”

“Should you be telling me that?” To be fair, it could all be nonsense, but Kate had seen her sharp eyes pick up on notes passed in lecture, and the speed at which the old woman could move across the lab when someone—Kate, often—was about to do something remarkably stupid.

“Oh, don’t worry.” She waved a rapier-filled hand in dismissal. “The organization’s long gone, a relic of the Cold War. Very few secrets I can spill at this point. Do you take fencing?” she asked, probably since Kate’s eyes kept returning to the sword.

“Yes, this semester—uh, term—but I’m more into archery,” Kate admitted.

“Ah! No wonder you like physics.”

“I suck at it! I failed the test.”

“You certainly did!” her professor confirmed, eyes twinkling. “That doesn’t mean you don’t like physics, though. If I remember correctly, you had the right idea, just stuck the numbers in the wrong places. It happens.” Her eyes swept the room, and she nodded briskly. “Move that chair out of the way, please, my back never hesitates to remind me about everything I used to put it through these days. Launching headfirst over furniture to tackle some megalomaniac always seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Kate dutifully moved the chair, trying not to grin at the mental image. The open space in the room grew by several feet.

“Perfect, that will give us plenty of room. If you look in that closet you ought to find a bow. I’ve tried to keep it limber, much like myself.”

Bemusedly, she found the bow and a quiver of arrows, as well as a rack of cat suits. Kate couldn’t resist pulling out a bright purple one, carefully encased in plastic.

“I used to wear those. Never could bear to get rid of them,” Peel said, her smile turning mischievous. Kate couldn’t help lifting up the plastic, running her fingers over the fabric.

“You must have turned a number of heads.”

“Oh, I did. Cat suits and judo chops. Both excellent for head turning. You can keep that one if you like. I’m too old to be running around in that get up, but you’re coming up on just the right age for it.”

“I—”

“Oh, don’t say you can’t. Can’t is such as a foolish word. Accept the gift, and do with it what you will. Now, grab that bow, and come over here.”

Kate, heart fumbling inside her chest, did as she was told. “Thank you.”

Professor Peel waved the rapier in dismissal once more, before setting it down. “It’s about time I start letting go of some things, and I’d prefer to see them go to bright young girls who know what’s what. Now , I find the best way to understand a force diagram is to be a force diagram. Come here, let’s see your form. Oh! Marvelous. ” She nodded in satisfaction. “Now. Katherine—”

“Katie . . . I mean Kate.” Kate said, flushing.

“Which is it?” Bright eyes buried their gaze inside her. This isn’t like my therapist though. She has to write progress reports for Dad.

“Um. My dad prefers Katie.”

“So? It’s not his name is it?”

Kate shrugged. “He did give it to me.”

“Exactly. He gave it. So, it’s yours now and you can do with it as you please. Rather like that cat suit. Kate it is. Just let me know which you’d like me to write on those tiresome reports I have to send.” She tapped Kate’s arm, and Kate, a smile tugging at her lips now, smoothly raised the bow into position. “Good. Now the faster you can tell me the forces at work on the arrow, the sooner you can release the arrow.”

“At your wall?”

“Preferably at the fencing dummy, it’s used to being stabbed, but I’ve never had the wall complain either, and it is covered in bright circles.”

“I’ll try to hit the dummy,” Kate promised, the corners of her mouth pulling upward as she began to limber up the bow.

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

Kate grinned, drew back the string, and began to list her answers.

~

Kate woke to gentle clinks of china in the kitchen area and peeked her head up to investigate. Sophie, the culprit, offered her an apologetic smile. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Didn’t hear you come in.” She yawned, stretching muscles irritated by her recent choices in sleeping locations, and wandered over to plop onto a stool at the breakfast bar.

“I didn’t intend you to. Tar- ahh -Bobbi told me a lot about you.”

Oh for futz sake— Kate rolled her eyes. “You know for a bunch of con artists who spend all day lying to people, you sure hate the tables being just the teensiest bit flipped, don’t you? I know you can remember her real name.”

The con artist in question tossed her hair and sniffed. “I can. I suppose it’s a point of professional pride. I vouched for her. I trusted her with my family.” She didn’t hesitate before that last word, like Parker or Eliot would have, even subconsciously. Okay, Hardison wouldn’t have hesitated either, but Hardison’s entire speech pattern made up of a stream-of-consciousness ramble that just throws the whole thesaurus at any situation that needs a single word.

Family. That word, the lack of pause, and the steadiness in Sophie’s eyes as she watched Kate consider her words cooled Kate’s indignation. Slightly. “You were right to. She’s a freaking Avenger, so it’s a bit rich holding being a different person than the person you thought she was lying about being against her!”

“I can see why they like you,” Sophie remarked, amused.

Kate made a face. “Did you find anything out about Charlie?”

“Later. Nothing urgent and the others won’t emerge for hours yet, why repeat myself? Besides, a briefing is Tradition.”

Kate heard the capital. You had to respect the capital. She accepted a cup of tea from Sophie, blowing on it and watching the grifter through her eyelashes.

Sophie watched her right back. “That’s not bad, for subtle observation. Personally, I’m a fan of hair. A nice big sweep of bangs hides your face while keeping a mark in view.”

“I’ll remember that.” Kate glanced around. “Where’s . . . ?”

“Nate? Still asleep, or pretending to be. We did get back quite late.”

“And you just happened to be up making subtle noises in the kitchen, huh?”

“I'm naturally an early riser.”

“Liar.”

“That too.” Her smile curved into mischief. “Grifters don’t admit guilt, darling. It’s against our better nature.”

“Better?” Kate had to admit she was enjoying this.

Sophie smirked, a cat in the cream. “Precisely. I see opportunities. To better myself, or others, of course.”

“Of course.” The second word slipped into a soft, rounded sound without Kate’s permission.

Sophie arched an eyebrow, setting down her cup. “Mockery or emulation?”

Kate felt herself blush slightly at the thought of Sophie believing either to be the case. “Boarding school. Comes back when I’m in the vicinity of the accent.”

“Ah. That’s an awfully long distance to send a child,” Sophie observed, voice perfectly neutral but hiding none of her contempt. “Did you enjoy it?”

“Teenager and no one enjoyed it. Least of all my professors.” Except for one. . . “But I was pretty used to it at that point.”

“Ah,” Sophie said in understanding. “Today we’re going out,” she said, with so much certainty that Kate forgot for a moment that she could refuse. “Girl’s day. Breakfast, some shopping, some grifting lessons, and you can tell me how your education in crime is coming along.”

“I’m not a criminal.” She swallowed the last gulp of tea. A girl’s day did sound nice though. I haven’t been shopping in ages . Right. Because you don’t have Dad’s credit card anymore. “I’m here as a project,” she heard her mouth say while her brain was distracted by self-pity. “And other extenuating circumstances.”

“A . . . project ?” Her neutral tone skidded close to curiosity before managing to course correct. “Never mind,” she said, waving a hand. “Semantics. Do you want to learn how to manipulate people or not?”

They’d be having a further conversation about the project remark, Kate was certain. But how could she resist? She slid off the barstool. “Teach me the ways of the Force, Obi Wan KenSophie.”

“Mmm, I take it Eliot was contrite enough to allow Hardison to put on Star Wars ?”

Eliot, had, in fact, not grumbled at all about Hardison putting A New Hope on, while Kate had tried not to think too hard about evil father figures and Leia staring down (or, up , technically)  Darth Vader. “Right, like that! You show up, and he got all...soft. I’d been trying to solve that problem for weeks!” 

Sophie pressed her lips together. “Solve?” she asked, the barest hint of an edge in the question.

“Yeah?” Kate said carefully, “by being a prism and everything. But I seriously suck at it. Had to come right out and ask Eliot if he and Hardison were okay.”

“And what did he say?” 

“That they were both jackasses, you being here made him realize that, and also to stay out of his love life.”

“Hmph. Well, at least he felt obliged to tack that last bit on,” Sophie muttered. Kate couldn’t tell if she was annoyed at her or at Eliot. In the next moment, she’d shaken off the frown, clasping her hands together. “Right, definitely a girl’s day today. You and I have a lot to talk about!”

~

Sophie led her to, and through, a literal hole in the wall, to a cafe that seemed to be more secret garden than restaurant. A huge tree arched over the space, shading long picnic tables and smaller cafe sets. Bright roses climbed the walls, trellises, anywhere they could reach. Sophie knew the owner, a young plump woman named Margery who swept up to give her air kisses and exclaim about how long it had been, before seating them right under Methuselah, as she called the tree.

“Was she a client?” Kate asked once they were settled.

“No, but I used to come here frequently, for a proper tea service. Her mother is English. Moved back a few years ago, but Margery loves this place too much to ever leave, I think.” Sophie patted the trunk of Methuselah. “It must be interesting. To set down roots. I’ve never been able to manage it.”

“I always seem to yo-yo back to New York,” Kate said. “So, I guess that’s home.”

“‘Home’ isn’t a guess. It doesn’t have to be a specific place, of course, a home is security and love.”

She blinked at the sincerity in Sophie’s tone. Sure, con artist and all that, but Kate knew she meant it. Is that New York? It should be, for all the time she spent elsewhere. And every time you walk through Manhattan now, will you think about Dad?

Their drinks came before she could wander further into that spiral. Tea for Sophie and coffee for Kate, and for a moment, they sat in silence. Sophie, setting her cup back onto its saucer, finally restarted the conversation.

“You called yourself a ‘project’ earlier. What did you mean by that?”

“I think that’s the first direct question you’ve asked.”

“Well, I was hoping for a direct answer. I figured I would try your approach.”

“So, I’m an Eliot?” How the tables have turned...

“Mmm,” Sophie hummed noncommittally.  “A little of all three, and none of them at the same time. You don’t need to define yourself as partial reflections of other people, Kate.”

“Might as well. I’m not a prism, that’s for sure.” Amy is, Kate realized, before she’d even properly registered the thought of Amy lurking in the back of her mind. She definitely prism’d me yesterday morning.

“You mentioned that earlier. What do you mean by prism?” Normal people’s foreheads wrinkled when confused. Sophie’s brow furrowed .

“Bobbi’s term.” Kate made an attempt at explaining their conversation on the flight to Portland.

“Hmm, Bobbi and I may need to have a rather different conversation than Tara and I would have about this,” Sophie said finally.

Kate felt her own brow furrow, though probably not as elegantly. “Is that why you don’t like calling her Bobbi?”

“To an extent. All of my personas have their own names, histories, impulses . . . they essentially are their own people. I know Tara and I trust her. I do not know Bobbi. Nor do I particularly appreciate her . . . instructions.”

Kate lifted her chin. “Well, they weren’t for you . They were for me . I’m an archer. I don’t like entering a situation blind. That’s how you wind up falling off roofs into dumpsters. Or tied up and monologued at by some megalomaniacal asshole. I should be annoyed about the “project” thing, but it’s not like it’s wrong. And I’m getting several new skillsets out of it. Skillsets I want to learn.”

“And the prism . . . ing?” Sophie asked, clearly at odds with the awkwardness of the word. If it was a word. “Was it successful?”

“It wasn’t... not successful?” 

Sophie didn’t look impressed. 

Kate retreated to the safety of her archery metaphors. “It’s like reaching for a specific arrow, and grabbing an explosive one instead. Problem solved, just lacking in finesse and also possibly causing more problems.

“You know, that metaphor implies that what exploded was you.”

Kate snorted. “Yeah, well, if you stick around me long enough, you’ll discover that’s not just a metaphor.” She picked up a leaf that had dropped from the tree above, and began tearing it delicately, along the veins. Sophie seemed to be waiting for her to continue. “It’s one of the dangers of bringing a ranged weapon into close combat.” Gosh I love metaphors.

“You’re not a weapon,” Sophie said, in an all too familiar tone. The tone of adults who didn’t get it .

“Don’t start. I made this choice. I want this. It’s not some stupid teenage phase or delusions of grandeur. I worked for this.” And now you’re hiding out as a waitress in Portland, so see where all that work got you?

“That’s not what I meant. I learned a long time ago that it’s not a particularly fruitful argument to have with certain people.” At Kate’s raised eyebrows, Sophie sighed. “ Yes , you and Eliot do share certain...characteristics. But that doesn’t make you him, any more than pop culture puns make you Hardison, or that mile-wide independent streak makes you Parker.”

“I know.” She started to fold her arms and lean back, then thought better of it. “But I can relate.”

“All too well, it seems. And because you can relate, it makes you feel responsible for them. But, as I was saying, you aren’t a weapon, or a set of skills, or—”

“A quiver of trick arrows?”

“Exactly. Any more than Eliot is a tool box, as much as the metaphor suits. His father ran a hardware store,” she explained at Kate’s head tilt. “If you want to understand how to grift, then you first need to remember that people are people , not reflections or metaphors, or bright spandex suits and masks. Does that make sense?”

“Well, yeah, that’s obvious.” Kate shifted in her seat, rather disappointed that Sophie’s lesson had boiled down to people are people .

“Mmm, no, I don’t think it is. Darling, listen to me very carefully. It is not your job to be a project, or a prism, or a perfect student. And it is certainly not your job to be responsible for the well-being of a grown man.”

Kate straightened. That’s what Sophie’d been aiming for? It felt like being hit in the back of the head by a boomerang arrow. “But—”

“No. No buts. There are no buts to that statement.” Her brown eyes held Kate’s in complete sincerity. “You care about others and you want to help them. I understand. Believe me, I’m married to a functioning alcoholic. I very much understand. But there’s a balance there, of your needs and theirs. Three against one is not equilibrium. One against one isn’t either, really, because you are still young, and I’ll repeat, not responsible for the well-being of a grown man . Or woman, but usually it seems to be the men who we try to save from themselves. Do you understand?”

“He wasn’t . . . They weren’t—”

“ Kate —”

“ Yes. I understand.” Kate dropped her eyes down to her plate and kept them there. It’s not like Sophie’d been there to do it herself.

~

The thing about girl’s days, Kate decided as they moved on from eating to shopping, were that they should be full of a busy sort of chilling. Full of gossip, but nothing requiring too much thought. Deep conversations could wait for sleepovers.

It wasn’t that Sophie disagreed with this philosophy. She’d dropped the direct approach after Kate’s chilly silence at breakfast and moved onto chattering about next season’s styles and a show she’d seen in Paris two weeks ago, and how Kate should try this blouse on, trust her, it would look elegant. Sophie could probably keep small talk going for a week without making the time feel wasted.

But Kate, still reeling from the plunge in psychoanalysis their breakfast had taken, kept carefully weighing and considering every answer she gave until moving among the racks of soft clothes now well out of her budget felt less like an escape and more like a new kind of tightrope.

“Oh dear,” Sophie remarked, when Kate paused before answering an innocuous question yet again. “I’ve overstepped.”

“No! I was just—I thought you were going to teach me . . . I dunno . . . something.”

“And I thought you were taking a day off?”

Kate made a face. “I’m not very good at days off.”

“I thought not. Still, they are valuable.”

“Maybe, but there are three surveillance cameras able to track us right now, four if we move slightly to the left, two if we move to the right. One security guard per floor, and I don’t see a pattern to their patrols yet, which doesn’t mean they’re highly randomized, it just means they probably stop to chat and help people—something that adds to unpredictability but also is a chance to cause a diversion. The woman at the jewelry counter is wearing an old watch with the wrong time, by the way. I think it’s an heirloom. If I wanted, I could probably lift it off her.” She let the sharp whispered litany slide to a stop, folding her arms. “It’s been less than a month, and already I can’t turn that off. And I don’t want to—it makes me better.”

“Better at . . . ?” Sophie prompted, as if she had no idea what Kate did when not lying low with a bunch of criminals at a Portland brewpub.

“Being me! Being Hawkeye. Not that I’m using the title right now, but I can’t stop training. I’m not special. People with actual powers? They might get away with half-assing it sometimes and having that one thing they’re good at. But I can’t. Not when missing a shot or not seeing a target till too late means people could die. All this stuff I’m learning, this is useful. Except maybe the fifteen minutes a night I spend staring at a small square of text in a dark room, but Eliot says that’s the way to get a photographic memory, which seems hella useful.”

“I always thought that was a myth,” Sophie remarked. Kate was growing accustomed to her ignoring the grand statements for the tiny details. “The dark room method. It’s rumored to be an Army technique.”

“Does it work?”

“No idea, but Eliot isn’t inclined to share unless it’s immediately relevant and he certainly has a talent for noticing detail.” Sophie smiled, pulled out a dress, yellow and summery, and held it up in satisfaction, before adding it to the pile in Kate’s arms. “I’ll make you a deal. One grift lesson per store. And I will ask my questions directly.”

Kate stared at the dress. “Not the yellow. He liked me in yellow.”

She didn’t specify who she meant, but Sophie didn’t make that one of her questions. The offending dress was removed before they headed for the dressing rooms. “What’s my end of the deal?”

“Relax.”

“I am!”

“Hardly. You don’t have to answer any question you don’t wish to.”

Because you’re psychic and already know my answers. Kate had been starting to harbor the suspicion that Sophie was, in fact, a mutant.

Somehow, Sophie the Possible Mutant ensured their privacy, perching on a pouf outside Kate’s drawn curtain and enthusiastically complimenting or critiquing every outfit she tried. None of her critiques were unkind or even barbed in the way Kate hadn’t realized she was used to from shopping trips with her sister or school friends. They were gentle comments directed at a fit rather than at her and somehow always echoed what Kate herself thought, even if she hadn’t said anything.

“What other . . . skillsets have you gathered?”

“I dunno, lots of different things,” Kate said, her answer muffled into a dress she was sliding into. She shimmied to make the cute summer dress, bright blue and with a surprising bit of twist to the skirt, not to mention pockets , settle properly. Stepping outside the curtain, she performed a trio of perfect pirouettes, enjoying the way the skirt swished out around her. “I used to dance,” she told Sophie. “My parents sent me to ballet camp after I burned down a summer camp and exploded my boarding school’s chemistry lab. They decided I needed a hobby with no chance of combustion.” 

And it was feminine, improved posture, made me more refined and elegant. A trophy. And still I loved it. She retreated back behind her curtain and discarded the dress. “I don’t think they actually cared, really. It was just an activity to keep me occupied and out of the way. Mom used to come to my recitals though, when she didn’t have a conflicting charity thing.” Kate stared at herself in the mirror. The thing about hiding from Sophie’s eyes: she had to look at herself instead. The bruises from the fight blooming purple. “Next summer, I got both ballet and normal summer camp. More time away.” Like they were allergic to extended time in my company. Okay so that wasn’t fair to Mom, really. The more Kate understood, the more she grasped how all of that shoving her away was a type of protection. Didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt.

“I’m good at summer camp. Hell, I’m GREAT at summer camp. Everything is brief and intense and you have clear expectations to beat. Win the swim out to the island, make a best friend, beat everyone else at archery. That’s how the archery thing started, but I was good at all of it.” That was why, when Mom turned up early one year . . . I didn’t want to leave. And I never saw her again.

“Um, anyway. That’s all I meant by summer project, earlier. This is like summer camp and I learn and do a whole bunch of crazy new stuff that’s miles better than building a lean-to shelter, but I’m not . . . I don’t have any expectations. And that’s okay.” They said you could stay. She quickly pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt so Sophie wouldn’t know she’d just been staring at the mirror without really seeing herself for that whole wave of word vomit.

Sophie eyed the simple outfit in satisfaction. “Good flexibility in those, which is key around Parker. So, you’re not planning on staying then, I take it?”

Psychic. I knew it! “I don’t—I haven’t really planned anything.”

“Understandable,” Sophie smiled. She passed over a long silk-soft gown, the soft lights of the fitting room bringing out purples and greys as the lavender fabric flowed over her hands. It had to be worth more than the rest of Kate’s “yes” pile put together. “I spotted it on our way over, had one of the shop girls fetch it. Try it on.”

She did, because it was beautiful and perfect, and standing in front of the mirror she felt her old confidence rising up to fill a part of her she’d not realized was leaking.

Sophie clapped her hands when she saw it. “Oh yes, that’s stunning .” She grinned at Kate. “My treat of course.”

“No.” Kate bit her lip at the force of the word. “Thank you,” she added, to soften it. “It is perfect, but not in my budget and I need to start buying my own stuff.”

“Of course, I understand. Well then! Gather up what you intend to get. We ought to be heading back soon.”

That’s it? No push back? No, ‘do it for me’? Huh.

At the register, Sophie became an overly helpful and chatty American, getting the cashier engaged in an enthusiastic conversation about her side jewelry business until she somehow lost track of which clothes she’d rung up and Kate and Sophie walked out of the store with significantly less damage done to Kate’s bank account than she’d been prepared for.

“I think some of these still have security tags on them.”

“Mmm, try a strong magnet, usually those work just fine. Otherwise, Hardison has just about every gadget they use to put those on and take them off. He lives with Parker, after all.” She linked arms with Kate. “There’s your lesson by the way. Relating to a person isn’t bad, it’s a strength, as long as you don’t lose sight of your target in the first place. The cashier was wearing several clearly handmade, but not all that bad pieces. It’s much more of a passion for her than working a register. That’s the key to a good distraction.”

The British 60's Avengers were a favorite of mine long before I got hooked on Marvel's Avengers. So you can imagine the cackling that ensued the first time I saw Kate's trademark outfit.

Of course I had to come up with a way for Kate to meet the inimitable Emma Peel. :P

Chapter Text

“Katherine Bishop, right? You’re new this year?” Kate shut her locker door to find a friendly smile attached to a blonde girl with bright eyes to match.

“New to Manhattan? No. New to Hawthorne? Yes. The prodigal daughter returns.” Her own smile might have been slightly lopsided. She’d just started getting comfortable in England, but Dad had changed his mind, wanted her closer to home, for once. “And it’s Kate. Not Katherine.”

“Cassie,” the girl said. “Not Cassandra.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “Lang?”

The way her mouth twisted would have been answer enough, but Cassie continued, “Yeah. That Cassie. And no, I don’t have superpowers.”

“Me neither,” Kate said, as if someone expected her to, which no one did. Still, Cassie grinned like it was funny. “I’m taking a bunch of different martial arts, though. Just ‘cause.” Because I’m not letting what happened happen again. Ever.

“Same! My mom and stepdad think I’m nuts. But there’s a cool hole-in-the-wall dojo just around the corner, so it’s super easy to sneak off after last period, plus the sensei’s really nice. Tough, but nice.”

“Yeah? Can I come with sometime?”

