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Sharon knows she’s fucked up, okay?
It’s not… it’s not news. It’s not even much of a surprise, these days. She’s had plenty of time to get used to the fact that she’s a second-rate spy playing way out of her league, of course it was going to catch up to her one day. And that’s today, apparently, since she’s read the situation wrong, trusted the wrong person, and picked a fight she couldn’t win, all in rapid succession. She’d like to say that trusting Captain America was the sort of mistake anyone would have made… but that’s clearly a lie, since she’s the one who smuggled his shield out of evidence storage, gave Falcon has wings back and is therefore indirectly responsible for all the bullshit which has gone down since.
Not anyone else. Her, and only her.
There’s no one else to blame for the fact that she’s on the run now. No one else is responsible for the fact that she’s lost her job- lost that particular job, perhaps the one job she’s worked hardest for in her life. Oh, training to join SHIELD’s numbers and climbing the ranks of the specialists was hard, but it had nothing on the months and months of distrust faced by every ex-SHIELD agent who tried to find employment elsewhere in the aftermath of the data dump. No one had trusted her- the situation made even worse by her last name, as usual- but she’d persevered. Friends were too much to ask for, but she’d kept her head down and done her job and they’d let her. They. Let. Her.
And now-
Such a fucking stupid mistake.
Clearly, they hadn’t trusted her at all- admittedly, they were right, but still. The moment the news broke that Cap’s shield was missing, her team turned on her. It was only because- If it wasn’t for-
Well. She never thought she’d be grateful to the nightmares- the memory of her co-workers turning out to be HYDRA agents and the world exploding in gunfire around her, a stop-motion picture playing behind her eyelids every night. She hates those memories, despises the fact that she hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep in years now… but it was those memories of betrayal which kept her alert every moment she was on duty, even standing in the middle of her own base. It was those memories which set her moving fast enough to avoid a bullet in the skull the moment the alert came through.
Damnit. She’s almost grateful to Rumlow, now. The betrayal from co-workers she’d respected if not liked hurts slightly less now that it’s happened once already. In fact, right now she can hardly bring herself to care about any of them.
After all, Sharon has slightly bigger problems to worry about.
She might have dodged the first wave of bullets, but she was still deep in newly enemy territory with a lot of very, very angry people. She’d run, of course, not even pausing to give thought to the other SHIELD agents who’d signed on with her: her now ex colleagues at the CIA probably turned on them just as quickly. Of course, they probably had the same paranoid reaction speed as her, so it’s entirely possible they’re all fine anyway. It’s not as if she can do anything about it if they’re not.
Sharon ran, and resisted the urge to return fire because these people are not actually a bunch of neo-Nazis wrecking her family legacy, and almost managed to make it out of the building before a particularly pissed off agent stumbled out of the break room with a bread knife.
He’s dead now. She’s probably supposed to feel guilty about that.
Now, she’s standing in the bathroom of an apartment she’s broken into, leaning over the sink, and willing her hands to stop shaking enough to do something about the knife sticking out of her side.
‘There are two rules to knife fighting,’ her aunt Peggy had told her. She was thirteen, and it was the random weekend in November that the family had declared to be Christmas since her aunt was always busy on the actual day. They were standing at the bottom of the garden, just out of sight of where her mother was fussing over the turkey, and Sharon felt like the bravest, most important girl in the world.
Peggy reached over and adjusted Sharon’s grip on the steak knife she’d stolen from the table. ‘Rule one: pointy end away from you.’
Sharon giggles, and Peggy’s eyes gleam with amusement, but everything else about her remains perfectly serious. That’s the thing she loves about her Peggy- one of the things, anyway. Peggy always treats her like an adult. Conversations with Peggy always feel important, no matter if they’re about the proper way to serve scones or tips on spotting Soviet assassins. As far as Sharon is concerned, she had the most amazing, perfect aunt in the whole world.
(She won’t question this belief in the slightest until one fateful day in Washington, DC where she stares straight into Peggy’s legacy and it grins back with too many heads.)