“Sure! I’d love a sparring partner,” Cassie dropped the smile, glancing around to make sure they weren’t overheard. “Are you . . . interested in being a superhero?”

Well, I have been gifted a catsuit . . . “No. Definitely not. Just want to do my own rescuing. Of myself. Not other people. Or, okay, so other people too, I guess, not like I’m going to stand back watch—” Kate realized she was babbling. “Why? Are you?”

The smile returned, small and secret and fierce. “Like my father before me.”

~

Kate and Sophie returned to the Brewpub to find Nate nursing a scotch and attempting to ignore the layers of chatter ricocheting around the room. Kate, after listening for a moment, couldn’t blame him. Hardison, likely for a combo of petty mess-with-Nate and my-boyfriend-is-talking-to-me-again reasons, had turned his affection and use of pet names up to eleven. Or twelve.

“Hey, babe, not my stars-in-my-sky babe, I mean my salt-of-the-earth babe…”

Eliot hadn’t killed him yet, which meant he was either super contrite, or enjoying Nate’s twitching face too much to end Hardison’s fun. Or both. 

“You’re back!” Parker dropped from the ceiling. “Shopping or stealing?”

“Little bit of both,” Sophie said, giving her a push to send her swinging. “Have a good morning?”

Parker, swinging back, flipped upside down. “Yup! Lots of make-up sex! And pancakes!”

Over by the window, Nate choked on his drink. Sophie cackled.

“Now that you’re back,” Nate began, venturing back into the center of the room—and attention, Kate noted— “let’s get down to business. Hardison?”

Hardison didn’t look up from his computer. “Mmm? Oh, sorry, my bad, see, I thought for a second there you were askin’ me to start a briefing.”

Eliot folded his arms and smirked as Nate and Hardison matched stares, but Kate could already feel her pulse increase in anticipation of whatever battle of wills was currently brewing.

A considering look and sharp nod later, Nate took a step back. “Whenever you’re ready, Parker.”

And that was it. Sophie nudged Kate gently. “Men,” she murmured, lightly teasing. Kate shot her a quick smile, uncomfortably aware of her slowly calming heartbeat, the limp, buzzy aftereffect of adrenaline.

Right, I get it. Not like facing off with dad. But it’s not like I was scared then. Angry, indignant, entitled, sure . . . but not scared. What broke?

She shook the thought out of her head, as Parker yelled for everyone to gather. Kate followed the others downstairs, to the glass-walled back room they used for briefings. Hardison paused just outside as the other filed past, until it was just the two of them, facing each other. “Listen—”

“It’s okay, Hardison,” she began, because she’d kinda figured this was coming, after her confessions the day before. 

“Nah girl, I ain’t lettin’ you off that easy, ‘cause you shouldn’t be lettin’ me off that easy.” 

“What, I’m supposed to blame you for not knowing things I very specifically didn’t tell you?”

“Girl, that’s pretty much my job description, if I had a job description, which I’m proud to say I do not.”

Kate wrinkled her nose at him. “So you’re apologizing for respecting my privacy?”

“Yes, woman! I don’t know what got into me!” He realized he was waving his arms and folded them, sheepishly.

“You were kinda distracted.” She’d intended it as another out, because, really despite everything, she was glad Hardison hadn’t spied on her. Dad’s surveillance was still too new and fresh. 

Hardison shook his head, not accepting her escape route. “That should never have gotten in the way. Not—” he held up his hand when she started to argue, “in the sense that it’s none of your business—don’t listen to El, he’s been tellin’ me his love life ain’t any of my business for years.”

“But he’s your—”

“That and a mess of walking contradictions, if you haven't noticed. Even before. I heard all about his conquests in between bouts of none a’ yo business. No, what I mean is, I’ve had plenty of practice worryin’ about El bein’ El. I shouldn’t’ve let that get in the way of me seein’ you bein’ you, and taking on shit you didn’t need to be carrying.”

Kate weighed that for a moment, thinking about redirection, and distractions, and prisms. And about playing pool, actually, since that too was about angles and aiming at a certain spot to get somewhere else. “Am I a project?” she asked Hardison bluntly, disregarding it all. “Bobbi said she’d suggested—”

“On Clint’s roof? Yeah, she did. But here’s the thing: teachin’ you is a project. You is a person. If you were done with us teachin’, we wouldn’t be done with you. Understand? Or did that sound weirdly threatening, ‘cause I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No, that sounds good to me.” She smiled up at him. “Thanks, Hardison.”

“Ah, nah, that ain’t enough, we huggin’ this one out,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. And just for a moment, everything felt okay. Hardison’s hugs were magic like that.

“We should get into the briefing,” Kate said finally, pulling away.

“They can’t start shit without me, so we go in when we’re ready. Are we ready?”

“Yeah. Ready.”

“Okay then.”

Kate settled onto a barstool between Sophie and Eliot, as Hardison walked out in front, pulling up tabs on the large screen. Eliot glanced over, eyes flicking from Sophie and back to Kate in a silent question. Kate stuck her tongue out at him, and got an eyeroll in return. 

“Hardison,” Parker said, eyes bright with excitement, “run it.”

“All right people, here we go, picking up from where we left off on the saga of Charles Dodgson . . . aaand Kate’s already got her hand up. Look at how polite an’ civilized! Y’all could learn a thing or two. ‘Sup girl?”

“Could we pick up a bit . . . um, earlier? I don’t actually know what you guys did for him the first time.”

“Did to him, would be more accurate,” Eliot muttered.

“Riiight. That. So, Charlie Dodgson—”

“—the Third—”

“—Owner and CEO of Dodgson Electronics,” Hardison finished, with a mild glare at Eliot’s contributions. “His company makes high-end batteries for electric cars, drones, that sorta thing. Not a big outfit, but they used to have a few military contracts, until Stark snatched most of ‘em up. Now they mostly deal with overseas, Europe and India primarily, where there’s a market for small electric vehicles.”

“We helped him a while back,” Parker said. “He has daddy issues. Like you!”

“Gee, thanks, Parker,” Kate said, ignoring Eliot’s immediate smirk. If she’d been sitting on his other side, she’d have punched him for making that face. Stupid partially-her-fault bullet wound. It made this side an unfair target.

“The company was founded by Charlie’s granddaddy, who everyone pretty much agrees was a stand-up guy, but his son, Charlie’s dad, went for profit over people. Charlie, now, started out like his grandpa, but swung wildly into asshole territory, sending the company into a downward spiral to try to sell it off for scrap.” Behind Hardison, images of Dodgson’s headquarters and products flashed on the screens. “We got asked to ‘fix’ him by his floor manager, Alex.”

“That’s who Nate and I just went and paid a visit to last night,” Sophie added. “Very willing to talk to us, and pleased we were keeping an eye on Charles.”

Eliot snorted. “Guy thinks we’re miracle workers.”

“Hey man, I am a goddamn miracle worker. I once faked a miracle and summoned the Vatican. By accident. And fixed Charlie.”

“You didn’t fix him! A bunch of holograms and drugs clearly didn’t fix this guy, alright?!”

“So how’d you stop him being an asshole?” Kate interrupted before Eliot and Hardison could gather momentum. “And can you patent that?”

“We faked him lucid dreaming through a combination of holograms, Eliot’s questionable drug compounds, and well, Sophie.” The way he rushed through the sentence, one might get the impression Hardison didn’t really feel all that proud of it after all.

Nevermind, I’ll take the couch cure for insomnia, thanks anyway. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah, it completely fell apart and what actually helped was Parker dropping her act as dead cousin Patience and just talking him off the literal ledge he was about to jump off of because he figured if he died in the ‘dream’ he’d wake up,” Hardison admitted.

Kate swept her gaze around the room. “I’m gonna repeat: WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK?”

“It’s called the White Rabbit,” Parker told her, proudly oblivious to Kate’s horror. “It’s supposed to be impossible.”

“It should probably stay that way!” That’s like, extreme prisming. Natasha would be fine with it. So would Bobbi, probably. Didn’t Clint say he’d been an unwitting lab rat for both of them? He’d seemed oddly cool with it too. Ohmygod. We’re all completely insane.

“Right. That’s the backstory. And after Parker’s intervention, Charlie did snap out of it. Pulled his company out of its nosedive and everything was looking pretty good.”

“Till he shows up, desperate enough to trust Kate.”

“I will punch you, bullet hole or not,” Kate hissed at Eliot, though his comment also reminded her: “Charlie recognized me.” Now they were all staring at her. “He knows I’m Kate Bishop . . . Hawkeye.”

“Makes sense,” Nate said, shrugging. “You two probably ran in the same circles at some point. He trusts you because of that.”

“He’s not the only one. Who recognized me, I mean. Wes Carroll, his VP? Either Charlie told him or he guessed, but he definitely knew me when I gave them the bike. Oh! And Amy.”

“Jeez, girl, anyone not see through your carefully crafted identity? I’m feelin’ insulted here.”

“Look, I might be currently avoiding the spotlight, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never been in it.” Something about the truth of those words pricked at her. Later. I’ll figure it out at some point. “They all come from money.”

“Correction!” Hardison said. “Amy and Charlie both come from money. Y’all could form quite the support group for overbearing father figures.”

“Can’t, Clint offered membership in his Shitty Parent’s Club first and he made t-shirts. I’m fully booked for wallow-in-self-pity time.”

“Bet he wrote the words on that shirt with a Sharpie.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Kate informed Eliot primly.

“My point, people,” Hardison continued, expertly redirecting the conversational racquetball on the rebound, “is that Wes Carroll ain’t from money.”

“Blue collar?” Sophie asked, intrigued.

“Nope, firmly middle class. Upper middle, really, but he’d insist otherwise. Dude ain’t poor, he’s just a few rungs down the ladder. Went and got his business degree from Oregon State and seems to thrive as a big fish in a small pond type situation.”

“So he could be harboring some resentment looking up at all the assholes above him,” Nate noted.

“Oh yeah, not to jump to the chase or anything, but the dude is definitely our guy.”

“So, Harley’s in the clear?” Kate asked Hardison, slightly disappointed he hadn’t strung that out a little more. 

“Wait, you actually thought it was Harley?” Parker asked with a sharp, derisive laugh. “I thought you just wanted the bike.”

“No? I mean, I thought Charlie was way too overly trusting of his employees, but I figured, why not cross off his suspect first.”

“And then he’d be more likely to listen to you,” Sophie nodded.

“Right. And yeah, I wanted the bike. I still want the bike!” That bike’s been nothing but trouble. Very fast, cool trouble that I’ve barely gotten to ride. She buried her face in her hands. “I’m an ex-rich girl who wants her toys back, sue me!”

“You’ve seen this place, right? An’ El’s stupid car?”

“—Hey!—”

“We ain’t livin’ like monks here, is my point.”

Kate leaned over to Eliot, “It’s hard to miss that car, but it’s still in one piece and I’m assuming you didn’t sleep with some manipulative chick with a sob story to get it, immediately wreck it, fix it, then drown it in during Hurricane Sandy. So, I’m giving you a pass on the car.” 

“Christ, Circus.” He and Kate shared a look of mutual forbearance.

“Anyway, there are much easier ways to get a lot further in stealing your way to a design for an entire bike.” Parker said, still thinking about Harley. “We’re looking for someone who wants just the battery. Inside job, Carroll has access, either offers it up or gets approached.”

“Yeah, but Charlie said his computer guys found evidence that someone hacked into their system?”

“Right, yeah, that probably was me.” Hardison raised his hand, waggling his fingers. “Timeline fits.”

“Parker’s right,” Nate agreed. “Wes Carroll likely sold the specs to someone less in the spotlight, who doesn’t have to get past the patent office and the NHTSA.”

“Uh, do we know who?” Kate asked, feeling pretty stupid about the Harley thing. Probably never getting the bike back.

“I have been on this for all of three hours, thanks to some pressing personal business, so no, we don’t know who. Not yet anyway, I’m still diggin’. Nate, Soph? Y’all get anything from Alex?”

“Alex is such a sweetie. Just the nicest man, and very kind. Charlie’s lucky to have him.” Sophie said. “He was glad we’re keeping an eye on Charlie, but thought he’d been doing fine lately. Stressed, definitely, but not overly.”

“Not a personal fan of Carroll,” Nate added. “Could be typical tension between the floor and the management.”

“Right, yes, he always refers to him by surname, they all do, even Charlie—”

“Not when we talked,” Kate interrupted Sophie. “Then he was ‘Wes.’” Also, just my personal judgment and I wasn’t in a great headspace at the time, but the guy’s a prick.”

“Ooh, how so?” Sophie leaned in. “What did he say?”

Kate blinked and realized, “I . . . can’t remember.” Stupid. We were under the bridge. Something about the way he talked. His choice of words. I should remember this! I’ve been practicing!

Eliot leaned over far enough that their arms brushed. The contact felt solid and reassuring. “Ain’t your fault, that’s what lack of sleep does. Messes with memory and recall.”

“Pretty sure that is my fault.”

“An’ I thought you said all your wallowin’ time was reserved.”

“Besides,” Parker added, “we have our target. And we know he’s an asshole, which is always a bonus!”

Kate noticed Parker’s deliberate word choice of “target” over “mark” and gave her a smile. Sure, she was angry at herself, but that wasn’t their fault. She’d screwed up, she’d fix it.

“Right,” Hardison said. “I’m spendin’ the rest of the day following the money, so we actually get enough to make a plan. Parker?”

“Need to talk to Sophie,” Parker said, and left it at that.

Kate, resisting the urge to raise her hand, asked, “What should I do? Contact Charlie?”

Parker shook her head. “Leave him hanging for now, I want to see how long he takes to reach out. And it buys us some time.”

“Go out,” Hardison made a shooing motion. “Have some fun.”

Kate straightened, suddenly understanding. “You’re benching me?! But I can help!”

He tilted his head, eyeing her. “You have encountered the concept of a day off, right?”

“That was yesterday,” she shrugged.

“Passin’ out for twelve hours doesn’t count,” Eliot growled.

It should, Kate wanted to argue. Besides, if they were going to do a job, she should be here for all of it. Learning.

“During a con,” Sophie broke in, “everyone has a job, usually more than one. We haven’t explicitly discussed this, but it’s evident that for the time being, you Kate, are currently our hitter,” her eyes darted to Eliot, who nodded confirmation, “as well as our point of contact with Charlie, who likely would prefer to never see me again. You are not our hacker.”

“I’m here to learn—”

“Then listen to your teachers.” Kate snapped her head around to Nate, who saluted her with his empty glass. 

“Fine,” she said deliberately, determined not to let the frustration in her throat bubble up and get the better of her. She’d been dismissed before. Yeah, but last night they said they wanted me around. “I’ll go help Amy.”

Sophie caught up to her in the hall. “As frustrating as it is, they do have their reasons.”

“Whatever,” Kate muttered, taking refuge in the most teenage of responses. Sophie taking their side felt like a betrayal, which was even more stupid. I’ve known her for less than a day. Of course she’s not taking my side.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” Sophie said gently.

“You’re leaving? Now?”

“We weren’t intending to stay, just stopped in because Parker asked. There are other matters we were attending to.”

That require your immediate attention. Yeah, I know the spiel. Kate swallowed. It was stupid to feel ditched by a grifter who’d hung out with her for half a day. She ran through the various responses jumping onto her tongue, dismissed them all as needy or whiny, before they could escape. “Have a good trip.”

Sophie frowned and reached out to lay a hand on Kate’s shoulder. “Would you like me to stay?”

“No,” she said and the smile she summoned came with the ease of long practice. “I’m good. Thanks for the advice. We’ll be okay.”

“You will,” Sophie said. It sounded like a promise. She pulled Kate into a hug that felt too much like too many things she’d shoved behind too many doors. When they broke contact, it was because Kate took a step back. Sophie gave her a nod, a smile, and a slip of paper. “If you ever want another talk.” She disappeared back inside.

~

“Hey! I just got a text from Hardison ordering me to take the rest of my shift off? And I’m still getting paid?” Amy wrinkled her nose at Kate, who’d appeared in the breakroom, intending to put an apron on, only to find Amy taking hers off. “This have anything to do with you?”

“Probably. It’s a battle of wills and I’m apparently losing.” She sighed, leaning against the lockers. “Are you going to listen?”

“To Hardison? Of course, he’s my boss. I guess it’s a bit weirder for you, huh?”

“I’m just . . . I don’t know. Feeling brushed off. Excluded.” Strange, how easy it was to confess stuff to Amy. Something about her eyes. Like they were always interested and listening. Not that eyes listen . . . oh shut up, Kate.

“I know how that goes. They’re terrible about it right? Like everything they do is this open secret I’m not supposed to know about, but still be ready to step in, no questions asked.” She rolled her eyes. “Have you gone to Salt and Straw yet?”

“What?”

“Salt and Straw,” Amy repeated, biting the inside of her lip. “Only if you’re interested, I mean it’s kinda touristy, not like, Voodoo touristy but—”

“What is it? I haven’t even been to Voodoo—damn my priorities have been fucked lately.”

Amy giggled. “It’s ice cream. Really good, weird flavored ice cream. It’ll score you Eliot points.”

“Interested, yes. Definitely interested.” Why are you babbling? “I uh, need the Eliot points, but more importantly I get ice cream and hang out with you? That’s like a triple word score!”

What is wrong with you? But Amy was giggling again, and Kate quite enjoyed making Amy giggle.

The line for the Salt and Straw wrapped halfway around the block, which Amy proclaimed was “not that bad” as she leaned up against the brick, squinting her eyes in the setting sun. Kate shifted slightly to create a shadow.

“Tall girl privilege,” she winked, and felt like a dork immediately, which meant she had to scan the rest of the line, as if on the lookout for suspicious persons. It wasn’t all that stupid, okay? Amy’d been kidnapped before, and well, she was enough of a trouble magnet that all of her friends were trouble magnets too. I don’t think that’s how magnets work. Anyway, scanning. Danger. Etc.

But there were no suspicious persons to be seen. Plenty of people around, walking dogs or navigating strollers over the old, cracked concrete of the sidewalk, dodging each other and the intermittent trees. Occasionally the pungent scent of weed drifted past from somewhere indeterminant. She finally gave up the pretense and turned back to Amy, who kept glancing at her as if about to say something but looking away instead.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Nothing made a line feel interminable quite like awkward silence. Kate sighed. “You can ask me,” she said, as if she knew exactly what Amy was going to ask, and okay, so she had a few top guesses, like “Do you know Thor?”

Amy glanced around them at the other chatting groups, completely ignoring them. “We’re in public!” she whispered, like that wasn’t suspicious at all.

Probably about Thor then. “People don’t listen as carefully as you think.”

“Really? I mean I eavesdrop on conversations at the Brewpub all the time.”

“What, between Eliot, Hardison, and Parker?”

“No—well, yes, but honestly it doesn’t make what they talk about any clearer. Besides half the time they’re yelling—it’s hard not to.”

“Point.”

“But Parker installed all these bugs while she was trying to figure out what the guys who, um . . . grabbed . . .” she stopped, opening and closing her fists a few times as she took careful breaths.

Kate still remembered what that felt like—would never forget the surprise and fear and powerlessness of the moment. “I’ve been kidnapped.”

Amy started. “Bet you rescued yourself, right?”

“God, no. I was nine, for one thing, and even if I’d been older, sometimes the only thing you can do is make things as difficult as possible for the assholes.”

“What happened?” she asked, immediately following with, “Sorry, I shouldn’t ask—”

“A certain archer. Didn’t meet him. Not then.” Dad whisked me away all concerned and I was so glad to see him. Even though it was his fault, doing business with a guy like that. But at the time I thought it had been a mistake.

“Parker got to me before . . .” She trailed off as they reached the door, grabbing a menu from a bracket. “Here, you pick first.”

Kate let her redirect, leaning over her shoulder to read through flavors like “Arbequina Olive Oil,” “Pear and Blue Cheese,” and “Rhubarb Crumble with Toasted Anise.” No wonder Eliot liked this place. She wondered how Parker felt about edible flowers in ice cream.

She didn’t attempt to return to the conversation they’d been having until ice cream was acquired—roasted strawberry coconut for Amy and honey lavender for Kate—and they’d exited the crowded shop to walk down the narrow sidewalk, dodging people and dogs while trying to curb escaping drips of ice cream.

“You never asked whatever you were going to ask,” Kate said finally. The evening was perfect; warm and bright, sunlight streaking between buildings to catch golden highlights in Amy’s hair. Neither of them wanted to go back to trading kidnapping experiences.

“It’s not important.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

Amy focused a little too carefully on licking her ice cream smooth.

Kate found herself focusing a little too carefully on Amy’s tongue. “S-seriously,” she stammered. When did this become a thing? “Ask me anything.”

“What made you decide to be a superhero?” Amy blurted out, following up immediately with, “You don’t have to answer if it’s too personal.”

“Oh.” On the plus side, not about Thor . . . “It’s not. I just don’t have a great answer.”

“It wasn’t getting rescued by—”

“No. Though I definitely signed up for archery at summer camp that year. I—it was a lot of little choices and one thing leading to another. Mentors in weird places. Seeing stuff I couldn’t fix in my own life. Plus, I’m really not great about Keep Out signs. Or keeping my mouth shut. Or keeping to myself. And suddenly I was kinda sponsoring a team of teenage superheroes and insisting that despite the fact that Cap called me Hawkeye, I wasn’t.”

“You argued with Captain America?”

“Yeah, that would fall under failure to keep mouth shut. That’s why he gave me Clint’s bow when Clint wasn’t around to object. Cap likes it when people talk back. He sees it as speaking truth to power.”

“I can see that. His point, I mean, and also you talking back. But you don’t just accidentally become a superhero.”

“Why not?” Kate asked, though there were plenty of perfectly good answers why not. She’d just never been great at choosing those. 

“I don’t know! I’m not the one going around sponsoring teenagers! For one thing, they’re teenagers! They’re not supposed to be fighting monsters!”

“Teenagers fight monsters all the time. Just some of them have more tentacles.”

“I didn’t mean to . . . I don’t know, it just sounds crazy.” She laughed, in an oddly flustered way. “It would never have occured to me as an option. Not until I met Parker and you.”

She still thinks Parker’s a superhero. And why not? She and the others walk the walk. (In less noticeable get-ups, but hell, for all I know Parker could have powers! They all could, really.  And even if they don’t… I mean, Clint and I are crazy enough to do this.

(And they sure act like the others. Showing support and then shunting you off to the side.)  

Kate shook her head against that uncharitable thought. “I think it’s combination of...knowing it’s a possibility, and the right balance—or imbalance—of having power and needing control. And New York has an above average population of people powered or crazy enough to give it a shot. So there’s that.” She’d started walking faster, without noticing, until Amy caught her arm, stopping her.

“I didn’t mean that you were crazy,” she said, holding Kate’s arms and gaze to make sure she’s listening. “I don’t want you thinking that.”

Kate blushed, breaking eye contact. “Oh, it’s definitely crazy,” she mumbled, then regained her conversational footing. “I’ve fought several evil versions of myself, believe me, it’s weird.”

Amy slid her arm through Kate’s as they kept walking, the warm pressure sending her reeling and grounding her at the same time. “I take it that’s not a metaphor,” Amy said, as if this was just casual contact for her, two girlfriends—um, girls who are friends—hanging out. Which is true! That’s all it is! You’ve linked arms with plenty of friends without becoming a mis-fired putty arrow!

“Nope, just a shit-ton of timeline and dimension hopping,” Kate managed, scrambling to keep track of the conversation. “Spent a lot of time out of this world.”

“Huh. So you’re nineteen, but your mind is older?” Amy couldn’t quite keep the grin off her face.

Kate gaped at her, brain well and truly scrambled now, like one of her failed omelettes. Cute, nice, makes completely random pop-culture references. Oh no. I’m doomed. “Uh—

“I’ll stop there,” Amy promised, schooling her expression as Kate mentally dumped the failed brain-lette in the trash and cracked some fresh eggs in the pan. This is your brain on... “That’s gotta be frustrating, feeling older, but not being treated like you are.”

Stir rapidly to form small curds. They create structure and cohesion when you go to fold.

“I’m a half-Asian girl generally seen running around in purple spandex with a bow and arrow,” Kate pointed out, brain at least back to the small-curds phase, if not fully set. “And even before the spandex, I was a pampered little rich girl shunted off to boarding schools and summer camps. I don’t expect anyone to take me seriously and honestly, fuck ‘em.” 

“I wish I could do that, it sounds . . . freeing.” They paused to wait for a light to change, Amy briefly resting her head against Kate’s shoulder. Oh no, there goes the omelette.

“Running around in spandex?” Kate asked, intentionally obtuse. “I mean it’s pretty comfy. Like full body leggings.”

“No . . . or only figuratively. I mean the um, the fuck ‘em.” She glanced around for any listeners before saying the last words quietly, with feeling. 

Oh, we have got to get you swearing more. “I mean, you are, aren’t you? Your dad has expectations and you’re off doing your own thing. That’s like, classic fuck ‘em territory.”

“I’m a waitress,” Amy replied, as if that was nothing to be proud of.

Kate gasped dramatically, covering her mouth in horror. “Did I just hear you use the forbidden W-word?” Eliot was very particular about terminology.

“Consider it my rebellion,” she said, planting her free arm on her hip and then dropping it immediately. “Or not, I don’t know, that’s a really stupid hill to die on.”

“I’ve chosen stupider ones, I promise.” Kate sighed. “Listen, being a waitre—server isn’t stupid, or useless, it’s really hard work, as I’m now incredibly aware. And besides, you do way more around there than just that.”

“That’s only because the three of them tend to up and disappear at a moment’s notice.”

“Right, because that makes what you take on worthless.” Kate felt her phone buzz and almost ignored it, but Amy looked meaningfully at her pocket, like the responsible person she was, so Kate unlinked their arms and pulled it out. Hardison.

shit hit fan

come back

asap

“Hardison needs me back at the Brewpub.” What happened? Internal fight? Something in the bank statements? What?

“That’s not right, you’re not on the schedule and this was his idea. I’ll tell him—” Amy was already pulling out her phone, fully prepared to go to battle for Kate’s sake.

Kate laid a hand on her arm, wishing it was back tucked close to her. “It’s not that job.”

Amy tilted her head, then nodded. “Ah. ‘Hero stuff.’” She stuck finger quotes around the phrase. “I won’t ask.” She flashed Kate her server smile, blank and cheerful. Kate could feel her earlier frustration bubble up again, this time on Amy’s behalf.

“No. You should ask. Always.” The words rushed out before she could reconsider. This was like, rule number one of superheroing. But Amy already knew about her and she’d said she could ask her anything, and Kate was pretty tired of the way the trio took Amy for granted, even if Amy pretended she didn’t mind. “Ask. And don't stop asking. Don’t accept some bullshit brush off.”

“It’s none of my business—”

“Yes. It is. In this case literally! You’re the manager when they go off and do the stuff you don’t ask questions about! It is your business!”

“But—” Amy seemed a bit taken aback by Kate’s sudden insistence. “I don’t want to pry . . .”

“Pry. Demand. Be annoying and exasperating and persistent. And not just with those three. With everything.”

“Kate—”

“Otherwise you get surprised by shit like your dad being a criminal as well as an asshole and arranging to have you murdered.” 

Amy studied her, eyes kind. “You don’t think you’re projecting a bit?”

Just because you’re projecting, doesn’t mean they’re not . . . “Do you know who your dad works with?”

She hesitated. “No. Not really. I was never that interested. But he’s not . . . like that. And I want to be an artist!”

“Only?”

She met Kate’s eyes with a question in her own, and Kate doubted either of them knew the answer to it. Kate sighed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. You’re good. But you’re good at this too.”

“And now I’m getting dragged along to whatever this ‘job’ is.”

Right ‘cause your timing is great here. “No. Not dragged. If you really don’t want to know, I’ll drop it, I swear. But if you want answers about the trio, I’ll help you get them.”

Amy considered for a moment, then nodded abruptly. “I want answers.”

“Okay then, let’s go.”

~

Kate impulsively grabbed Amy’s hand as they walked back into the Brewpub, which was bustling enough that several of the waitstaff looked up with desperate hope in their eyes that Amy had returned to save them. Okay, so maybe she too could’ve helped with the saving, but Kate, well-acquainted with the gaze of someone looking to the person standing next to her for rescue, was willing to give this one to Amy. Or would have been, if she wasn’t determined to help Amy see this other thing through.

“Your night off too, remember?”

“That’s just because Hardison is an idiot.”

“Yeah, well, I suppose he can’t be a genius at everything.” She pulled Amy into the back rooms, where they found Parker, Hardison, and Eliot sitting at the table . . . and an unconscious person—likely a man, but only based on their short dark hair and wrinkled button-down and slacks—laid out on the couch. His face was turned away from them, but Kate had a sinking feeling she knew exactly who it was. A square, similar to a nicotine patch, stuck to his neck.

“Kate...and uh Amy...hi Amy!” Hardison waved, while Eliot folded his arms, eyes latching firmly on Kate as if Amy’s presence was all her fault. Which, okay, it was, but he had no right to jump to conclusions like that.

“What, you a package deal now?” Eliot asked, jerking his head at their joined hands. Amy tensed. Amy might have already been tense, what with Kate pulling her in here and also the unexplained unconscious stranger, but Eliot’s tone definitely ratcheted it up several notches based on the way she was squeezing Kate’s hand. “This ain’t for any other people you just decide to haul in.”

“Wh-why is there . . .” Amy stammered, staring at the couch and its contents. “What did you do to him?!” She almost pulled away before Kate tightened her grip. This was not going as planned. Right because you didn’t plan! You thought this would be a great idea based on impulse and the fact you were pissed at them for sidelining you.

“Gave him somethin’ to make him sleep,” Eliot told her, as if drugging someone was a totally normal thing to do.

“For his own good,” Hardison added, which didn’t seem to reassure Amy one bit.

Neither did Parker saying, “Trust us!” with one of her brilliant, slightly deranged smiles.

“Trust you?” Amy burst out. “I did! Kate said I should ask what you guys do, and that seemed like a great idea, but if your job involves drugging people unconscious, I’m going to need a good reason not to call the cops!”

“Kate—” Eliot’s tone went several shades darker.

“Hey, no one ever told me standard operating procedure involved roofies, so she’s got a point!” Kate snapped. “And I’m still waiting to find out what happened!?”

“You can’t call the cops,” Parker pointed out, tone completely reasonable. “If you call the cops, he’ll go to jail.”

Kate winced as Amy yanked her hand out of Kate’s grasp to point it at the unconscious man. “He’s a criminal?” Shit. The bike. This has to be about the bike.

“What? No, of course not. And since when are you prejudiced against criminals? That hurts.” Parker pouted, but it might have been lost on Amy.

Hardison chimed in, “Please, like you know any criminals that’ve actually gone to prison.”

“I-I don’t!” Amy stammered.

“My point exactly.”

“I don’t know any criminals!”

Eliot snorted, but Parker looked oddly hurt by Amy’s insistence.

Fuck. I screwed up. Again.

“I don’t want to be part of this.” Amy stepped away from Kate as she said it, but her words were directed at Hardison, speaking employee to boss. Kate really hoped she wouldn’t call the cops and hoped even harder that Hardison wouldn’t try to bribe her into not calling the cops. Amy’s honest. Meanwhile, I try to help a guy by sorta, not quite stealing a bike and he ends up on the lam and roofied by Eliot. Again.

Hardison nodded. “That’s fair. I promise, we ain’t hurtin’ him, he’s had a rough time of it and needed a break. It’s for his own good,” he repeated.

Kate had to admit from Amy’s perspective, this still looked bad. Hell, it looked bad to Kate too, for vastly different reasons. “I know this looks bad,” she began, but Parker interrupted.

“He’s a friend,” she told Amy. “I’ll protect him.” The simple words balanced between promise and resignation.

Amy met her gaze uncertainly, and finally nodded. “Staff looked overwhelmed when we came in,” she said, giving both them and herself an out. Kate bit her lip.

“I’ll owe you big time?” Hardison wheedled at Amy. “An’ overtime, obviously.”

Amy nodded again, her own familiar balance with what went on in the back rooms of the Brewpub reestablished, and turned to leave.

“Amy—” Kate began, knowing she’d miss the target even before her name left her lips.

“I’m going to do my job. You. . .” Amy swept her eyes over the group in front of her “. . . do yours.” She walked out.

I just can’t leave it like that. Kate hesitated for a moment, then rushed after her, but Amy had already disappeared through the doors into the kitchen, leaving her standing alone by the stairs.

She sat heavily. This is stupid. I’m stupid. Of course Amy doesn’t want to have anything to do with a bunch of vigilante criminals. She saw me as a superhero, but that line is so blurred as to be nonexistent. And now she’d see her for what she was. Maybe she’d not not trust her, but she’d keep herself separate. Like with the others.

“So, this is the fight you've picked, huh?” Eliot, self-appointed Hawkeye wrangler, came out of the room to lean against the wall next to her.

“It seemed fair. I should’ve known better.” Kate wished she could tell where any of this was going, or where she wanted it to go. Usually she was good at both of those things. Kinda the whole skillset of an archer, really.

“Tellin’ her exposes her. You know that.”

“She’s been asking. You guys take her for granted, and she lets it happen.” Eliot grunted a possible assent, so Kate continued. “Because she thinks she has to toe a line. She’s a people pleaser.”

“And you have a type,” Eliot said, completely out of left field.

“What! No. And not—she is DEFINITELY not my type. Not that I have a type . . . okay I do, which is why I know she’s not it. Tall, emotionally distant buff guys are more my type. That goes for aliens to.” Kate winced at Eliot’s raised eyebrows. “I’m not into . . .” Kate cast around for anything to get this conversation away from the ledge it was teetering on. “Look, you’re not gonna get this, but as a former people pleaser, that first time being an asshole? That moment of just acknowledging you have the right to take up space in the world and claiming it as yours? It’s a rush. It’s a glorious, terrifying rush. And I wanted that for her. Want that. For Amy.” See? Totally nonselfish reason right there.

“Why wouldn’t I get that?”

“Oh please. Like you’ve ever been a people pleaser in your whole futzing life.”

“Eliot! Can-we-have-the-special-briefing-popcorn-with-chocolate?!?” Parker yelled from the room behind them.

“Nope. Never.” Eliot smirked. “And I’d say, based on you moping out here, that she’s gone and done that. Just not in the way you were expectin.’” He disappeared back inside, leaving Kate alone.

Again.

Chapter Text

“My daughter was held hostage at gunpoint—”

“Is your daughter hurt, sir?”

“I’m fine, nurse. Thank you.”

“You are NOT fine. You’ve been strangled, shot at . . .”

Kate sat outside the emergency room on the curb, turning the throwing star she’d used in the cathedral—poor Susan, so determined to have an all-out wedding and then gets held hostage. Should’ve just eloped and given the money to charity, like I said—and turning Dad’s words over and over through her head, each sharp like the points of the star. Strangled. Shot at.

I’m fine.

She was. She knew what not-fine felt like, but back there, being strangled and shot at, she’d been in control. She hadn’t needed to be afraid, because she’d known what to do and she’d been prepared to do it. She’d saved everyone, even those Young Avengers getting tangled up in each other and setting the whole place on fire during their “rescue.”

“Kate? How did you get mixed up in this?” Cassie, arms wrapped around herself and eyes bright, hurried up. Kate hadn’t thought to text her, or anyone, so Cassie must have seen it on the news. Which meant Kate had a good guess why she’d turned up. 

“It was my sister’s wedding, go figure.” 

“Is she okay?”

If you asked Susan that, the answer would’ve been an emphatic, sobbing NO. Her picture perfect wedding ruined. Not being dead because of Kate’s actions had taken a back seat. Kate rolled her eyes in answer.

Cassie, she knew, wanted to be considerate, but she wasn’t here because of Kate. If I was upset, she’d sit beside me, but whatever my threshold is, this didn’t come close. 

You wanted to feel in control. You did. You were. 

I know. It was awesome. 

“I’m looking for the Young Avengers,” Cassie said finally, startling Kate from her thoughts.

“They’re not here. They flew off when we left the cathedral.” I think I hurt their pride.

“Did you see which way they went?”

“Toward the park, maybe?” They’d left sloppily, in a hurry, and flying for that matter, so they might have changed direction. But let’s be real, they aren’t thinking that far ahead.

“So, toward the mansion. Thanks!”

“You’re going to join them, aren’t you?” Kate asked. It was what Cassie had always wanted.

“Yes! This is my chance! If you . . .” Cassie let the question trail off. Kate had been insisting it wasn’t her goal since the first time they’d met at Hawthorne and started sparring together. “Anyway, thanks.”

“—by the time I get through with you, Doctor . . .” Dad was yelling behind her, threatening to call on the powerful—monied—forces at his disposal. 

That’s not the kind of control I want.

“Hey Cassie, wait up!” The words flew out of her before she’d given a thought to where they would fly, what they would lead to. “I changed my mind.”

~

It took Kate about 30 seconds to stop moping and get over herself.

You’re welcome to a bit longer if you’d like, a mental Sophie insinuated herself into Kate’s thoughts. 

“I think I’m good,” she told Head-Sophie. And my client’s drugged unconscious on the couch so I should probably go see what’s up with that. The whole mess she’d made with Amy would just have to wait. 

Way to overshoot that target, Kate.

They all looked up from their cluster around the briefing set up when she returned to the room. Well, except poor Charlie, still passed out on the couch.

“Sorry,” she said finally. “I don’t know why I thought that dragging her in here was a good idea.”

Parker shrugged. “Amy’s honest,” she said, as if it was an explanation. 

“She helps people, but what we do…” Hardison waved his hands around him in illustration, “it ain’t quite in her wheelhouse, an’ that’s okay.”

Right, because she’s a sane person who freaks out when they see someone drugged and passed out in a back room of their workplace.

Kate gestured to Charlie. “And that’s helping? ‘Cause when I talked to the guy about what went down before, he was pretty confused but it sure didn’t sound pleasant what you put him through. And from what you said earlier, I don’t blame him and I’m pretty confused as to why he’d walk into a place that has you three, or five, or whatever, in it.” She folded her arms, watching all of them.

Hardison and Eliot looked at each other, then turned to Parker, whose lips were pressed together. “You’re right,” she said finally.

Not something I’ve been hearing much lately. “I am?”

“The White Rabbit—the job we pulled on Charlie before—is . . . it’s sort of like your archer’s paradox. You know where you want the arrow to go, but the arrow has to do it on its own and it wavers back and forth. The difference is, we can try things along its path. Not just at the release.”

“Oookay?”

Hardison gestured at himself and Eliot. “Neither of us have any idea what y’all are talking about,” he said. “But back then, we made Charlie think he was dreaming and walked him through memories we reconstructed, so he could work out the trauma associated with ‘em.” 

“With drugs,” Kate said flatly.

Eliot lifted and settled his shoulders in something slower and more deliberate than a shrug. “Somethin’ I’ve been dosed with myself, yeah. It should’ve worked, but he drank one of those energy things and it threw everything off. He was disoriented, headed for the roof. Parker snapped him out of it, by giving him something real.”

“Sooo, how’d he end up back here and drugged unconscious this time? If it messed him up so bad the first time?”

“A few things, uh . . . happened. Fast. That’s why I called you back,” Hardison began, but Parker jumped in impatiently.

“Alex is dead. His car blew up in the DE parking lot.”

Whatever she’d been expecting, that was not it. “Shit,” she said, for lack of anything better.

“Exactly. Have a good date?” Eliot asked, as a unfairly sarcastic non-sequitur. They sat back down at the counter in front of Hardison’s screens. Kate noted there was in fact, a large bowl of popcorn drizzled with chocolate sitting in the center. A man is dead and there’s popcorn. Special briefing popcorn. 

“Are you going to call back Sophie and Nate?” Kate asked Parker, rather than deign to acknowledge Eliot. “This feels like it just got a lot bigger.”

“They on a trans-pacific flight right now, an’ while those two could easily get that plane turned around…” Hardison trailed off.

“We’ve got this,” Parker finished, certain. “With your help.” She meant it.

Kate nodded. “Of course. So what the hell happened?”

Hardison took a deep breath. “Wellll…”

After some discussion between the three of them, Parker and Eliot had left Hardison to his hacking through the thickets of financials and driven Lucille down to Oxford to retrieve the bike, figuring that whatever was going to come next, a not-exactly-stolen prototype Harley shouldn’t be involved.

The car explosion occurred when they were about fifteen minutes away, ten by the time Hardison noticed his set alerts for anything related to DE flaring to life across social media. Someone had caught it all on film and immediately posted it. The account was junk, meant to be completely anonymous, but with a hacker like Hardison on the case, it likely would lead them somewhere—eventually. “I only got ten fingers and two eyeballs people.” Meanwhile, Eliot and Parker had arrived, ready to flash fake police badges, planning to feed the guard at the gate some bullshit about Lucille to get through, but there was no guard at the gate. He’d run, along with everyone else in the vicinity to see if he could help.

He couldn’t.

Cops, firefighters, and EMTs were already on scene when they arrived, and in the chaos it was easy to stash Lucille around back and blend in. Wes was there, talking to officers, while most of the employees watched, stunned and crying behind the police caution tape as firefighters investigated the hunk of twisted metal that had been a car. Charlie had disappeared.

They found him instead, in his office, door locked (until Parker), having a full-blown panic attack.

Charlie didn’t have a good history with cars. He’d lost his cousin, Patience, to a car crash. He hated driving. Kate remembered Wes driving the trailer when they’d come to pick up the bike. And now Alex. Kate hadn’t met the man, but he’d clearly cared about his employer to the point he sought out unorthodox help for him before, and recommended he come again for this theft.

“He was a good guy,” Eliot confirmed, tone somber. “Looked out for everyone in that place, from the floor on up. Not surprised it threw our boy here for a loop.”

“So you,” Kate searched for a neutral term, “sedated him?”

“He kept saying ‘I did it. It’s my fault’ over and over,” Parker said. “I don’t think he did, but any moment the building would be swarming with people looking for him and that’s not the first words you should say to a cop.”

“Right, okay, fair point.” 

“Eliot had dug out some of those patches—we keep some in Lucille just in case—and we carr—”

“We,” Hardison interrupted, glaring at Eliot.

“Parker did the fireman carry, Alec,” Eliot grumbled, barely annoyed, “I scouted ahead.”

Hardison took a moment to eye Parker in admiration. “That’s my girl!”

Parker and Kate shared a look. “It’s not that hard,” Kate pointed out. “Just balance and weight distribution.”

“Hey, it seems impressive is all! An’ I like the idea of either one of my babes carryin’ me from danger.”

“Oookay, and we’re backing out of Hardison’s fantasy . . .”

“Prob’ly for the best,” Eliot said, agreeing with Kate, and also with Hardison, based on the flush climbing his neck. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, we found the bike in the lab downstairs, had a few close calls, but managed to get both Charlie and the bike loaded into Lucille. Tight fit, and some fast talkin’ on the way out, but we made it.”

“I texted you right after,” Hardison said. “Woulda earlier, but . . .”

“I get it,” Kate said. Their first day back on a job and Parker and Eliot ended up surrounded by cops and surprise exploding cars murdering people while Hardison was an hour away. Again. “Just going to be petty for one moment to say I could’ve helped, if you hadn’t sent me away. Okay, there, pettiness over, let’s get back to business.”

“If we’d expected any of this, we wouldn’t have,” Eliot said. “This was s’posed to just be a . . .”

“. . . surprise!” Parker finished, in a vastly brighter tone of voice. “What?” She demanded when the boys turned to glare at her. “It’s all changed now, but it was!”

“Wait, what was a surprise?”

“Oh! We were going to mod and paint the bike. For you. So we got you out of the way.”

“You . . . want me to keep it?” She’d been planning to demand it, willing to fight the inevitable pushback, that turned out to be totally . . . evitable? Hang on, that doesn’t sound right.

“Of course! You hustled it fair and square. Those assholes were sore losers. And then there was all the fire and death and cops and a hyperventilating man trying to incriminate himself, so the plan had to change. It happens.” Parker shrugged. “But! I do have a present for you!” She bounded up before Kate could protest and returned quickly to plop something black and rectangular down. “For when you can’t carry a bow.”

Kate grinned at the taser. She had arrowheads that did the same basic thing—when she wasn’t being an idiot who hadn’t bothered to pull them out of their case—but a recognizable taser could go a long way as a threat and a deterrent. “Thanks, Parker.”

“You’re our acting hitter. Just no guns.”

“I’m totally cool with that.”

“Gonna state the obvious here,” Eliot added, “but the way I handle shit and the way Kate handles shit is gonna be different. As are people’s reactions. What went down in that parkin’ lot might not have happened in my case. That’s got nuthin’ to do with your abilities.”

Kate winced. “Maybe, but it had something to do with my lack of situational awareness at the time.”

He nodded, giving her that point. “You know what I’m sayin.’”

Kate did. If it had been Eliot, they may not have jumped him in the first place. And if they had, and they’d gotten lucky, managed to get him down and keep him down through sheer force of numbers, he’d have ended up in bad shape, but not . . . not what they’d been planning to do to her. “I know the risks.”

“Then let’s get a move on,” Parker said. “Hardison, did you get the security cam footage from the access point I left?”

He nodded and tapped at his tablet. “Okay, so Parker left me a little . . . think of it like a beacon, or a backdoor, while she an’ El were in Charlie’s office. Gets me into his computer, and his computer gets me into everything,” he explained, clearly for Kate’s benefit. “So yes, mama, I mean ma’am—cause we at work now—I did get the security cam footage and it’s . . . well, let’s see what y’all see.”

He showed them the footage of the parking lot. It was clearly at the end of the workday, with employees streaming out of the building to their cars, some of them pausing to exchange a few words. Hardison aimed a laser pointer at the screen to indicate Alex, a white-haired man, walking to his car. The cam footage was decent quality, but it overlooked the entire parking lot, sacrificing detail for coverage. A moment later, Alex got in his car, and Kate found herself holding her breath as she imagined all the tiny adjustments he might have been making. Seatbelt, mirror. . .

A fireball, bright white in the monochrome footage, flared into the space where a life had been. Around the parking lot, other figures turned, dropped bags, ran back or forward, not that either made any difference. The car had become a twisted mangle of dark metal in those few seconds.

“Okay,” Hardison paused the video, sounding slightly shaken. He’s watched this countless times by now, probably, Kate realized.

“Gimme that pointer thing,” Eliot ordered. When Hardison brought it over, Eliot captured his hand, wrapping their fingers together tightly.

Parker watched them, but didn’t move out of her seat. “Where’s Charlie and Wes? Are they out there?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Hardison continued, reclaiming both the laser pointer and his hand, but he stayed with them at the counter. This time, he rewound the footage further back than he had previously and indicated the two men, talking near the entrance of the building. Alex stopped to say something to Charlie, resting his hand on the younger man’s shoulder, before walking toward his car. Hardison hit pause again. “Okay, now, here’s the viral footage someone—and no I don’t know who yet, I’ll get to the weirdness of that after you see it—uploaded almost immediately.”

This video came from a different angle, eye level, as if the person was holding up their phone. It was much better quality than the cam footage, so much so that Kate blinked a few times, because her eyes felt too in focus, like one of those 4k TVs. It began as Alex walked to his car, with Charlie and Wes just in the corner of the frame. Wes turned to stare directly at the camera for a brief moment, confusion replaced with a dawning recognition before he quickly turned away, following the vector of the camera’s gaze back to Alex as he got into his car.

In this footage, the explosion burst into sound and color, with chunks of metal whistling through the air as people began screaming and running. The camera jiggled slightly, but not as much as Kate would expect . . . unless they’d been expecting the blast.

“Can we see who’s filming? From the other footage?”

“That,” Hardison said, pulling his eyes from the destruction to smile at her, “is a very good question.”

This time, he played the two together, perfectly synced and in slow motion so they could watch and compare.

“There—” Kate pointed at a woman with medium length dark hair and business clothes, toward the bottom left of the range of the security camera. Hers was the only angle that made sense. “Except . . . no phone? Or camera?”

It had to be her, though. No one else was at the right angle, and she spotted Wes, turning in her direction before looking away.

“Button cam? Or maybe in her earrings?” Parker suggested, frowning. “She clearly knew this was going to happen.”

“Definitely not an accident,” Kate said, and felt stupid for even bothering. Eliot and Hardison traded a look. “What?”

“Alex, as floor manager and one of Charlie’s most trusted employees, got a special kind of bonus last Christmas. That car was one of the first off the assembly line, thanks to their deal with the Norwegians.”

“He’s driving an electric car with DE batteries in it?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. How easy . . .” Kate realized the others were probably miles ahead of her thought process here, but Hardison nodded at her to continue, “um, how easy would it be to rig the car to explode and blame the battery?”

“Very, if you know what you’re doin’.”

“That’s true for a regular car too,” Eliot pointed out.

“Sure, but you blow up a regular car—POOSHSSH,” Parker waved her hands to go with her sound effects, “and everyone just shrugs because it’s full of gas and anyway it’s done all the time in movies and people are dumb enough to think movie stuff is real stuff. That,” she continued, waving at the screen, “isn’t just people-killing footage, it’s company-killing footage. If your company makes batteries.”

“Okay, so the mystery lady with her mystery camera is sending DE under? Couldn’t she do that without murdering someone? Like, that’s some serious evil villain territory.” And I’m on summer break, okay? Plus this is Oregon! Why would a villain come to Oregon?! “Wait! Is she using this to frame Charlie? He’s an engineer, he technically could have done it.” Not that he would, but . . . “Wait, wait! Before, you said Wes had something to do with this. She and Wes are working together to frame Charlie!”

“Learns fast, the padawan does,” Hardison held out his fist for her to bump. “Everything about this looks fishy to me, and that’s without even getting into the fishy money stuff, Wes has been doin’. But cops don’t think that way, at least not at first, so they’ll definitely be wanting to talk to Charlie over there.” He froze, hand midway through gesturing to the couch. “Hey ah, guys? What’d’y’all do with Charlie’s phone?”

Parker and Eliot shared a look, followed by Parker hurrying over to expertly raid Charlie’s person and coming up empty-handed. Hardison meanwhile tried calling the phone, only to have it go immediately to voicemail. It didn’t ring. He kept tapping at his tablet, trying other things, but Kate turned her attention to Eliot, who’d gone quiet, eyes closed. 

Finally, he opened them. “Under his desk,” he said. “Didn’t think about it at the time, but he probably turned it off and threw it there, t’stop it from ringing.”

Parker rested her chin on her hands. “Oops,” she said, eloquently. The other two nodded in agreement. “Okay,” she continued, straightening. “Eliot, Hardison, damage control with the cops. We need to give Charlie a reason to be AWOL, might as well be that he’s in shock.”

“Psychiatrist, got it,” Hardison said, fingers scrambling over his screen. “I’m also gonna want Wes Carroll’s personal computer or phone or both.”

“And, we need a look at that blasted car, see if there’s some indication as to how it blew.” Eliot said. “Back to goddamn Oxford.”

Kate raised her hand, then immediately lowered it as she realized what her job was going to be. “Crap. I’m the futzing babysitter, aren’t I.”

The three traded looks.

“Not because we don’t want you along . . .” Hardison began.

“No, I get it, it’s because Charlie has to stay here, and when he wakes up, he’s going to need someone to explain what the fuck is going on and that someone should be me, since I took the job in the first place.”

“And he trusts you. Likely more than he trusts us.”

“Hopefully, considering what we put him through last time,” Parker added. “But he’s not very good at self-preservation.”

“He listened to you and didn’t throw himself off a roof. So there’s that,” Hardison offered.

Why does it always come back to roofs? Kate wondered as the others grabbed supplies and dashed out the door, leaving her staring at the videos on Hardison’s array of screens. Rooftops reminded her of New York, where space was valuable and the roof became something communal, not the solitary territory of people fleeing something so terrible they thought their only option was to climb as high and fall for as long as possible. And isn’t that, in some way, what Clint and I do up there too? Sure, we interrupt the fall—usually—but Amy’s right. Doing what we do . . . it isn’t an accident. It’s a choice and something makes us keep choosing to make that leap, as crazy and likely suicidal as it is. Why?

Kate shook her head to clear those thoughts, because they led nowhere except down a rabbit hole of a past that felt too tight and constricting to navigate. Maybe that’s what it was. Squeezed out of a tutu and into a catsuit. Ugh, not working. Maybe that’s why she kept dreaming of that night on Clint’s roof, the last time she’d seen her father, and behind him, the people he’d chosen and the people she’d chosen, together and yet so . . . not. And there’d been the Clown, killed by his own side in an attempt to kill hers. Before he could kill her. After he flirted with her and went to murder Grills on the same night. 

Wow, Kate, this train of thought sure is happy and productive.

She restarted the videos, looking for anything they’d missed.

“Oh. Gods.”

Kate spun around in her chair to find Amy, hands over her mouth as she watched the scene Kate now had memorized, play out on the huge screen. “What are you doing here? You don’t need to see this.”

Amy tore her eyes away. “And you do? I came to . . . talk. Does that have to do with him?” she asked, pointing at the sleeping Charlie.

Kate nodded, sighing. “Yeah.”

“I saw a still frame, on the local news—one of the TVs over by the bar. Explosion at Dodgson Electrics, one dead.” She frowned at the figure on the couch. “That’s Charlie Dodgson, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Kate repeated. Lying to Amy didn’t really make any sense at this point. “Do you know him?”

“We traveled in the same social circles—before his dad died and I became a disappointment to mine. Dad was actually interested in buying DE when Charlie started dismantling everything his family’d built, and he wasn’t the only one. Plenty of vultures circling. And then he . . . stopped. Found investors, rehired the workforce, started showing up again at charity events, that sorta thing. He had a line about being talked off a ledge.”

A line. Kate could imagine the joke, light enough that whoever was listening would chuckle along politely and move on with simple conversation topics. She had lots of lines. She wondered if Amy did. “Parker did that actually, the ledge talking.”

“I believe it. Parker’s . . . she can be better at people than she seems.”

“Yeah,” Kate agreed, thinking of how Parker, more than Eliot, or her, or anyone else had managed to click on some fundamental level with Clint in the middle of his own crisis. She and Parker haven’t always clicked, but… Kate glanced at the taser beside her, remembering Parker’s offhand acknowledgement, you’re our hitter. A job and a tool to do it with. She appreciated that. 

“I helped her,” Amy said, and something in her tone told Kate they were finally circling back to the conversation that started in line for ice cream. “The kidnappers? She thought they were thieves at first. She was stuck here—torn ACL—while the rest of them were off doing . . . whatever they do. And she was bored and kinda mean at first, or not mean just . . .”

“Parker.”

“Yeah. She refused to call the cops. Got really involved in figuring out if those guys were staking out the jewelry store across the street and I was supposed to be keeping an eye on her, so I offered to help. I did help. And then their target turned out to be me.” She shuddered and leaned up against the counter beside Kate, face intent on the screens. “There’s something weird about the high definition footage.”

“I thought so too, but I dunno what, and neither do the others.”

“Where’d they go?”

Kate blinked. “I thought you didn’t want to know about all this.”

“Can we . . . sit somewhere not watching someone die on repeat?”

“Right, yeah.” She hit pause and led Amy over to the loveseat, perpendicular to the couch Charlie was stretched out on. Here, away from the screens, the room was much darker, which seemed fitting for the sleeping man, and for the careful way Amy sat beside her, fingers twisting together nervously.

Kate felt her breath catch. “I’m sorry. About earlier. I got hung up in my own . . .uh hangups. . .? And dragged you in too. It wasn’t fair of me to do that.”

Amy tilted her head, just the outline of her face visible in the dim light. “You said they weren’t superheroes, but are they . . . basically superheroes?”

She owed her this much. “As much as I am . . . yeah. Heroes, if not the ‘super’ part. Not that any of them are all that average, either. They have certain skills and they use them to help people.”

“Are they helping you?”

Kate blinked at the question. “Sure? I’m here to learn—”

“That’s not the kind of help I meant,” Amy interrupted. She’d been the one Kate hadn’t fooled, after all.

“Oh.” She stared at her hands. “They’re trying, now that I’ve told them everything. I’m not...great at asking for help. I like being the person doing the helping too much, you know? So I kinda figured if I focused on helping them, I’d help myself. By distracting me.”

“How’d that work?”

“Oh fantastically, can’t you tell?” She shared a brief, expressive eye roll with Amy. “But I’m beginning to get it—stuff like Eliot taking an extra go at explaining something that I pretended I understood, and Hardison completely fucking over the schedule to give me and you a chance to um…” she realized where that was going and trailed off. “I don’t think they’re used to using a direct approach and talking about problems. Including their own.”

“Because they’re criminals.”

“Figured that out, huh?”

“It’s pretty much been staring me in the face, and I couldn’t see it, because they were, well, nice? Weird about it, sure, but nice. I couldn’t reconcile the two.”

Kate was almost afraid to ask. If they’re heroes as much as I am, then I’m… She wasn’t all that different, as Eliot’s vigilante comment made perfectly clear. If Amy couldn’t reconcile—no way of knowing unless you take the shot. “Can you? Now?”

Amy caught her gaze and held it. “I’d like to try,” she said simply. “Because I trust you. And them.”

“Yeah?” Her chest tightened at Amy’s certain nod. “Okay then.” She leaned back against the couch, her heartbeat picking up its pace as Amy did the same.

They sat in silence for a while, Kate increasingly aware of how close Amy’s head was in relation to her shoulder.

“What do you need to do?” Amy asked finally. “If you can tell me.”

“Pretty sure we’re way past that line in the sand,” Kate admitted. “I’m on babysitting duty. Charlie’s probably going to be accused of something he didn’t do—the explosion—but he looks hella good for. So, I’m on babysitting duty while the others try to get the cops off his scent and find out who actually did this. They might target him too. I don’t know, it wasn’t this complicated when I agreed to help him.”

“What will you do if the cops . . . or someone else does come?”

She shrugged. “I doubt they will, I don’t think anyone knows he’s here. But if it comes to that, I get him out. Or I fight. Or, well, do whatever Parker tells me to, since she calls the shots.” And because that didn’t seem enough, and she needed to explain, “Eliot got hurt, helping Clint.” And later, me. “So right now, I’m the hitter.” 

Amy hummed as the information about Eliot slotted into place. “Are you scared?”

“No.” She could feel Amy shift, but she didn’t turn to look at her. “I don’t get scared during fights. Everything focuses, becomes clearer, somehow. It’s only a mess afterward. If anyone does come, you should run into my room, hide in the closet.”

“Not my favorite thing to do.”

“I won’t let anyone hurt you, but—” She stopped talking because Amy’s lips were in the way and they felt soft and sweet, reminding her of nothing and no one except the brilliant possibilities of something new. 

Okay. Maybe babysitting isn’t so bad.

Chapter Text

She fell asleep.

Weeks of my brain refusing to even consider the concept, but no give me a couch, a few dim lights, and—apparently—a girl leaning up against me, and oh now it’s pass the fuck out time?

And sure, so technically Amy had fallen asleep first, her head on Kate’s shoulder, so she’d been trapped with no feasible means of escape. Nope. None. She was kinda an expert in a escaping but this situation had been a doozy...not that she’d particularly wanted to escape . . . or needed to . . . but she’d succumbed to the surprise warm and fizzies—ahem—fuzzies, that for once her brain decided to let her enjoy, rather than stay awake all night analyzing. The ONE time. 

I suck at babysitting.

That thought came later, of course. First came a muffled pounding on the front door of the Brewpub, Kate jolting awake to find flashing red and blue lights bouncing in through the windows. FUCK.

Amy blinked beside her, began a yawn and froze half-way. “What the—”

Kate was already moving. Phone: no messages from any of the trio and no time to call anyone. She’d have to go with her instincts and those said Get him out. Get answers later. “I need to get Charlie”—she paused to rip the sedative patch off his neck none too gently—“out of here.” Yes, she could carry him, as she’d told Hardison, but it would look hella suspicious if they were spotted. Also, her preferred escape route involved quite a few stairs. “Hide,” she ordered Amy, aware of how brusque she sounded. Amy’d been kidnapped once from this building, and now Kate was here, making everything sound dangerous all over again. “The vents are nice—Parker has blanket nests up there,” she said, to soften the situation. Literally. You don’t know the situation. All you know is there are flashing lights and you have a half-conscious murder suspect you need to sneak off with. 

Amy shook her head, rejecting the offer of a blanket nest. “I’ll talk to them,” she said reasonably, rubbing sleep sand out of her eyes.

The gesture was cute enough that her words took a moment to register, as Kate slapped Charlie’s cheeks to wake him up. “WHAT.” 

“Most of the cops in the area eat here. A few FBI guys too. They know me and they’ll expect me to be here, maybe not this late—early?—but that’s easy enough to work around. I can buy you some time. They need a warrant anyway, and I’m stubborn when I need to be.” She folded her arms as if that established her obstinance.

“No, absolutely—”

“Whas going on?” Charlie groaned, rolling halfway upright, away from Kate’s ministrations.

“No time to argue with me about it, you have enough to deal with.” Amy hurried over to one of Hardison’s worktables, where various electronics lay spread out haphazardly. She grabbed a box of earbuds, pulled one out and tossed the box to Kate. “Just in case,” she said, tucking it into her ear. She gave Kate a quick nervous smile and disappeared.

Kate stared after her for half a second, but Amy was right, there was no time. She pulled Charlie fully upright, slinging one of his arms over her shoulders as she babbled something about explaining later. Half-drugged made him reasonably pliable to being dragged upstairs, where she paused to grab her bow, quiver, and a harness before she hauled Charlie up to the roof, praying Amy would be okay. They’re police officers. 

Yeah, and she’s brown.

“I don—” Charlie tried again. He’d found his feet on the way to the second flight of stairs, bracing himself between her and the wall. 

“Shhh!” she hissed at him, just in case the cops had sent someone around back, or had barged past Amy. 

“SHHHH?”

Kate muscled the two of them through the door onto the roof. “You ever ziplined before?” she asked, as he blinked and tried to get his bearings. Tentatively she stepped away from him and he didn’t topple over in a heap, which she took as a good sign. Really wish I knew dosage or duration on whatever the fuck Eliot concocted on those patch-things.

“Yeaaaah. Once. Patience made me and I threw up. Why...?” he trailed off as Kate selected an arrow from her specialized quiver, nocked, aimed, and loosed, the tip latching firmly to the A/C unit of a building a block and a half away. Amy’s building, to be precise. She attached the other end to the lean-to structure of the roof access door.

“Okay.” In her ear, Amy was playing up the indignant, uncertain employee, and—smart cookie—using it as an excuse to dial Hardison. Kate refocused on Charlie, laying out the harness and helping him climb in, before making a cursory strap check.

“I—wait—what’s happening? I really don’t think I should be doing this right now. Or ever.”

“Hello, 911 dispatch? I want to verify you sent the officers at my location? Yes I’m at . . .”

Go Amy. Where the fuck is Hardison? Kate had no idea how to make the earbuds connect to ones not in the vicinity. These two apparently worked together, being from the same box—not important, move on—

“Charlie. Listen to me. Right now what’s happening is I need you to slide down this rope. You won’t fall, you’re strapped in.” She clicked his harness in and positioned both his hands on the harness, not on the line. “DO. NOT. GRAB. THE. LINE. Got that? It’s not a steep ride and I don’t want you getting stuck in the middle.” She dug in her pocket and came up with a key that she briefly held up to show him before sticking it into his shirt pocket. “That’s for apartment . . .” Picture the door . . . “211. Go there, wait for me. Oh, and grab the arrow when you land, they’re a pain to retrieve later.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I’m getting us transportation. Tell me the important bits back, so I know you know them.”

Charlie seemed at a loss for words, which Kate couldn’t really blame him for. 

“Charlie.”

“Don’t grab the line. Do grab the arrow. 211.”

“Yes, I understand,” Amy was saying, “Please hurry.” Kate heard the door slam, and Amy’s running footsteps. “Kate! The cops aren’t real cops! I don’t—they’re not right!? I shut the door in their face and dispatch is sending real ones, but—”

“On my way—HIDE. Charlie, I’m sorry, and I’ll explain later. Remember to brace with your feet when you land.” She shoved him over the side, wincing at his surprised shout of terror. 

Babysitting sucks.

Hoping Charlie made it without lasting physical or psychological damage, Kate took the stairs back down, as tempting as it was to pull the same stunt she’d pulled at the ballet studio in New York and crash through the window. No sky cycle to break the glass for her, and she wanted to be quiet. She nocked an electro-tipped arrow and kept it ready as she padded back into the upper floor, Amy whispering in her ear.

“I heard glass break and footsteps, so I hid in the back room, but I don’t know where they are. Two of them. Real cops are on the way according to dispatch, but I dropped the phone by accident. Sorry.”

“I’m so sorry, but I can’t validate that apology for you,” Kate told her in her sweetie-pie server voice, heading for the stairs to the ground floor. After a beat, she realized that Amy was possibly not as comfortable bantering while being hunted in the dark by fake cops as she was. “I’m coming,” she said, trying to sound as reassuring as she could. As Eliot would.

She heard a yelp and scrabbling sounds, the sounds both near and distant, thanks to the earbud. Briefing area. Dashing in, Kate found Amy struggling in the grasp of one of the fake cops, the other making a tour around the room, ignoring her. 

Kate shot him before either of them could react, noting only that the electro tip had worked—weirdly well, actually, he’s definitely down and that’s a lot of sparks?—as she nocked another arrow and drew, aiming it at the fake cop holding Amy. She’d chosen a regular tip this time, to avoid electrocuting Amy, and to increase the threat. People might laugh at the trick arrows, but they stopped when faced with a nasty looking broadhead.

“Let her go or I’ll put this through your eye.” Also when you said badass stuff like that.

Sometimes, anyway. When she was lucky. The guy, big and burly—identical build to his partner—didn’t seem particularly bothered by the threat. “Boss said take people here. She’s people.”

Amy jammed her elbow into his solar plexus, in a move that would have made whoever her self-defense instructor had been, proud. Hell, it made Kate proud.

It had no effect whatsoever on her captor, though Kate heard the oddly sharp thump of the impact. Dude didn’t even wince. 

Amy did. “OW!” she yelped, painfully surprised. “Kate, he’s wearing body armor!”

The goon shook his head. “Body,” he said. 

Kate didn’t understand how, or why, but she suddenly, undoubtedly, knew what. It was so nice to be sure of something again. She loosed the arrow as promised, and it sunk into the LMD’s eyesocket. 

It jerked, Amy wriggling out to escape as it twitched, but instead of getting herself to safety behind Kate, she lunged for the table, where the taser Parker had given Kate still sat. She whirled and shocked the flailing robot, which finally fell, smoke and sparks trailing from its still form.

“What. The. Fuck.” Amy’s knees wobbled as Kate closed the distance between them to catch her up in a hug.

“You took that thing DOWN! Are you okay?”

“I don’t have a concise answer to that.” Amy drew in a ragged breath. “I thought—they seemed wrong.”

They hadn’t to Kate. Not at first, they’d just seemed like clueless goon types—like the mafia bros harassing Clint. “Life Model Decoys,” she explained . . . or not—what kind of explanation is that? 

Amy sucked in a breath, feeling steadier now, so Kate reluctantly released her to check on the one she’d shot first. He also looked fried, though not smoking—Christ, Parker, what’s the voltage on that thing? 

“It’s SHIELD super-secret spy tech.” She grabbed some of Parker’s climbing rope from a nearby closet and tied him—it—up, just in case. “Definitely does not belong in Portland.” As she straightened from her hog-tying, she could hear sirens approaching. “Shit. More of them?”

“No,” Amy shook her head. “That’ll be the real deal, I think. I hope,” she added fervently, hugging herself and keeping a tight grip on the taser.

Not much better, considering the circumstances. “Amy—” Kate stopped, unsure what she could say. She wanted her safe and clear, but she also had to get to Charlie. And, cops, real or not, coming up here and finding this was going to lead to a lot of questions. Especially if they started looking around. But that wasn’t Amy’s problem. She wasn’t even supposed to be part of this. Maybe she should take over babysitting Charlie. I’m doing such a shitty job of it and I’ll probably be arrested here soon anyway.

Amy’s brushed a strand of Kate’s hair back gently, giving her a quick smile that looked genuine, even if its foundation shook a little. “I called the cops. The real ones. So it makes sense that I go out there and tell them the fake ones ran away. I know how Parker feels about cops, but also I think this,” she waved a hand at the twitching machines, “is more up your alley. And theirs.”

“Yeah. More mine than theirs, but once you’ve taken one walk down my kind of alleys, they start turning up everywhere you look. Are you sure?”

She nodded. “Your job is babysitting Charlie, not me. Uh, where is Charlie?”

“Your apartment. It was close enough to shoot a line to and I had a key. Sorry.”

“. . . You attached a string to my apartment?” A sharp hiccup of a giggle escaped her, before she managed to school her expression. “Will I see you there?”

Kate wanted to say yes, that she’d be there waiting, but that wasn’t her job. This is why you only date people at least as crazy as you. “I’ve got to get him further away. I don’t know how they tracked him, but I can’t take that chance.”

“Understood.” She reached up, cupped Kate’s cheek and pulled her in gently for a quick kiss. “Mmm, I needed that. For courage.”

“Seems like you’ve already got that in spades,” Kate managed.

“Go,” Amy gave her a little push to show she meant it. She was right, the cops were at the door, announcing their presence like a surreal repeat of earlier. Amy disappeared, shutting the door firmly behind her. Kate working fast, found a panel in the backs of each LMD, pried it open, and pulled out the battery pack. Now they were dead, and she had evidence. She dragged both “bodies” out of sight behind the sofa, just in case. 

Next up: a ride. She escaped into the vents and away.

~

Hardison finally called back just as Kate was parking her bike—found stashed in a storage room off the loading dock—and giving it a pat before climbing the stairs to Amy’s apartment. She’d been listening in to Amy over the earbud, and while she’d sounded shaken, she was doing a great job reassuring the officers that everything was fine now.

Hardison’s voice wasn’t nearly as calm. “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON???”

“Life Model Decoys. Two of them,” Kate said, just to cannonball him into the deep end of the run down. “I’m retrieving Charlie from where I stashed him, Amy’s making sure the cops don’t take a grand tour of the Brewpub, the bots are fried, stashed in the briefing room, and I ripped out their batteries, so I doubt they’re transmitting, but they definitely got a look at the place. Oh, and Amy and I have comms in, but I don’t know how to hook them up to yours?” She hesitated at Amy’s door, then decided Charlie was the type to have geeked out over Morse code as a kid and rapped out her name.

“Right, that first, keep your hands free, talk soon.” Hardison hung up just as Charlie opened the door. He held Kate’s arrow in one hand, looking substantially more with it than when she shoved him off the roof.

“Going to stab me with that if I turn out to be a bad guy?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Um, no, it just . . . I needed something to distract me. This is . . . really clever.”

“That answer to that should be yes. Stab if bad. Your competitor—Stark—makes them. Clint comes up with originals, but Tony can’t stop nerding out over how to re-engineer them.” She reclaimed the arrow and shoved a helmet into his hands instead.

Charlie blanched. “Uhhh, no, I can take a motorcycle apart, but I am not getting on one.”

“I just fought”—Kate began, then reconsidered exactly how much detail she wanted to get into right now—“two guys who were clearly looking for you. They’re connected to what happened to Alex, and I need to get you clear. That’s my job. So, bike it is.”

In her ear, more voices started registering. She ignored them, except for Amy telling someone, “Oh, I would definitely appreciate a ride home, once we’re done with the report. Thank you for the offer!”

Shit. Not that she blamed her, but real cops would not be opposed to finding Charlie and Kate needed them to not do that . . . yet. “C’mon,” she growled, and pulled Charlie out of Amy’s cozy apartment back down to the bike.

Charlie froze there, eyes sliding warily over the motorcycle. “I don’t know about this.”

“You don’t have to! I’m the one driving!”

“Look, I’m not all that comfortable in cars—”

“—not a car!—”

“—and this is even less safe!”

Kate rolled her eyes. Amy had handled being grabbed by a robot cop better than he was handling the prospect of a bike ride. “I dunno what to tell you, dude. ‘Even less safe’ pretty much defines all of my life choices. But I’m still here, so let me handle the scary roaring wheel-beast while you ride bitch with your eyes closed.” She pointed to the helmet in his hands. 

Charlie stared at it like the visor was going to open and bite him, but he finally stuffed it over his head, and clambered awkwardly on the back of the bike. 

“Finally,” Kate muttered inside her own helmet and gunned it out onto the street. At least his scream was muffled this time.

“I woulda killed him by now,” Eliot growled in her ear in solidarity.

“Liar. You’d have stuck another of those patches on him again, though.”

Eliot grunted an agreement. “Mild one, so he doesn’t throw off the bike.” 

Kate sighed, still against the drugging, but coming up short on patience herself. At least the helmet offered a perfect opportunity to check with the rest of her team. “Where am I taking him anyway?”

“Eliot’s safehouse,” Parker ordered. “Why is Amy on comms?”

“Uh, long story?” 

“Not if you have access to security cam footage, it ain’t!” Hardison cackled.

“That is not the important part of that footage,” she muttered, turning beet red under her helmet as she ignored the trio’s snickering. 

“It’s got a few things goin’ for it.” She could still hear the grin in his voice, but he dropped it as he continued. “So here’s where we’re at, an’ I just wanna say, if we thought there was any chance of thing’s goin’ down the way they did—”

“It’s okay, I handled it. We handled it.”

“I know, but I would’ve set you up with a comm. Course then you might not’ve . . .”

“Hardison.”

She took the 30, cruising past illuminated warehouses, graveyard shift workers loading the trucks that would soon be crowding the road. Hardison filled her in on what they’d been up to during the night. Parker and Eliot she could hear breathing on comms, but they’d been silent for quite a few minutes now. Kate wondered what they were doing.

“Righ’, anywho, on the way down to Oxford, Parker put on her sexy lawyer voice an’ called up the Oxford cops, sellin’ them on Charlie bein’ shook up by everythin’ and needin’ some time.”

“Not not true.”

“Exactly, and she’ll go with him to the station in the mornin’, after he’s had some time at the safehouse to get calmed down. I edited the security camera footage from the DE offices to match her story, so we’re all set there.”

“What about the car?”

“Eugh.” She could hear the face he made. “Yeah, El an’ I took a look while Parker broke into our man Wes’s house. So nasty.”

“The body?”

“Nah, that was gone, but it didn’t feel gone, y’know? Anyway, the thing was definitely rigged to blow, by someone who knew what’s what. Which don’t narrow down the field much except—”

“LMDs,” Kate said.

“Yeah. Which means we’re lookin’ at SHIELD or someone stealin’ from SHIELD, right?”

“Not necessarily . . .” Kate bit her lip. “The bots I fought tonight weren’t the same as the one you built to look like Clint. Similar—I knew where to look for the battery, but different shape to the access panel and they were just . . . off?”

“Older gen?”

“Different product line maybe?” She didn’t want to say it. That would make it a possibility and she hated the butterflies fluttering in her ribcage at the thought. “What if Madame Masque—Gia Neff—what if she isn’t dead? Not dead dead. She’s had access to this type of tech for a long time. I know Clint said she was and he wouldn’t lie to me, but this… I don’t know, it’s just a hunch.” What if she’s not the only one? The thought sat in her stomach like sour milk.

“Kate—”

“Can you just . . . check. Please. I’m probably wrong.”

“Yeah,” Hardison agreed, making it a promise. “I’ll follow that trail as far as I need to and let you know whatever I find.”

“Thanks.”

Almost there. Practically a straight shot until she hit the bridge, and Eliot’s safehouse was basically under it, on the other side. She just had to get Charlie there and wait for Parker to come and Hardison to do his digging and Eliot to . . . do whatever the hell Eliot was up to right now. The arches of the bridge rose to her right in the premorning dark.

They didn’t make it to the bridge. Kate could feel Charlie moving on the back of the bike, and he didn’t respond well to her sharply applied elbow as they took the St. Helens turn off. Kate growled under her breath, but rather than deal with a thrashing Charlie in the middle of a tall, extremely jump-off-able bridge (that had been a memorable nighttime excursion with Parker), she veered for the left fork into Forest Park, pulled off to the side of the road, and stopped the bike.

Charlie’s eyes stared, glazed and wild when she opened his visor, his breath coming in short, harsh gasps.

“Shit.” She hauled him off the bike, all too aware that, early as it was, the trails here would soon be crawling with hikers, cyclists, and families out to catch the Saturday morning coolness.

“What’s wrong?” Hardison asked, but Kate had to ignore him to focus on Charlie, pulling off his helmet, then hers, and leaving them both with the bike.

“Okay, no more scary wheel-beast,” she said, trying to lighten the mood and feel less like a dick for putting him in this situation. It didn’t work.

“S-sstop trea-ting me like-like a-a-a kid!” Charlie gasped, lurching away from her across the mercifully empty road.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—” she shut up. What she’d meant wasn’t the point. “What do you need?”

Charlie didn’t answer, just kept up a halting half-run up the trail into the forest. Kate followed him, collapsed bow and quiver over her shoulder just in case, muttering an explanation into the comms as she went.

“You got this, girl. Do what you think is best,” Hardison told her. She would have liked to hear Amy’s advice, but Amy was still talking with the cops. Okay, Katie-Kate. Just don’t make it worse.

Charlie came to a stop up a side trail deep enough into the woods that she could barely hear the dopplered roar of cars on the mountain road. He leaned against a tree, still breathing hard, but with less desperation than before, as if he knew the next breath would be there waiting for him. Kate sat on a boulder and let him be.

Instead, she started talking, not quite at him, but loud enough that he could listen if he wanted. “Did you know the whole moss-only-grows-on-the-north-side-of-the-tree thing is complete bullshit?” He didn’t answer so she kept talking. 

“When I was a kid, my parents would ship me off to camp. First two years I was the youngest one there, and the smallest, and I didn’t fit in and I felt like all the other kids had a head start and knew the ropes. Which they were and they did, but that part didn’t really sink in, just the fact that I had to prove myself, because Dad had asked if I was a big girl and ready to go to camp with the other big girls when Mom said that I was too young.” 

She could tell Charlie was listening now, but she didn’t look up to meet his eyes. “I was used to high rises and penthouses up above a neat gridwork of streets, so the woods around camp with their shadows and undergrowth terrified me, and after the first hike our scoutmaster took us on, everybody knew it, because I kept screaming and jumping at every rustle. So of course, some boy dared me to go into the woods by myself and bring back some flowers from the clearing we’d gone to earlier to prove myself. And not to worry, I could find my way back by following the moss.”

“Did you?” Charlie finally asked, breathing steadier now.

“No, I got completely lost, scared shitless and crying, and hating myself for crying because it meant I was a failure and not daddy’s brave little girl who was old enough for camp. Of course, my crying meant the counselors searching found me pretty easily—I hadn’t made it that far—and one of them took me to the clearing so I could pick a few lilacs and keep my pride. They let me call home too, but mom and dad weren’t there, they were out on their yacht and Mrs. Perkins, my nanny, said they couldn’t be reached.”

“Yachts usually have a pretty advanced telecommunications array,” Charlie noted, an engineer even in the aftermath of a panic attack.

“Yeah, no shit. But six-year-old me didn’t know that, and she was following instructions, and I think Mrs. Perkins felt that she should be enough to comfort me, seeing as she was the one really raising me. She offered to drive up and get me, but I said no.”

“You called your nanny Mrs. Perkins?”

“That’s what Dad called her, so yeah.” Kate hadn’t actually thought that was weird until now. “I mean, now I get how manipulative the whole thing was on his part, but at the time I just wanted to make him proud.”

“And now?”

“Now, I know he… he was an asshole who was only interested in having me as this pretty doll he could put on display at functions and talk about my accomplishments as if they were his. Now, he’s gone and I get to walk away. Just… what’s that myth with the guy who just needs to not look back and everything will work out so of course like an idiot he does?”

“Uhh, no idea.”

“Orpheus!” Amy offered, back on comms, which meant she’d finally sent the cops on their way. “You’re doing great, by the way.”

“Orpheus,” Kate said aloud, mostly succeeding at keeping her smile locked away. “I keep looking back, even though I know it’s a bad idea.”

“Yeah.” Charlie said. It hung in the air between them, that understanding.

“Anyway, all that was to say that you better know how to get off this mountain ‘cause I’m still useless in the woods,” she added, to lighten the mood.

“I used to get called useless a lot,” Charlie, the un-mood-lightener, replied. “And lectures on what a real man was like.” He sighed. “And when I get us down, what then?”

“There’s a safehouse just across the bridge. Nice place to crash and burn. I have first-hand experience.” He could probably use some ramen. And a hot shower. Oh god, Sophie was wrong, I am turning into Eliot.

“I’m not hiding.” Charlie pushed away from his support tree, something new and sure in his movements. “My father used to go on and on about me not being a real man, but he’d always hide. Behind money and lawyers and lobbyists and loopholes. I’m not doing that.”

Super-duper inconvenient time to grow a spine, dude. “You know we’re none of those things, right?”

“Superheroes count. So you can beat me up if you want to, but I’m not going into hiding.” 

“I’m not gonna beat you up! If beating sense into people actually worked, I’d have done it to my partner ages ago.”

“Good, I wasn’t really looking forward to having to stand by that.” He blew out a breath. “But, there’s a thing . . . tonight? How long was I out?”

“It’s Saturday. Barely.”

“Right, then tonight. Charity gala. I’m on the board. If I don’t deal with this, it’ll screw everything up for them. Damage their reputation. My company’s already doomed, due to whatever malfunction caused this, but that’s my fault—my responsibility. I have to turn myself in and get this dealt with. It’s my fault and I am not my father.”

“Neither of us are, dumbass! But it’s not your fault, and you don’t need to fall on a sword, not even your sword, to prove it. I get that you want to do the right thing, but the right thing doesn’t always mean it’s legal, or straightforward. The right thing isn’t just right because it’s what your asshole dad or my asshole dad wouldn’t do!”

“How do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know that this isn’t my fault? That my design didn’t kill Al— my employee?”

“Honestly? I don’t!” Kate spread her hands in an exasperated shrug. “I know a lot more about computers and tech than I did a few weeks ago, but I can’t look at a list of bank account transactions and go ‘ah yeah, there she is’ and it actually mean shit!”

“Heyyy—” Hardison called out over the comms, sounding pleased.

“And I’ve got a pretty healthy radar of when a death looks suspicious, but I can’t glance at a burnt-out car and go—” she deepened her voice into a semblance of Eliot’s growl, “‘That ain’t an accident.’”

She heard a noise over the comms that sounded distinctively like a suppressed, indignant snort.

“And I’ve seen some seriously convoluted plots in this business, but I don’t see them for what they are immediately. Usually by the time I understand what’s going on, I’ve been Nancy-Drewed—”

“Hey?” Parker asked in a low whisper.

“Chloroformed, kidnapped, tied up and an’ listenin’ to some asshole monologue,” Hardison explained. “Let’s avoid that, this job, okay?”

“Ooh chloroform!” Oh, Parker.

“But I have people I trust who can see this. And they’ll tell me when I screwed up, but they’ll also tell me when I haven’t . . . or maybe just a little bit, but even then, they don’t make the point by beating me up or beating me over the head with it. It’s not easy, breaking that habit, but you can trust them too. It’s soppy and disgusting, but that’s what family is for. We both just got unlucky the first time around.”

“Yeah, you’ve got it made,” Charlie muttered with more than a touch of bitterness.

Kate rolled her eyes. “Yeah I do! And so do you, you privileged ass! You’ve got money and a company that’s yours to run into the ground—or not. You have power!”

Charlie considered her carefully. “And with great power comes great—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, all that. Ready to use it?”

He stared at his hands, reflexively tightening and loosening into fists, then met her eyes. “How?”

Chapter Text

Charlie made it to the safehouse with only one strangled scream as Kate remembered the last-minute sharp right that swung them underneath the towering structure of the bridge and into the quiet residential neighborhood beyond. For the second time that week, she was grateful for the silence of the bike’s engine.

Charlie was just grateful to be off the bike, staggering after her into the house, and looking lost the moment he came to a stop.

“Go take a shower.” It sounded more like an order than she’d intended. Dammit. She wished Amy was still on the line offering encouragement on the people skills front, but the girl had signed off during Kate’s ride here, saying she was exhausted and going to crash. And instead Kate had ended up channeling Eliot. Yikes. But he’d been right about the shower. She’d needed it too, the opportunity to crumble and rebuild under the pounding water. 

“Are you saying I smell?” His smile and voice shook only a little.

You’ve had two panic attacks in those clothes, what do you think? “It helps. Believe me. The water pressure’s fantastic, too, I think he put some special shower head on.”

If common sense couldn’t get Charlie to move, the promise of a gadget seemed to do the trick. Kate made a mental note of that, as he headed for the bathroom, and she moved into the kitchen. “I dunno what Eliot’s up to, but I’m about to attempt cooking.” She got a low grunt back, and Hardison’s chuckle. “He’s sittin’, in the dark, in Wes’s bedroom, bein’ creepy.”

“Lurking,” Parker added. “He calls it lurking.”

“Uhm . . . why?” She opened the fridge for inspiration. Earlier in the week, the fridge had mostly contained things that would last ages, just like the pantry, because safehouse, duh. But now she found fresh strawberries sitting on one shelf, and milk, and eggs. But we didn’t know we’d be—oh. Parker and Hardison must’ve brought them, the night she and Eliot had washed up here. Figuratively and literally. Breakfast options, for the four of them in the morning. And I ran off to meet Charlie under the bridge, assuming they were done with me.

Kate was sucked out of her reverie by Hardison saying, “Because you were right. It’s her. M&M. That’s why it took so damn long to find anything on the money trail.”

“So, Eliot and I are going to use that,” Parker continued, blithely unaware of Kate’s death-grip on the refrigerator door.

“Based on his communications—”

“—all on a secret phone he kept stashed in his vent like every idiot who thinks no one else is going to check the vents—”

“—he’s been courtin’ Madame Masque’s favor for a while now, back since Charlie went into his last spiral and started sellin’ off the company. Wes, here, figured he could make a few bucks on the side, and Charlie’d delegated so much to him, that it really was like takin’ candy from a baby. He sold batteries to M&M, but he ain’t content with being the middleman any longer. He’s anglin’ to jump ship, work for her.”

“Lofty goals of being a henchman? He’s going to regret that,” Kate muttered.

Hardison snorted. “He’s gonna have a few more regrets, by the time we’re through.”

“We think she blew up the car,” Parker said. “To crash the company’s stock and Charlie’s sanity in one go.”

“Yeah, Wes ain’t all that nice or circumspect about his boss’s anxieties and triggers. Asshole. He made it real clear how to target Charlie and had no problems with it involving murder.” Kate could hear the extra level of anger enter Hardison’s tone at the line that they’d crossed, in killing Alex. 

Parker, focused on the job, picked up the thread in the silence over the comms. “So now we just need to hook her, and we’ll use Wes to do it. But first, we have to hook Wes, and we’ll use her to do that. Eliot’s playing my goon, and I’m going to be Madame Masque, on a small screen and in shadow. It’ll be easy.”

Kate wondered how long it had taken Parker to come up with something that convoluted and call it easy. “Demand me.” She didn’t need to think about it.

“Sorry, what now?” Hardison apparently did.

“She knows I’m here—even if Wes hasn’t told her, the LMD goons definitely saw me and probably transmitted it—and she hates me. If Wes promises to deliver me, she’ll come out of hiding to collect.”

“Kate—” Hardison began.

He was interrupted by Parker agreeing. “Good idea, let’s do that instead. Eliot, change of plans, you’re the roper.”

“Wait—instead?” Kate asked, as Eliot grunted an assent.

Parker hummed a confirmation. “Better if he comes up with it himself.”

That made a sort of sense, though after her introduction to the concept of the White Rabbit, Kate wasn't entirely sure what to expect next. She imagined Eliot sitting in an armchair, making just enough noise to wake Wes… who’d sit up… turn on the light by his bedside . . .

“What the fuck are you doing in my room!”

“Have a message from the boss,” Eliot grunted.

“You—you’re Charles’s old driver!”

Shit.

“All the better to keep an eye on him.”

“Good cover, man,” Hardison commented offhand, like they hadn’t just had Eliot’s cover blown and reestablished in under ten seconds. They’re good. 

“Fine, what. What’s the message?”

“Says to handle everythin’ tonight. She’s got other business.”

“And she couldn’t tell me that herself?” Wes demanded. Kate wondered if he heard how petulant he sounded.

“She’s got other business,” Eliot repeated, in the mild tone of someone who’s paid enough to deliver a message, but not enough to have feelings about it one way or the other.

“What other business? I’m the one—” whatever he was about to say became a garbled grunt. 

“Look, this whole deal you have goin' on just ain't at the top of her list right now,” Eliot said, rather gently. “Not since she found out that Hawkeye girl’s in town. Those two have history, an’ you know how it is, with these types.”

“Types?” Wes asked, like his curiosity had gotten the better of his sense. Kate had to admit she also wanted to know about “these types” Eliot was referring to, considering her membership in that category. Eliot categorized everything. Where had he placed her? 

This is a con, it’s not real.

All the best lies are mostly truth.

“Yeah, y’know, heroes an’ villains, all drama and stupid getups. Better for us normal people to steer clear, live to pick up a paycheck, you catch my meanin’?” Kate did, seeing both the truth and hook beneath it. The meaning Eliot intended, the one she heard, the one Wes understood. There’s the prism. Each time she noticed, caught the light shining in and separated colors radiating out, it felt like a new discovery all over again.

“Oh, I catch your meaning, alright, but I am not like you.” Wes said, the words a casual backhand that he probably intended as a slap, not a return volley.

“Well, okay then, if that’s the way you want it to be.” Eliot said easily. “I was tryin’ t’ be friendly, but if you’re gonna be a delusional dick about your role in all of this, then fine, forgit I said anythin’.”

“Tell her I can deliver Bishop— No. Don’t tell her anything, I’ll tell her, because I’m not some schmuck who gets the goon as a middleman. Now get out of my house.”

“Sure thing...boss,” Eliot said, heavy on the sarcasm.

And that was that. 

After Eliot left, Wes made his call on the burner Parker had found and cloned, and Madame Masque seemed positively delighted at his initiation, but Kate’s heart was pounding too hard in her chest to pay close attention. She wasn’t scared of Gia Neff. But if she’d managed to escape death, as an LMD . . .

She’s been working on LMDs for years. Of course she had a backup of herself. Doesn’t mean anyone else did. They wouldn’t. It would mean trusting her with your . . . well, your self. And they’re all too selfish, even him, to do that. 

I should call Clint or Bobbi. Let SHIELD know she’s not as dead as they thought.

But something stubborn and petulant—she could admit it was petulant—got in the way. She’d had a team and a plan (ish). They could do this. Take Madame Masque down. And if Kate was the one to bag her . . . well, then she could get some answers about the fate of the others on the rooftop. 

“Kate?” Charlie came out of the bathroom, wearing the official post-breakdown fluffy robe. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. It will be. Parker’s going to come soon—”

“Half an hour.”

“Parker, we’re an hour away.”

“Not if you’d let me drive, we’re not.”

“—in an hour-ish,” Kate gamely continued. “She’ll go with you to the police, to make a statement. Smooth things over. The gala tonight . . . you’re certain you want to go?”

“I’m the host. If I’m not in jail, then yes, I need to go. We’ve been working on it for months.”

“We?”

“Wes and I—I’d be nowhere without his help.”

“Ah.” 

“Don’t tell him about Wes!” Parker ordered in her ear.

That seemed unfair, but not something she was going to hash out with Charlie staring at her. “Okay then. Better tell Wes I’m your plus one.”

“Niiiice,” said Hardison.

“You don’t have to—”

“You hired me, remember? Sometimes the job is running rooftops, sometimes it’s fancy dress galas. I’m equipped for both.”  

Charlie nodded, looking rather relieved. “Okay, I’ll tell him you’re my date.”

Kate’s stomach flip-flopped. Suddenly she didn’t like this plan quite so much, despite the fact that it was her idea. 

It’s not a real date.

Right, and is Amy going to understand that? When she sees you back on the society pages, hanging off Charles Dodgson’s arm?

“Uh, were you going to cook something?” Charlie gestured at the still open fridge.

“RIGHT! FOOD!” Kate exclaimed, shoving all those other pesky, pernicious thoughts behind a mental door. Later. Problem for later. 

She made them omelettes. They folded perfectly. No scramble rescue needed.

~

By the time they finished eating and cleaning the dishes, Parker turned up to claim Charlie. The boys were back at the Brewpub—officially closed for the day—dealing with the broken front door and the two “bodies” in the briefing room. 

Kate also had things she needed to do before the gala tonight, but it was still early, and, mindful of the admonishments to take downtime where she could, she poured herself a second cup of coffee and went to sit out on the back porch. 

These moments were always strange. She’d traveled the multiverse and never had quite gotten the hang of the lulls between the fights and the flights and the discovery of new foes. Or rediscovering old ones. It’s not like she’d come to Portland to escape a villain with a grudge. She’d left New York for much more mundane reasons—relatively speaking—and with the clear message that her help in the less mundane aspects of this case was not wanted. 

So yeah. Maybe there was something petty in not telling Bobbi or Clint about Madame Masque coming to town. Yet. She’d tell them, just too late for SHIELD to intervene, brush her off again.

Her phone almost vibrated itself off the wooden porch rail, and she caught it up, answering the unknown number. “Hello?”

“Hello, darling, it’s Sophie,” said Sophie, as if Kate could mistake Sophie’s voice for anyone else’s. “I hear the job’s taken several interesting turns.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Kate muttered, tucking the phone between cheek and shoulder as she boosted herself up on the railing. She almost asked if they were coming back to town, but instead added, “Nothing we can’t handle,” and believed it. “I’m sorry about Alex. I know you liked him.”

“I did yes. He was a sweet, kind man, and he didn’t deserve that end.” She paused carefully before continuing, “We’ve gone against dangerous people before, obviously, but people with powers...the machinations of the supervillains, they aren’t our normal cup of tea.”

It was the same thing Nate had said, and Kate still didn’t quite understand the line in the sand, even if she understood that her being here crossed it. Eliot could hold his own against Natasha or Bobbi, Parker could easily keep up with her and Clint, and she still wanted to stick Hardison in a lab with Stark and Banner to see what crazy thing came out of it. Powers were what you made with what you had. 

They fly under the radar. We don’t. Sure, Nat, Bobbi, and sometimes Clint all took a turn at infiltration, but it was more like a reverse Scooby-Doo reveal, the normalcy yanked off to show the mask underneath. 

Kate shook her head, deciding it was too early in the morning for such abstractions. “Gia Neff doesn’t have any powers, just fancy tech and a grudge.”

“And she worked with your father.”

“This has nothing to do with him,” Kate insisted, needing it to be true. “Dad was always chasing after people with power he wanted for himself. He worked with all of them, not just her.” 

“Mmm,” Sophie said, or rather didn’t, the sound itself noncommittal. “She’s had her own rifts with her father. Not all weapons are physical.” 

I thought villains weren’t your cuppa. Kate set down her coffee mug to rub her forehead. “I foiled her plans in Madripoor. And in New York. Believe me, I’m perfectly capable of pissing off a power-hungry bitch without Dad’s intervention.”

Sophie hummed again, but didn’t press the point. Whatever her point was. “And you’re more than capable of defeating her tonight.”

“Thanks, mom,” Kate fired off, definitely aiming for the sarcasm target, but somewhere along their flight, the word flexed and missed. “I, um, I gotta go.”

“Of course,” Sophie said, and didn’t press that point either. “Good luck tonight. I know you’ll keep them safe.”

Kate, beet red, stared at her now silent phone without really seeing it. When it vibrated again in her hand, she startled, nearly dropping it, and sloshing her coffee onto her hand. This time the phone could identify the caller: Amy.

She pressed the ‘accept’ option without any concept of the next step in the process—talking, apparently—still caught in the embarrassment and confusion of accidentally(?), intentionally(?), acci-tentionally(??) calling Sophie mom and the sink/float buoyancy of remembering Amy’s lips on hers last night, before everything went wildly off the rails. 

“Kate?” Amy asked, when no sounds came from Kate’s end of the line.

“Mraskjfonemerg.”

“Um. You okay?”

Kate got a hold of herself. Sliding off the rail, she pressed the phone to her ear as she set down the half-spilled coffee and wiped her hand on her pants. “Hey. Yeah, I’m here. How are you? I thought you’d gone to sleep.”

“Turns out that’s easier said than done,” Amy sighed. “I’d ask you for suggestions but…”

“Couch with a cute girl on it seems to do the trick,” Kate said immediately, before realizing she wasn’t available to offer her shoulder. “If you happen to have one around.” Right, go encourage her to snuggle with someone else. Great job Kate.

“None I care to experiment with, but I’m patient,” Amy said. Her voice sounded close and breathy, like she’d wedged the phone underneath her chin to free her hands. “I don’t have work today, but I’m guessing you do?”

“Still babysitting,” Kate said, intending to stop there, but because it was Amy, the rest of the explanation flowed out without pausing to check in with her brain. “There’s this charity gala thing Charlie’s insisting on going to tonight. I’m his date.” 

“Ah.” The sound managed to be as circumspect as Sophie’s “Mmm” had been. Kate mentally kicked herself. Hard.

“Not like, his date-date,” she heard her mouth say, and she was pretty sure it was about to drive  straight off that cliff following a track of I wish you were my date, but that would mean Amy was bait too, date bait, and she didn’t deserve to get freaked out like that twice in twelve hours and…

...and is it even responsible to date someone like her. A civilian who didn’t sign up for the type of crap that follows you even to Portland… 

“Bait. I’m his Bait Date,” Kate said hurriedly.

“After all he’s been through,” Kate could hear her gearing up for her own type of fight, “you’re using Charlie as bait?” 

“No-no-no, he’s the idiot who’s insisting he goes. I’m the bait. Kate the Date Bait! We got lucky,” she explained. “Turns out I know the person behind all of this and she loathes me enough to come kill me herself!” Or, more likely, capture for convoluted evil plans.

“You sound like Parker,” Amy said and Kate couldn’t tell if she thought that was a good thing or not. “So tonight, you’re Kate Bishop, then?”

“I’m always Kate Bishop. I always was Kate Bishop, even when I wished I wasn’t. A fake ID and a job as a waitr—server can’t change that and I wouldn’t want it to anyway. I came here to be better at what I am, not be… ” she lurched to a stop, catching the last word before it escaped past her lips.

“...normal?” Amy finished for her anyway, turning the word into something so dry and flat, it surpassed sarcasm altogether. 

“I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean for this to—I didn’t plan—” This wasn’t helping. “I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight, and I don’t have much of a plan for anything beyond tonight either, except I want you to be in it. But only if you want to be. And I know it’s a shitty way to start something by saying I won’t change, but I am Hawkeye and that isn’t going to change. My life is crazy and dangerous and being part of it should come with, I dunno, traffic cones and bright flashing warning signs saying ‘Proceed with Caution!’”

Amy laughed softly and Kate’s heart swooped. “I’m glad you told me that. I need to think and I promised my Dad some family time today, but we’ll talk later, okay?”

Kate nodded against the phone. “Yeah. Of course.” She tried not to sound both disappointed and relieved. “Later.”

Figure it out after the job is done, she resolved as she stared a moment longer at her silent phone, before sticking her comm unit back in. 

“Hey, Hardison? Any chance for some discretionary job-related funds? I need a dress for tonight, and I know just the one.”

~

Kate returned to the safehouse in the early afternoon laden with supplies of both soft and pointy varieties. Based on the chatter she’d been hearing over the comms while she ran errands, it was no surprise to find Hardison and Charlie still engaged in some esoteric discussion on engineering. Parker and Eliot sat at the kitchen table going over the case as Eliot prepped sandwich materials and Parker attempted to steal them.

“You’re back!” Parker waved and used Eliot’s moment of distraction to swipe a slice of tomato, grinning at his growl. Hardison would probably call it gamification—Parker wouldn’t be interested in the vegetables if there wasn’t the challenge of getting past the knife in Eliot’s hand, and Eliot only griped as a misdirection. Come to think of it, a good percentage of Eliot’s gripes were types of misdirection.

Kate grinned back at Parker and dumped her bags. “So, what’s the plan?”

Parker’s face went as blank as glass. “Your job, you tell us.” Behind her, Eliot smirked.

Crap. “This is a test, isn’t it?”

“Ya think?” Hardison called out. Charlie, looking much more at ease by now, gave her a helpless shrug.

“I don’t make plans!” Kate protested. “I’m more of a see-who-shows-up-see-what-blows-up kinda gal.”

“That’s ‘cause you hang out with Circus.”

“Just Plan A,” Parker said. “I’ll handle the rest of the alphabet.”

“Plan A is like the always terrible first pancake in a batch! It’s a PLANCAKE.” Aaand now all three of them are grinning like Cheshire cats. “Fine, I’ll see what I come up with in the shower.”

Shower and sandwich later, she’d gotten no further than their original idea, though she was still very proud of coining it “Kate the Date Bait.” 

“You’re overthinkin’ it,” Eliot told her.

“No she ain’t. So far, her plan is to wander around lookin’ pretty till Madame Masque shows her face, except she won’t because this is a friggin’ masquerade,” Hardison said. “What is it with white people and fancy dress?”

“I’ll see her. And even if I don’t, she’ll see me. Masks aren’t only for hiding.”

Parker, twitching with the effort of not just making the plan herself, finally burst out, “You’re not alone! And neither is she!”

“I was just planning on stocking a bunch of electro-tips?” Kate suggested. “This is my fight.”

“You’re as bad as Eliot,” Hardison muttered.

“Shuttup, I ain’t that bad.”

“Usually.” Parker turned back to Kate. “You’re the hitter and the roper tonight, but you’re not the whole crew.”

“But there’s nothing to steal!”

“An’ you didn’t come to Portland to learn how t’ be a thief,” Eliot pointed out. “Think in terms of skills, not tools.”

That clicked finally. “We need to spread out. No one at an event like this is paying close enough attention to the waitstaff or the caterers. Parker’s a server, Eliot in the kitchen?” They both nodded in agreement. “Cool, then Hardison’s going to need screens so that we’ve got a view of security cameras. But with only four of us, keeping you in the van is too limiting,” And right now for . . . reasons . . . you’d probably prefer to be closer, “soooo DJ? Can you DJ?”

“Can I—girl, you doubt my—”

“He’ll do it,” Eliot cut through his partner’s indignation.

“Good placement,” Parker added. “What about the tech?”

“Hardison? You spent the day prying the robocops apart, yeah?”

“Yes, I did, and let me tell you, that was disgusting and I did not appreciate—”

“Hardison—”

“Look, just because you helped with the nasty bits—did you know those things are part organic? Like a cylon, people, we are fightin’ CYLONS.” 

“I honestly can’t tell if you’re squicked out or excited,” Kate sighed.

“Can’t a man be both? I contain multitudes, dammit!” From the way he was bouncing slightly, she guessed that excitement prevailed.

“Are they sentient?” Charlie had stayed out of the discussion so far, but now that it had veered back into tech, he came over, intrigued.

Hardison’s face made an Eliot-worthy sprint of micro-expressions. “Ehhhh . . . the two Kate fought operate on a highly complex machine-learning algorithm that makes decisions based on their preprogramming and people’s responses—and that includes stuff like heart rate, body temp, and other indicators, not just words or conscious actions—during interactions. But it is a program. Just one complex enough that even I can’t understand and map out the math. No one can. That’s what makes it AI. But no, not technically sentient.”

“But so do people.” Parker pointed out. “People operate based on stuff they are programmed to through their environment and who they talk to. That’s what grifting is.”

Hardison beamed at her proudly. “Babe, trust you to nail the sentience debate in one sentence.” 

“What about Madame Masque?” Kate had to ask. “Her body should still be at SHIELD. Dead.”

“Unless they lied,” Eliot muttered.

“Clint wouldn’t. Not to me.”

“Her body bein’ dead doesn’t matter. This is probably her escape hatch anyway. Machine learning is built on piles of data. For her goons, she’s likely using the same code, built on trained obedience and force response data. Might be why they didn’t immediately run down Amy. If they’re running a “cop” simulation, the data probably told them to follow that.”

“They broke the door down.”

“Right. Exactly. Cops.” Hardison muttered. “For M&M here, if becoming her own robot was her escape route, then she would have collected piles of brain scans—possibly wearing some sort of scanner—”

“Her mask!”

“—to collect them constantly. Gives her basically a perfect representation of her. Jus’ in a transferable package.”

So pretty unique to her. Okay. That settles that. No one else.

“How do we take them out? Shock? EMP?” Parker asked. “Both would draw attention in a crowded room.”

“They have an off switch,” Kate noted. “If you count ripping out the battery.”

“I do not, but they do have an easier off—squeezing their right earlobe.”

“That’s . . . disturbing.”

Hardison shrugged. “Has a nice haptic response, I thought.” Incredulity crawled up Eliot’s throat, but Hardison rushed on before the sound could become actual words. “Anyway, we don’t want to drop ‘em where they stand, as that tends to be a tad noticeable. As would M&M yelling at them.”

“Okay, so she signals them silently through wireless. Bluetooth or some shit. Just tell us if you can hack it, man.”

“It ain’t wireless and it ain’t silent.” Rather than answer Eliot’s demand with an explanation, he grinned and made him wait.

Kate rolled her eyes. “When you boys are done flirting?”

“That’s flirting?” Charlie muttered in the background.

“Fine. It ain’t wireless because as much as I hate her, M&M is a smart cookie. Even with encryption, that’s a two-way connection and when you is the machine, it would be real stupid to have that enabled most of the time. She’s going to have air-gapped herself. Except for taking a sec to upload a certain video online to go viral.”

“That’s why that video seemed strange. It’s her eyes filming!”

“Yup. But to get back to the point, her communication ain’t silent exactly, it’s just on a frequency outside the range of human hearing. A bot don’t have that type of problem. Great way to hack a voice assistant on a phone. Just play commands above 20 kilohertz and only the bots—and any nearby bots—will pick ‘em up.”

“Can we, I dunno, jam it?” Kate asked, wishing she had Lucky. He’d hear it just fine.

“Yes, we absolutely can.” Hardison held up an earbud. “I’m way ahead of you on that one. Charlie and I have been working on these babies all afternoon. Get them in a bot’s ear and it’s ours.”

“Cool. Then let’s go steal a robot army.”

Hardison slung an arm over her shoulder. “That’s our girl!”

Chapter Text

The trio left before her and Charlie. They needed time to insinuate themselves in the setup at the venue and Kate in particular needed time to primp and prep. The process felt surreal, its familiarity both special and mundane. I’ve gone to parties for worse reasons.

Charlie, awkwardness mostly concealed by his well-tailored tux, did a double-take as she stepped out of the bathroom.

“You look amazing, you know that?”

Men and their tone-deaf compliments. Her sarcasm clicked in. “Nope, had no idea. You know what you should invent? Some kind of reflective surface. Would make the hair and makeup process so much easier.”

Charlie held up his hands in surrender. “That came out wrong. Sorry. I’m not good with . . .”

“Girls?”

“Anyone?” He shrugged. “Haven’t had much practice. Patience used to rib on me about it. Though she stuck up for me too.”

It occurred to Kate then what the gossip would have been like, Charlie, the wealthy heir with his attractive cousin on his arm. 

“People have informed me that I maaaybe have too much practice at quick sarcasm,” Kate admitted, softening.

“Really?” He flinched away from the light whack she gave him with her clutch. “Um, look, I like you—”

Ohgod.

“But, I don’t . . . I’m not . . . interested?”

Ohthankgod.

“Nothing against you, I’m not interested in anyone.” Based on his stammered admission, Kate didn’t need Sophie powers to guess no one’d ever told him that was okay.

“Cool,” she said, and gave Charlie a grin to let him know she meant it. “It’ll be nice going on the arm of a guy not trying to grab my ass.”

“Never understood that impulse.” He let his breath out in a rush. “Friends?”

“Friends.”

~

Kate drove them.

Typically this would be a limo-grade event, but they didn’t have anyone to drive a limo, and after Nate’s stunt when she’d first arrived in Portland, not to mention the offhand comment from Eliot that being a driver had been their original access to Charlie, she decided to nix that potential attack vector and get them both there. Also, Charlie hated driving.

“Typically, the man is supposed to drive,” he couldn’t refrain from pointing out, rubbing damp palms on his thighs. “It’s going to look weird.”

“One, quit caring what men are supposed to do. If it’s even half as convoluted as what women are supposed to do, you’re looking at a recipe for disaster and insanity. Dis-sanity.”

“Uh, right. And two?”

“Two, we’re driving up a steep and winding mountain road because some rich guy had to go build his stupid mansion at the highest point in Portland, and now a bunch of other rich guys have to use it for events. Do you want to be the one driving?”

“God, no. I’m just glad you agreed on a car rather than that stupid bike.”

“That bike is amazing, so shut up, but while you puking on the red carpet would make a memorable entrance, it’s not the one we’re going for.”

“And us exploding?” Charlie wiped his hands on his pants again. When the trio had gone to Oxford earlier, they’d brought back Charlie’s car, the identical model to Alex’s. Not that it wasn’t an impossibility, but they hadn’t exploded yet which in Kate’s book meant they were winning at life.

“Hardison, Parker, and Eliot went over it, and between the three of them, there’s a significant amount of overlapping expertise on the subject of cars and booms,” she reminded him.

“And it’s a necessary statement demonstrating my trust in my own product.” Charlie chanted back in sing-song. “I know. I looked it over too.”

“So, trust yourself.”

Beside her, Charlie let out a harsh huff of breath. “I get what you’re saying, but I make a lot of bad calls. If I didn’t have people like Alex, or Wes, or, well you . . .” he shrugged. “It’s better if I trust others.”

She wasn’t wearing her mask yet, so Kate schooled her face to remain carefully neutral. She’d definitively lost the debate on whether to tell Charlie that Wes was stealing from his company.

“He deserves to know!”

“He deserves not to die. No one said anything about avoiding betrayal, and he has no poker face.”

Parker had a point. A poker face was not in Charles Dodgson’s skillset. Which meant he understood this to be exactly what he’d suspected: a hostile takeover from outside his company, all DE employees completely innocent and in the clear. 

“It’s a weird coincidence, me finding you in Portland and you having a connection to the woman behind all this.”

Shouldn’t that make you hella suspicious? Sure, it was a coincidence—Wes had been selling batteries to Gia Neff before Kate had even met the trio, much less moved in with them. (Okay, so that took less than a month, but still.)

“You should put your mask on,” Kate said, rather than acknowledge the baseline levels of weird coincidence that pervaded her life. “ we’re almost there.”

Charlie nodded, fumbled the simple black silk into place, though Kate could tell out of the corner of her eye that she’d need to help him fix it. Wearing a mask took practice. “I don’t know why I let Wes talk me into this theme. It seems so . . . pointless. Why bother with a mask if everyone knows who you are?”

Kate glanced down at the purple and white shape in her lap. Not her first mask, but her first physical one, back when she was still trying out identities; demanding a place for herself in a world that kept telling her to go home. The mask itself could be taken as an homage, or a rip-off, but Kate had long since decided to leave the interpretation to others.

Who are you supposed to be, Hawkingbird? 

No, but I can think of worse people to emulate. 

“We’re here,” she announced, more to her team on the comms than to the man next to her. “And, uh, someone should probably give my folks a heads up, now that it’s too late for them to interfere.”

“Folks?” asked Hardison, before Eliot interrupted.

“On it.”

She stopped the car in front of the valet service, and quickly tied her own mask in place, before turning to fix Charlie’s. Secure your own mask before helping others. And also adjust their collar as an excuse to plant a bug.

“Ready?” she asked, removing her hands and leaving the tiny device tucked out of sight underneath his collar, held stiff with stays. Charlie nodded, drying his hands on his pants one last time.

As she stepped out of the car, bulbs flashed, first at Charles Dodgson, CEO and host of this evening, and then at her. Kate could hear the whispers spread like wildfire before they flamed into shouts of KATE! HAWKEYE? BISHOP!

“So, what’s the point of a mask?” Charlie muttered in her ear.

“To show people who they think you are,” Kate murmured back. She beamed for the cameras as they walked inside.

~

So sorry to hear about your father.

Don’t worry, all it takes is the right judge and the right ‘donation,’ am I right or am I RIGHT?

We’re having similar problems here in Portland, you know—people just don’t understand how a developer can modernize an old, rundown neighborhood! They’re against progress and new ideas.

Kate’s mask was slipping.

Not the purple winged one covering her eyes. That stayed firmly in place like it should, as she moved among the glitterati of Portland’s elite. No, her other mask. The one she’d worn around these people for her entire life, until she’d finally discarded it, only to discover that she’d have to keep discarding it over and over and over. Why was it so hard to understand? Her dad was not the victim here. And they don’t even know he’s dead.

“You okay?” Charlie asked, then took a step back under the force of Kate’s glare.

Bet you really enjoyed getting to be the one to ask the question this time. 

Kate resisted from snapping at him, her patience fraying like a bowstring about to fail. “Fine,” she gritted out instead, scanning the crowd. What she wouldn’t give for a horde of LMDs to fight right now. Something useful to do. Trying to keep the fireworks to a fizzle went against Hawkeye nature. Just pretend Clint is here, so you have to be the adult of the situation. Oddly, that helped.

Some, but not all, of the waitstaff were henchbots, and to Kate’s newly-trained eye, they could’ve been programmed better—they kept turning and walking away at the exact moment a guest would attempt to take something from a platter. Then again, Kate saw Parker do the exact same thing several times, but she doubted whatever program Parker ran on would be replicable. Amy would have some words about that, she thought, and wished she was the one standing next to her, close enough to whisper and giggle to. Charlie wasn’t really the whisper/giggle type. 

Focus, Kate-o-rade.

Although they had access to most of the first floor of the mansion, the majority the guests had gathered in the open space leading off from the grand swooping staircase. Charlie, growing more gregarious as Kate’s permanent smile tightened into a grimace, had mentioned it generally was filled with antique instruments, the center roped off for the daily tours that came through. For events, all of that had been shifted away, leaving the space open for dancing and mingling while the waitstaff laid the dining room next door. She’d already gone on a partial sweep of the other areas, searching for Madame Masque like this was a game of Clue: from the lobby, through the library, the vestibule where she’d already found a couple making the most of the dark corner, circled past the staircase, then back to the music room. 

Eliot had covered the sections close to the kitchen, Parker had slipped into the off limits upstairs, and Hardison had tapped into the security cameras angled throughout the mansion. “If she’s anywhere else, we’ll spot her, Kate,” he’d reassured her over the earbud. “You just keep makin’ nice and scannin’ the crowd in here.” 

Usually, she could put the ‘making nice’ on autopilot, as long as she reined in the sarcasm. But on Charlie’s arm, every single person wanted to slide indelicate questions about the explosion and Alex’s death or the arrest of Kate’s father into their conversations. Or both. Both is bad. Kate wasn’t sure if they were surviving this in spite of or because they were facing it together, like a tennis doubles match except with fifty people against two.  

Wes was here, though, appearing harried. He’d made a comment to Kate about being glad she could make it, adding with a leer that she should give Charles the “night of his life” (ugh) and clapped Charlie hard on the shoulder before saying he’d check in with him later, he had duties to attend to. Eliot was keeping an eye on him, reporting that the guy looked particularly nervous when Eliot, in his dual role as Masque’s hench-non-bot and prep cook waved a particularly long and shiny knife in his general direction.

“Look, uh, Parker’s over at the buffet,” Charlie offered, when Kate said nothing after the bitten of ‘fine’. “I’ll check in with her, get us some drinks.” He hurried away. I’m being a terrible date.

“Fine, huh?” Hardison said over comms, and she was about to snark back, but mid-thought she  caught a glimpse of red and gold across the room and—Oh.

“Guys, I think Kate’s broken.”

“She ain’t broken, Parker,” Hardison said, the grin he must’ve been wearing colored his voice, but Kate didn’t turn to check. That would have meant tearing her eyes away from—

“Amy?”

“What’s Amy doin’ here?”

“Aww, Kate’s all dumbfounded! Ain’t you two the cute—”

“Hardison, shut it or I’ll make you,” Kate managed through gritted teeth as Amy, smile both nervous and impudent, came to a stop in front of her. “Um. Hi. What-are-you-doing-here-you-look . . . amazing.” Understatement of the year. The simple, deep red gown she wore hugged her down to her thighs where it spread into a full skirt. A shear red cape, held in place by gold embellishments, swept back from her shoulders, flowing with every slight move she made.

“It was a cultural compromise.” Amy scanned the room. “Lost dad to some boring conversation about stocks almost the moment we got here.”

“You came with your dad?” Right, she just said that Kate, keep up, but Kate’s brain kept getting snagged on Amy’s tumbling curls, her dark eyes accentuated behind her red beaded mask, with sharp brushes of eyeliner, her mouth—STOP. NOW. “All anyone wants to talk about is my dad, and how I shouldn’t worry because he’ll escape any consequences.” That is SO not a better conversation topic.

“Hmm,” Amy’s eyes swept up and down Kate appreciatively. “Want to give them something else to talk about?”

“I, um, I should find Charlie.”

“I’ve got eyes on Charlie,” Parker said. “Dancing will give you a chance to scan the room and make you the center of attention. Also, less stupid people talking about stupid things.”

Kate ducked her head, letting her hair cover her mouth from view. “I’m not using Amy as a distraction,” she muttered as quietly as possible, though Parker definitely had a point about the stupid talking.

“I’m right here and can definitely hear you,” Amy reached out to tuck Kate’s hair back behind her ear. “I came to help. My choice. You’re not ‘using’ me, so . . . how’s your waltz?”

In answer, Kate grabbed her by the hand and led her on to the dance floor. “Mind if I lead?”

“Not at all.”

Amy laid her hand on Kate’s shoulder, and Kate noticed the intricate designs trailing up her arm for the first time. “You did this today?”

“The henna? Yeah. Needed something to do while I processed last night. My mom taught me. We usually do each other’s, but with her away in Sri Lanka . . . That’s why I just did my left.” She stepped in close to Kate, allowing her to guide their movement.

“You could have gone back with her,” Kate found herself saying, before she could stop. Quit projecting, Kate. It was always strange talking to Amy about her family. Like a less shitty parallel universe full of possibilities for normal family drama. Not . . . what she had. You could have gone with her and then you’d both have gotten out. She’d be alive and I wouldn’t need answers because the questions wouldn’t be there, hanging over everything. Yeah, Dad was a guilty bastard, but how guilty? She’s gone and I still don’t know if it was his doing. Now I’ll never know. She stumbled, stepping on Amy’s gown, and making her giggle.

“I have a job!” Amy explained as they began moving to the music again, Kate firmly slamming the door on those questions of hers. “And a life. And there will be other visits. And if you don’t remember, we were kinda short staffed and I had this absolute newbie to train—”

“Okay, okay, fair point.” She guided her partner through a twirl. “The henna looks awesome, by the way. I’ve never tried it.”

Amy smiled up at her as they swept in a circle. “That can be arranged.”

As they danced and Kate tried to shove her fluttering heart behind a door because it wasn’t supposed to be doing that, it never bothered to before and she wasn’t exactly new to the dating/relationship thing and she wasn’t even sure if that’s what this was, but it sure felt like...something. Rather than determine what, she started scanning the crowd in earnest. Amy seemed to register the shift.

“What are we looking for?”

Kate spun them in a 180 to give herself a better view. “A . . . woman, technically also an LMD, but she’s the one controlling the others.”

“Ah. Like the people type things from last night?”

“Yeah. Which raises the question, what the hell are you doing here? I told you—”

“That you’d be here, I know, that’s why I told Dad I’d be his plus one. He was thrilled by the way. I rarely agree to come to these things, so I’m scoring good daughter points. Sorry, I shouldn’t—”

“Have a complex, but still fundamentally good relationship with your dad?”

“—shove said relationship in your face. It feels . . . inconsiderate.”

“It’s not. I’d like to meet him.”

“Good, cause after this dance, he’s going to insist.” Amy gasped as Kate dipped her.

“You haven’t answered my question, and if you don’t, Parker’s going to be the one asking next.” Kate jerked her head in the direction of the buffet table.

Amy followed the motion, nodding at Parker. “Right. So . . .” she took her hand off Kate’s shoulder, using their closeness as a shield to rummage briefly around in her cleavage. Kate’s brain stuttered to a standstill, her legs somehow keeping them moving, as Amy pulled out her earbud from last night, and tucked it back in place, finishing the gesture by brushing her hair back. “I want in,” she told Kate, Parker, Hardison, and Eliot. “I’ve thought about it. For a long time, actually, and I want in on . . . whatever this is.”

“Crime.” Parker said bluntly.

“But you help people? So, like, robbing from the rich—”

“If you dare make a Robin Hood reference . . .”

“To an archer? Wouldn’t dream of it. Though I used to obsessively sketch the fox version as a kid.” Amy spun away, then back into her arms. “Oo de lally.”

“You’re here, then you’re workin,’” Eliot snapped over the comms. “Kate, make sure she knows the plan and how to get clear. And where are my goddamn servers?”

“I’m keeping eyes on Charlie,” Parker said. “Use someone else.”

“I don’t mean you, Parker, I mean the actual servers—”

“—man, will you quit worryin’ about the kitchen for once in your life—”

“Listen! These hors d’oeuvres aren’t gonna walk themselves out . . .”

Amy and Kate rolled their eyes, before turning them back to roving over the crowd, ignoring Eliot and Hardison’s bickering. She’d spent the last month practicing detailed observation with Eliot, but she didn’t put it past Amy to spot someone or something unusual first. She had an eye for faces and much more experience gauging a room.

“So, our target—mark—will definitely be wearing a mask—”

“—like everyone else?”

“Well, yeah, but it’s like, a thing for her.” Kate’s hands tightened around Amy. “If she approaches me, get out of the way. Get to Hardison or Parker. I don’t want her grabbing you.”

Her dance partner nodded seriously. “Am I screwing this up? By being here?”

“Kate’s supposed to be dating Charlie, not you,” Parker pointed out before Kate could reassure her.

“Babe, don’t you dare take away this spin on fake-dating. You two look lovely and I need some entertainment over here in the corner.”

“Fake?” Kate heard Eliot mutter, with an extra bang of pots in the background as punctuation.

She and Amy traded a look that seriously questioned several priorities, but the song was ending, and they still hadn’t noticed anything particularly unusual. Except—Kate thought she’d caught a glimpse of movement that screamed DISTINCTIVE!! out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned there was no one to match the movement. She felt her knees wobble, Amy catching her arms to stabilize her as the music came to a halt.

“Kate? Everything okay?” she asked, worried.

“What’s goin’ on?”

Kate shook her head, forcing her legs to become at least firmer Jell-O. “Nothing, I thought—nothing. I’m fine.”

“Right, an’ what definition of ‘fine’ are we working with here?” Hardison pointed out, when he should have been busy either putting on another song, or making some sort of announcement into the murmuring, glittering crowd.

“Hardison—” Parker reminded him. Kate noticed her stepping closer to Charlie, who’d been cornered by a group of socialites; but they hadn’t been what triggered her alarm.

“I don’t know what I saw.”

“Yes, you do, you jus’ need to play it back. Like we worked on,” Eliot told her.

Kate closed her eyes, pictured the scene, replaying her and Amy’s last turns . . . there. “Ten o’clock.” In her mind she could see the figure. Just a man, her mind’s eye insisted, but something about him . . .

“Katie?”

Eliot’s distinctions were categories. Details slotting into place. A distinctive watch, hairstyle, boot, accent. They all added up to something, indexed people, places, things into a taxonomy of data.

And when those don’t add up? When nothing adds up? She didn’t feel herself step away from Amy, turn, look up into the plain, black silk mask of the man who’d stood behind her and called her that name. He was taller than he should have been, more powerfully built, features slightly harder, a stronger line to his jaw and mouth. A full head of hair, because of course, he’d hated the fact that he’d gone bald.

“Hi, Daddy,” Kate heard herself say, voice low and somehow steady. “Stupid of me, to think you’d have the courtesy to stay dead.”

“Dad—? Dammit, Wes is on the move—” Vaguely she registered Eliot on the comms, just as she could see Parker by the buffet and Hardison in the opposite corner both tense up, and feel Amy’s hand on her arm.

Kate stepped out, away from and in front of Amy, blocking her from Dad. “Got tired of the dad bod, decided to become a dad bot instead?”

Her father’s hand flashed out, faster than she’d ever known it to before and captured her wrist tight enough that the bones ground together. “Don’t cause a scene, Katherine, we wouldn’t want to draw attention, now would we?” he murmured, drawing her close to him.

“Oh, wouldn’t we? I’m great at causing scenes.” Kate growled, painfully aware she’d have to break her wrist to get free. That would definitely do it.

“Say the word and we’re there Kate,” Hardison murmured. Neither Parker nor Eliot contradicted his promise.

“Hold your horses,” she told him and meant it for all of them. “Fine. Let’s have a nice, civil chat, Dad.”

“Good girl. A father-daughter dance, then.”

“Seriously?” She hurried to keep up, make this farce look consensual. “I’ll catch up with you later, she called to Amy, giving her the tiniest shake of her head. Amy did not look happy, but that could be excused by Kate ditching her right after their dance. Despite Kate’s whole world narrowing to these few feet on the dance floor, barely anyone else gave them more than a second glance. Just Katherine Bishop, choosing a new dance partner. To anyone else, to anyone who hadn’t spent their lives searching this man’s face for approval, he wouldn’t have registered as Derek Bishop at all. 

“Well, it’s not like you ever had the courtesy to get married, like your sister. You owe me.”

“I saved everyone at that wedding, including you, and by the way, I owe you nothing,” Kate gritted through her smile. “Though speaking of owing, what did this new lease on life cost you?”

“Your sarcasm, Katie, it’s not your best feature.”

“Not sarcasm, this time. I know how the Nefarias operate. You sold your soul for that hunk of tech and they programmed it. You’re theirs now, you get that right?”

“Always so short-sighted. I’m immortal, sweetheart. You really need to start thinking long term.”

“You disowned me, Daddy. That makes all of my problems just a tad more immediate.”

“Katherine, sweetie, you know I’ve done nothing to you that you haven’t forced me to.”

“Riiight, and your friend? Gia? She and I—”

“Your choices are yours to own, Katie. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

Kate sighed and tried a different approach. “What does she want with Charles Dodgson?”

“To discuss a business deal. That’s all. Katie, you have to stop seeing the world as so nefarious! It’s not a healthy mindset for a young woman. Makes you sound paranoid.”

“I’m duress dancing with my deceased dad, but by all means, let’s call this situation normal.”

“Doin’ a great job at not punchin’ this asshole, Kate.” Eliot muttered. 

“Wes claimed Charlie, is guiding him over to a woman. Looks like her,” Parker cautioned. Kate wasn’t leading—like that would happen—but it was easy enough to catch a glimpse as they turned, register the downward point to Madame Masque’s . . . well, mask. “If any of us move in, we’ll be recognized by one of them.”

And therein lies the rub. That was the thing with identities and masks and cons. They all skated on the thin ice of anonymity. And me, who couldn’t decide. She’d stormed the scene as Kate Bishop, headliner of the society pages, and oh yes, she shoots bad guys. But her shows up-blows up method wouldn’t work here. It would blow up a lot more than just her.

I’m never going to be a regular part of this team. I can’t be. She felt like she’d been realizing it for some time, and now fully formed, it didn’t hurt as much as it could have. More of a bittersweet understanding. She could still be a part of this family.

“What are they talking about?” Amy asked. “Do we know? Does anyone, I dunno, read lips?”

Kate, determined to at least be able to listen in to the conversation uninterrupted, extended her leg upwards in an arabesque. She heard a few people near them gasp in admiration and smiled at the frown of her captor. “You always did love to watch me dance.”

He loosened his grip. “Then dance for me, but others are watching, if you try to run.”

“That’s Circus,” Eliot was saying, as if Amy had any idea who he meant. “Kate bugged Charlie, Hardison’s got audio.”

“Explain ‘Circus’ later,” Amy ordered, and Kate felt a little thrill from the idea of introducing Amy to her life in New York, to Clint and Lucky. “Of course you guys bugged him. What’re they saying?”

“I can patch you in if y’want, but this many voices gets confusin’.”

“When I take orders from a table of twelve, the notepad is for their comfort, not mine,” Amy scoffed. 

Hardison laughed and Kate could suddenly hear M&M, as Hardison called her. “—trust you’ll consider my offer, Mr. Dodgson. I’m completely serious.”

“I’m not—”

“Interested? Of course not. Not yet. But how interested will you be when another car explodes, another of your . . . valued employees dies?”

“You’re letting Charlie face this alone?” Amy demanded over Gia Neff’s unsubtle threats.

“We won’t let anything happen to him, and this way it’s getting recorded,” Parker told her. “But between Wes Carroll and Madame Masque, they know our faces. Eliot, how are the kitchen bots coming?”

“Gettin’ there,” Eliot grunted. “Last one I wrangled was a slippery bastard.”

“You’re supposed to use a light touch,” Parker sniffed. Kate knew she’d been planting the jamming earbuds in server bots’ ears for some time, but she still hadn’t managed to spot her doing it. Because Parker.

“What about Charlie?” Amy tried again.

“We can’t without blowing the con.” Parker explained. “Kate was a known entity in a different context, but any of the three of us will blow the con.”

“Got it. Well, I’m that, so I’m going in.”

Kate almost fumbled her footwork.

“Hang on, you’re what?” Hardison demanded.

“A known entity in a different context,” Amy told him, and walked up to join Charlie before anyone could stop her.

“Dammit Kate, you’re a bad influence on her.”

Kate managed, very briefly, to flip off Hardison as her father spun her out to the end of his arm.

“I’ll pass the message along,” Hardison promised. “Eliot, Kate says...”

“Charlie! Long time, no see! Who are your friends?”

As she was reeled back into her father’s arms, Kate saw Charlie relax in relief as Amy joined him. “That’s the girl you were dancing with earlier. Who is she?” Derek Bishop asked. “Is that why you’ve never married?”

“A new friend,” she told him, trying to sound as offhand as possible. “Portland socialite.”

“You look familiar,” Madame Masque was telling Amy.

“Amy’s father owns an international corporation.” Charlie said. “Amy, this is Whitney Frost. Wes here introduced us, suggesting,” he dripped displeasure into the word, “that I listen to her proposal.”

“Which reminds me, if you are thinking of selling, Charlie, be sure to give us a heads up, okay? I know Papi is very interested in a partnership—or a merger if it comes to that. The market in South Asia . . .”

“Dayum, our girl is GOOD, y’all!”

“Quit distractin’ her, Hardison.”

Across the room, Parker, voice hard: “LMDs neutralized. Kate, take him out.”

Kate’s father pulled her in close to whisper, “If she gets in our way, she’ll regret it.”

“I won’t.” Kate snapped, finally free to cause her scene. “YOU BASTARD, LET GO OF ME, HOW DARE YOU! GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME, YOU PRICK!” She lunged at him, scrabbling at his face and in the process, briefly squeezing the handy off-switch in his left earlobe. Hardison was right, it did have a weirdly pleasant haptic response. WTF, me. Kate punched him, not hard, from her perspective, since she didn’t want to break her hand, but it looked showy, one of those uppercuts that always lay people out in movies.

The body released her as it fell.

Kate turned to the murmuring crowd that had gathered, brushing her hair back from her face. “Creep,” she muttered. No one needed a further explanation than that, and anyway, they weren’t getting one.

“YOU.” Madame Masque stepped forward, and Kate did too, instinctively putting the crowd behind her. “This is your doing.”

“Yup! It’s all me. Sorry folks,” Kate announced to the crowd at large, “I know it’s totally rude of me to turn your swanky party into a showdown, but someone’s got a grudge they just can’t let go of. It’s her, if you’re wondering, she’s the grudgy one. I was enjoying my time out of the spotlight, here in Portland. It’s a great city! Until someone had to show up and go straight back to killing people to further her business interests. Car explosions, really, M&M?” she taunted, enjoying the way the full body of the LMD twitched slightly in irritation.

The crowd, wisely, had begun to make its amorphous way toward the exits. In her periphery, she could see Parker hurrying people along. And nearly in reach by the DJ booth, resting in its open case, was her gear. Okay, Katie-Kate. Showtime.

“Little girls should—”

Kate didn’t bother listening to whatever bullshit little girls should be doing. She dropped, rolled, enjoyed the silky feel of her dress sliding out of the way, and came up with an arrow nocked, bow drawn.

Nefaria, in answer, pointed her gun—or whatever it was, what is it with supervillains and their stupid futuristic weapon tech—at Amy, and Charlie by proxy, since he was standing behind her. Wes, Kate noticed, had backed away while both of his bosses were distracted and was swiftly making for the kitchens. Good luck with that exit strategy. 

“Oh, the soft-hearted superhero has a dilemma.” Madame Masque’s eyes remained fixed on Kate.

I know her field of vision. It’s what we saw in the footage. It’s wide, but not that wide. Kate very carefully did not look at Amy. “What can I say, faint heart never won fair lady.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Amy’s wobbly grin and steady nod. She was ready.

Kate pointed her arrow up, to the ironwork railing of the staircase above Masque’s head and loosed, drawing her opponent’s gaze, as Amy stepped forward, and stuck Parker’s overamped taser into the small of her back.

Madame Masque jolted and jerked, dropping her weapon, never noticing Kate’s boomerang arrow returning, the line attached now snaked around the railing. Kate caught it easily, and nocked and loosed again, this time aiming low, wrapping the line around her ankles, and yanking until Gia Nefaria dangled upside down, several feet above the ground.

Kate stalked over, ignoring the residual shock of sparks as she grabbed the mask and pulled it away. “No respect for privacy this time, bitch.”

Chapter Text

It was always during the postfight haze of adrenaline-weak knees and muddled thoughts, that people wanted to talk. Ask if you were okay, what do we do now, should we run because the cops are here, isn’t it kinda conspicuous the three of them standing there and grinning, are you really sure this is the best time for a selfie?

Kate couldn’t really begrudge Amy the questions, but no, really the selfie was important. For reasons. She angled the phone to capture both her face and Gia Neff’s and her mask lying on the floor, snapped the picture and sent it off to Bobbi and Clint.

Her phone rang almost immediately. “Hi, Mother Goose.”

Bobbi groaned on the other end of the line. “You did not just—”

“I know, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and you are much more of a goose than a hen. If anything, Eliot is the hen.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you that one, if only because me calling him Mother Hen is going to make a great follow-up to Clint’s Grumpy Cat. Moving on—”

“Oh, right, yup, that is Madame Masque!” Kate said. "She’s ‘alive’ depending on your definition of the term. Autonomous and sentient so yes, according to Hardison, but uh, slightly electrocuted. The cops and the FBI are coming up the drive as we speak, and Parker says she’ll be talking to them as an FBI agent?”

“Agent Hagen, of course. Okay. I’ll be there in a few hours. And Kate?”

“Yeah, Bobbi?”

“No idea how you pulled that off, but good work.”

Kate traced a half-conscious rond de jambe with her foot, her smile growing along with the half circle. “Thanks.”

Wes stumbled back into view, having determined the kitchens would not provide an escape route. Kate almost expected to see Eliot stalking him like Michael Myers wielding a giant knife, and based on the way Wes kept looking over his shoulder, he did too. At least, until he saw Charlie looking down at the slightly twitching form of Madame Masque. "I figured someone ought to call the cops," he said, eyes flicking back and forth between his two masters. 

Charlie raised his eyebrows, unimpressed. "Better part of valor, Mr. Carroll?" 

Wes took a step back, comprehension dawning. The game was up.

"Then again," Charlie continued, with more steel in his voice than Kate had heard before, "you always were a forward thinker." He turned to Kate. "Do you have another of those cool arrows with the lines? Just in case he tries to run again."

Kate, having caught sight of Eliot in the shadows near the kitchen, casually twirling his chef's knife, doubted Wes would try it. Still... "I've got something better," she told him. "Want to try it?" She ran her fingertips over the nocks until she found a net arrow. "Hard to miss with this one."

Charlie hesitated for a moment, studying the tip curiously, before accepting her bow and the net arrow and backing up several paces. "It's been a while since summer camp, but..."

"Now, Charles—Mr. Dodgson—Sir! Is this really—"

Charlie half-drew her bow, which, fair, given the poundage, and loosed. The net arrow flared out, wrapping it's light-weight strands firmly around Wes as he backed way. 

He tripped, crashing on his ass. "...necessary."

"Seemed pretty necessary to me," Amy remarked, nudging him with her toe. "Downright therapeutic."

"Amelia!!"

Amy straightened ever so slightly as a man who could only be her father beckoned her from across the room, where the first of the police officers and FBI agents were streaming in.

"Hey, sooo, remember how I said after our dance, my dad would want to talk to you?"

"Lemme guess that after getting you involved in a hostage situation with a robot—again—that's pretty non-negotiable at this point," Kate sighed. "Amelia?"

"Yes, Katherine?" Amy nudged her, face impish. 

Somehow, it didn't sound so terrible, coming from her. "Oh shut up, and let's get this over with."    

As it turned out, Amy’s father Victor wasn’t particularly interested in talking to Kate, but rather at her, stating, point blank, that he disapproved of Derek Bishop’s business dealings, the man belonged in prison, and if he was ever to make such choices, he would hope his daughter would disown him. 

Amy, apparently adept at sliding into his run-on sentences at just the right moment, asked lightly, “and what if both Kate and I decide not to follow in our father’s footsteps?”

He pointed at the tied up robots (and Wes). “You want to do...that?” Then to Kate, “Does it pay the bills?” 

“Nope!” Kate had to admit. “I’m a server like Amy. I started hero-ing as a rebellion against my dad and now I just can’t seem to stop.”

“Then find a way to make it pay you,” he ordered. “A rebellion, hmm? Amelia, is that what you’re doing? Insisting on working in that restaurant?”

“Yesss,” Amy said, in the tone of a dawning realization. “The harder you push this, Dad...”

They studied each other for a moment and it wasn’t Amy who broke. “Fine. But you double-major. Art and Business. You choose the school. I’ll pay.”

“Wait. Really?”

“A deal is about compromise, yes?”

Amy bit her lip, but it didn’t stop her smile from spreading into a giant grin. “Thanks, Dad.”

He waved off her hug. “The police will want to speak with you soon. Do you want me to call our lawyer?”

“I’ll be fine. Charlie, keep Dad company for me?” 

At Charlie’s stammered agreement, Amy dragged Kate away, practically bouncing. “He said yes! You were magnificent!”

“Why am I getting the feeling you orchestrated that conversation?”

“I swear, I didn’t.” She tilted her head. “Just took advantage of where it was heading.”

“That,” Parker said, turning up out of apparently thin air, her waitstaff’s outfit subtly changed to become classic FBI, “was very neatly done.”

“Was I just ‘bad boyed’? Is that what just happened?” Kate demanded. 

“Hush. Pretend I’m taking your statement,” Parker said. “And yes, that’s exactly what just happened. Amy,” she paused to point to the cops talking to the other guests, “I need you and Eliot to run interference. Keep them from trying to talk to Hardison and anyone who’s a robot, while he finishes hacking them.”

Amy’s forehead wrinkled. “What...kind of interference?”

“Flank, intercept, an’ don’t let ‘em past you,” Eliot’s knife had disappeared, but the sharp glint of it lived on in the smile and wink he gave to Wes, struggling in the net. “How you do it depends on what’s in your arsenal. I got me a fish.”

“Charlie landed that fish, technically,” Kate informed him as Amy hurried off to begin flank and intercept maneuvers. Hardison lifted a hand, then went right back to typing. Kate figured he was creating a variety of literal “scripts” for the bots to use. Right, because we wouldn’t want the normals realizing that there are more than two robots at this party. She glanced back at the still forms of Madame Masque and the thing that thought it was her father. 

“Kate?” Eliot asked, and she realized she’d missed whatever his reply had been. 

“I’m—” she bit back the automatic fine. “—going to go keep an eye on them.” Parker and Eliot glanced at each other, then nodded in understanding.

Charlie found her there, bow in hand and arrow loosely resting on the string. Not that she thought they’d get up, but the familiar weight in her hands felt better. Like she still had a purpose.

“Hey. Police are done with me—for now, I’m sure there will be many more interviews to come.”

They hadn’t tried to talk to her yet, and Kate blinked in the sudden understanding that Hardison wasn’t the only one being shielded right now. Ha. Just wait till SHIELD gets here. I’m sure Eliot’s thrilled about that. “Oh,” she said, after too long a pause. “I guess I’m your ride off yet another mountain, huh?”

He shook his head, “Victor’s offered. Wants to talk business. But I came to say thanks. I didn’t know what I was dealing with, in more ways that one, and you—”

Kate pulled her eyes away from the stiff figures to focus on him. “You did really good.” Bobbi’s encouragement rested fresh in her mind. It was nice, being told that. She should try it more herself. “Sorry, I was an asshole at times. Also, ditching you. And letting you be cornered by the woman trying to steal your company. SO, uh, extra sorry about—”

“Kate!” he held up his hands. “It’s okay. Sometimes I deserve a kick. And thanks. Even if I do need a new VP, since mine turned out to be a double-dealing . . .”

“. . . dick?”

He huffed out a laugh. “Yeah.”

“Do yourself a favor, and hire someone who actually trusts and respects you next time. Someone who kicks you respectfully.”

“I’ll be sure to include that in the interview packet.”

Then it was just . . . waiting. Parker told her she could go back to the Brewpub or the safehouse, but Kate knew she needed to monitor the bodies. Not that they were dead, exactly, that was basically the problem. If she didn’t watch them, they might surprise her by turning up again somewhere down the road. So as the rest of the guests were released and disappeared, she settled down on the staircase to keep watch.

Eliot turned up first, sitting down beside her. “You can get outta here, you know. We’ve got it covered. Hell, those two have it covered, if you want me to take ya. Bobbi knows where to come lookin’.”

“I know. But I can’t. I came to terms, left it all behind, and he turned up again. So, I have to watch him. Even if his consciousness or however it works is stored on a cloud somewhere, which it probably is and this is pointless. Just turning him off doesn’t guarantee anything, but I have to. I know that doesn't make sense.”

“Makin’ sure he stays down makes perfect sense t’ me,” Eliot remarked. 

He beckoned across the room, and a few moments later, Hardison came jogging over to join them, long legs carrying him swiftly up the staircase. He plopped down on the other side of Kate, jostling her gently. “All bots are programmed with matching but not like matchy-matching statements if questioned. What’s up?”

“Think you can find where she stored that jackass’s brains?” Eliot asked him, jerking his head at Derek Bishop.

Hardison’s eyebrows climbed skyward. “Yeeaaah, I can do that. Uh, what do you need me to do with them after I track them down, Kate?”

She knew what he was asking, and if she told Hardison she wanted them gone, nuked off any server they could be hiding in, he’d do it. For her. Even after the whole sentience discussion. “Don’t delete them,” Kate said. “Give them to SHIELD. Or something, but I’m not going to have their blood, or bytes, or bits on your hands. It’s not fair.”

“Nothing is fair.” Parker spoke from above them, and Kate had a feeling neither of the others knew when and how she’d gotten three steps above them. “But I agree. Give them to SHIELD.”

“As a peace gesture?” Hardison asked cautiously.

Eliot shook his head. “As a leave us the fuck alone gesture.”

“Yeah,” Parker agreed. “That. Maria Hill said we owed her a job after New York, and I’d say this fits the bill.”

Amy returned, having finished her distraction duties and seen her father and Charlie off. Hardison, who’d insisted on keeping Kate company on her pointless vigil, made himself scarce with a knowing grin and a wink. Kate rolled her eyes at his departing back and patted the step next to her. “Your dad and Charlie are going to be shaking hands on some deal by the end of that trip, aren’t they.”

“I told you he was interested.” She leaned against Kate. “God, I’m tired. Is it always this exhausting?”

“Yup. Day after a fight is officially pizza and pajama day. Or something equally mindless and relaxing. Them’s the rules.”

Amy was silent for a moment, and Kate was about to add the obvious, that of course she was invited to the mindless crash, when she asked, “And after that?”

“What do you mean?” Kate had a few different guesses about what she meant, but needed to know which of Amy’s possible targets she should be aiming an answer at. 

“Well, you came to Portland to not be Kate Bishop, the Amazing Hawkeye.” Amy waved a hand at Kate’s purple gown, the mask, the bow and quiver of arrows leaning against the railing. 

Oh. Not the direction I thought that was—

“Because I have some decisions to make about my future too, and if you want to, I’d like to make them together?”

Kate, blinking hard, dipped her head; surprised at the force of the relief washing over her. “I’d like that, yeah.”

Below them, a new wave of people in dark, nondescript uniforms thronged into the room. Kate couldn’t help but note that Bobbi’s eyes barely swept the hall before she’d managed to spot her and Amy on the stairs. “What is it with Hawkeyes and their vantage points?” she called up to her.

Kate gave her a wave, then stood, offering Amy a hand to pull her up. “C’mon, you should meet—”

“Tara?” Amy frowned down over the railing. “Oh, she’s a friend of theirs. I’ve seen her in the Brewpub before.”

Kate watched Parker approach, give Bobbi a professional greeting, and in the midst of the handshake, transfer an earbud into her palm. “Yeah, she lives a . . . lot of different lives.”

Bobbi pulled her into a hug the moment Kate got close enough. “Looks like you had a fucked-up night. I didn't he know that asshole was part of this.”

Kate glanced down at the simulacra of her father. “Cathartic, really. How’s SHIELD feel about me doing their job for them?”

Bobbi winced. “Got an earful on the way, not because of you, no, Hill expects you to get caught up in shit because, and I quote, ‘she’s a goddamn Hawkeye, what else did you expect, Morse?’ But you’re hanging out with them and I dropped you off on a SHIELD quinjet, and while I’m in L.A. on a wild goose chase, the action was up here in Portland of all places. But enough of that, haven’t I seen you around the Brewpub?” Bobbi asked, redirecting to Amy.

“I’ve... been taking an interest in the behind the scenes aspects? Amy. Amy Palavi.”

“Well, Amy Palavi, I’m Tara Cole to your bosses, Bobbi Morse to mine, and Mockingbird when I bother with a mask and spandex. Welcome to the weird world.”

“So far it’s all been robots trying to kill me, which is getting pretty repetitive.”

Bobbi laughed. “The days I’ve only got robots trying to kill me are good days. Or I thought so, anyway,” she sighed, glaring at the bodies on the floor. “This opens a whole new tin of sardines.” She caught their expressions and added, “Smells worse than worms.”

“Sooo, M&Ms not the mole? I figured she just had a robo-bod or fifty ready and waiting.”

Bobbi tilted her head at the nickname and "M&M" and tossed a loud sigh in the general direction of Hardison. “For her, definitely. But your dad? Why him? Did he remember the last time you two, ahh, talked?”

Kate frowned. “I...don’t know. He definitely didn’t think I was on his side anymore,” she said, rubbing her sore wrist half-consciously. “And it wouldn’t explain why the others all ended up dead too. Did she sneak into SHIELD and kill them? Or was it some one else?”

“That's what I mean. Big stinking can of sardines, and that’s before I toss in the weird shit in L.A.”

“I thought you said that was a wild goose chase,” Amy pointed out.

“It was her primary base of operations, so maybe, maybe not. It’s been a few decades and a lot of shit under the bridge since I was stationed there. Hard to sort through what's irrelevant.” Bobbi shook her head, then paused, mid-turn, to study Kate. “You know, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to restart an Avengers outpost there.”

“Huh?!” Kate spluttered, “I’m not an Avenger!” Of all the protests to make…

“You’re practically an Avenger,” Bobbi said, in the tone of someone who knew exactly which buttons she was pressing. “And you are a Hawkeye. There’s precedent.”

“So first you won’t take me to L.A. and now you want me to live there and keep track of weird stuff for the Avengers?”

“There’s a lot of good art schools in L.A…” Amy mused, causing Bobbi to lift an eyebrow. 

“It’s an idea. Sleep on it. Clint’s deep down a mole-hole right now, but when he surfaces in a few days, I’ll tell him to give you a call.” She clapped her hands together once, recentering. “Now, both of you scram, I need to be all bossy and lock this down for SHIELD.”

“Bobbi—” Kate started.

Bobbi caught her shoulder and held her gaze. “I will do everything in my fucking power to see them locked away, in whatever form that takes, okay?”

Kate blew out a breath and nodded. “Thanks.” 

At the door to the kitchen, Parker beckoned, Eliot and Hardison at her side. Kate slipped her hand into Amy’s as they joined them. Out back, they all piled into Lucille. “We got ourselves a full house again!” Hardison exclaimed, winking at Kate and Amy, the new pair to their three of a kind—for however long it lasted. Eliot groaned, Parker laughed, and Kate rolled her eyes at him, Amy’s head settling comfortably on her shoulder, as they took the winding road back down into the city. 

Amy had fallen asleep by the time they stopped at her apartment. When Kate shifted, she woke, grumbling about Kate promising her the shoulder of a cute girl and she wasn’t done using it yet, so hold still. 

“Have a good night, you two,” Eliot called from the driver’s seat, voice incongruously saccharine-sweet, before either of them had even started to get up. Kate couldn’t see his shit-eating grin, but Hardison’s and Parker’s were on full blast.

“I’m never living this down,” Kate sighed as they climbed up the flight of stairs to Amy’s front door.

Amy, still tucked in beside Kate, their arms around each other’s waists, yawned hugely. “I’m sleepy-stupid enough to go the innuendo route on that one. Don’t tempt me.”

“Uh, so, hey, remember what I said about my relationship with Keep Out signs?” Time to put all that upper-body strength to good use, Kater-tot.

Amy squeaked as Kate hoisted her, swinging her around until she could wrap her legs around Kate’s hips, bending her head from her new height to kiss Kate as they crashed up against the door. “Well then,” she whispered, breath hot against Kate’s upturned face. “You’d better come in.”

Kate could hear a phone buzzing. She didn’t particularly care if it was Amy’s or hers, it was too early and she was too comfy, and besides, the chargers were across the bed, on Amy’s side and she wasn’t about to wake... 

“If that’s Parker, I’m gonna kill her,” Amy mumbled into her pillow, but she snaked out a hand and grabbed the offending phone anyway, squinting at it blearily. “A bunch of emojis. And that’s all I can see on your lockscreen.”

Kate groaned and claimed the phone to unlock it. The emoji strings were followed by an actual message from Hardison:

Got a surprise for u whenever ur up. We’re at the safehouse.

Kate read it out loud. “Are we up? I don’t think we’re up.”

“Definitely not up.”

“Although…” she reconsidered, “the safehouse is currently stocked with breakfast supplies.”

Amy lifted her head, hair tumbling everywhere. “And an Eliot to cook them?”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Okay, we’re up. I wonder what the surprise is.”

By the time they finished showering, Kate had another text waiting for her, this one from Eliot.

Charger’s keys are in the common room. Don’t wreck my car.

Kate rolled her eyes, grinned, and texted back that her track record driving orange monstrosities was perfect, thankyouverymuch. All dings, dents, and more extensive damage Clint’s had suffered was his own damn fault. She could practically hear Eliot's answering hmph.

Parker and Hardison were already standing in the open garage, talking over Kate’s bike and each other, but the moment they climbed out of the Charger, the laser beam of their shared attention shifted to her.

“KATE! What color should we paint it?”

“I’ve added some special features—color? Purple, Alec, duh. Kate is purple.”

“I’m givin’ the girl options! Anyway, it ain’t like purple is a real color anyway.”

It was still too early for Kate to keep up with Hardison at full tilt. “Hey! Purple’s a real color!”

Coming out of the house, Eliot groaned at the absolute glee in Hardison’s face and Amy began, “Actually . . .”

“See! Amy can tell ya!”

“Amy is going to make coffee,” Amy told Hardison. “Because if you’re this hyper, you must have drunk it all.”

“C’mon, I’ll give ya a hand,” Eliot gestured and the two of them headed into the house. Kate had a feeling he was going to have a talk with her about more than just coffee.

“Purple, like magenta,” Hardison continued, not to be deterred from nerding out, as Kate yawned, “doesn’t have a wavelength. It’s just your brain makin’ shit up. Your eyes can register red, green, and blue, and everything between those it decides is some combination of those three. But red’s on one end of the visible spectrum and blue’s on the other. So your brain just decides to fill in the gap anyway.” He grinned, extremely pleased with this information.

Kate stared at the bike. “I have no idea what to do with that fact.”

“Nothing,” Parker told her. “It’s all in your head, so that’s what you trust.”

By the time they were ready to paint, Amy and Eliot had emerged with coffee and a plate of ridiculously fluffy soufflé pancakes, which Amy promptly forgot about in favor of the mechanical canvas in front of her. Kate and Eliot stood back, taking turns dipping their pancakes in strawberry compote while Amy, Parker, and Hardison ended up with a color that registered as black until she shifted just slightly, and the colors shimmered into tones of deep purple all the way up to magenta and back. Kate decided not to ask him about the science behind iridescence of colors that didn’t technically exist.

“It’s beautiful,” Kate told them. Parker and Hardison had taken the result of her reckless gamble and made it hers. The simple gesture felt like more than forgiveness—she didn’t have a word for the way her heart lifted into her throat. Eliot, from the steady way he looked at her, seemed to understand. “Thank you.”

“Anytime, girl,” Hardison pulled her into a hug. “Now, go on, get outta here, both of you, take it for a spin and leave us in peace.”

Amy looked up at her, eyes bright. “Sounds good to me.”

Kate, with Amy tucked snugly behind her, comms in both their ears so they could talk despite their helmets, took them under the towering arches of St. John’s Bridge and up through Forest Park, testing her traction on the winding mountain road. They emerged into the suburbs and kept going, into the forest towards the coast, with no particular destination in mind. The road flew past beneath them and with it went everything that had been building inside her, all the frustrations and futilities she’d stuffed away, trailing out behind them along miles of asphalt.

They came to a stop at a small, sandy beach town, parked the bike, and struggled through hot, dry drifts until they reached the firm strip of wet sand. A huge, dark rock, close enough to shore that she and Amy could have walked to it if the tide was low, dominated the skyline.

But instead, they walked past it. Let the waves brush sand and strands of seaweed over their toes, smiled at the other people out enjoying the breeze and the bright day; the sun hanging high over the bright rippling water.

The more she thought about it, or didn’t think about it, let the road and the beach and the girl beside her fill up that empty space inside her instead, the more she realized that was what she’d always done. He was an absence, an emptiness filled by placeholders until he would finally come to fill it.

But he wouldn’t. He never had and he never would.

She’d known that, somewhere in her, for a long time. The long summer camps and the boarding schools and the nannies and short, intense bursts of “father-daughter time,” usually in public, where it had value. She’d known it helping Cassie sneaking into the Avenger’s mansion, desperate to find her father, who somehow, even when dead, was closer, more real. She’d known it long before the surveillance pictures in the safe, the confrontation on the roof, the “dance” the night before.

There’s a moment, after the arrow is released, when physics takes over and the only thing an archer can do is wait for the satisfying thud of a hit, or the never-ending silence of a miss. Some things you can’t hit, no matter how much you try, because there’s nothing to hit. Just a hole for the fletching to brush past and continue on, in search of a target.

Down on the strand, Kate and Amy turned and walked back, past the giant rock and off the beach. The final rays of the midsummer sun followed them down the road, back to the city. I think I’d like to live near a beach, she thought, and it felt right. A target for that wayward arrow, searching for a place to land.