‘Rule two: slash don’t stab.’ Sharon frowns.
‘There’s slightly more to it if you decide to specialise in knife fighting,’ she admits. ‘For the beginner, however, your main aim is to finish the fight as quickly as possible without losing your weapon, yes?’
Sharon nods.
‘Stab me.’
‘What?!’
‘Stab me,’ Peggy repeats.
Sharon hesitates, but her aunt seems to be serious. After a moment, she takes a half-hearted swing with the blade.
Peggy takes it from her and twists her arm to the side before Sharon can even work out what’s happened.
‘Oh.’
‘You see? You’re far more likely to lose your blade if you wield it like that. Even if you do land a hit, you lose momentum. Your strength comes from moving quickly, love. Use it. Now, try again.’
The impromptu lesson continued. Five years later, Sharon would find herself standing in the Academy of Operations with a combat knife clasped in her fist, Isabelle Hartley calling out a set of instructions which boiled down to two rules she already knew.
(It wasn’t really enough, in the end. Sure, it put her ahead of the curve on that first day, but by the end of the week she was firmly in the middle of the class again. Sharon was never quite enough. Or rather, she’d be fine, and they’d speak cheerfully about her prospects as a specialist and her talent for kickboxing (not quite as good as May) and picking up batons (not quite as fast as Morse) and talent with a pistol (nothing on Barton, though). Then, sooner or later, they’d realise that she was that Carter, and she’d be back to disappointing them. Not quite good enough. Not quite living up to the legend no matter how hard she tried. How could any relative of Peggy Carter be anything less than a generation-defining master of their craft?)
(Trip had it easier- fewer people made the connection, for him. He could be an expert marksman without everyone and their dog comparing his scores to his Grandpa Gabe. He got it, though. Probably the closest friend she ever made at SHIELD, to be perfectly honest. One of the only ones who might have understood just how exhausting it could be to carry a legacy like hers.)
(The rest of them thrived on legacies, drawing strength from the past. Most of the time, Sharon wished she could burn it all down and start again, forge her own path where no one would compare her to the last Carter who tried to change the world. Maybe that’s why she did so well for herself after SHIELD fell. All her fellow agents found their foundations torn out from under them and their beliefs shattered. For her, all that happened was the impossible expectation she’d been held to as long as she could remember suddenly became a whole lot less desirable. Maybe it was okay that she didn’t quite live up to the expectations after all. Sharon was free to forge her own path for the first time in her life… until she got sucked into the orbit of one Steve Rogers and fucked it all up again, that is. Funny that. Good old aunt Peggy and her war stories, screwing Sharon over once again.)
The knife caught against her ribs. Which is good, because that means her ribs are doing what they’re supposed to be doing and preventing her soft squishy organs from spilling all over the floor.
However, there is a knife caught in her ribs.
Sharon rifles through the cupboard of the bathroom she’s, uh, borrowing, searching for bandages, and breathes a sigh of relief when she finds a surprisingly well-stocked first aid kit tucked away at the back. She knows how to do this- it’s hardly the first time she’s had to patch up her own wounds, even if she hasn’t been stabbed this badly in a long time now.
Too slow. God, that was stupid. She knows how to handle a knife fight, she’s known how to handle a knife fight since she was a teenager, never mind that she was an upper-class white kid growing up in picture-perfect suburbia who never should’ve seen hide nor hair of a fight. And it’s not as if the guy caught her off guard, either. She saw that blow coming from a mile off.
She should have dodged. Peggy would have dodged, no problem, but she’s never been Peggy. Then again, any specialist worth their salt would’ve avoided that hit, and she’d always thought she got her position on merit. Sure, she might have disappointed everyone by not being that Agent Carter, but she was still a damn good specialist regardless.
She’s used to being a disappointment- in one way or another, she’s been one her entire career.
Usually, though… Usually, she was disappointing other people. Not living up to their impossible expectations. But what if those expectations weren’t impossible? If she’d been a good SHIELD agent, she wouldn’t be hunched over someone else’s sink trying to bandage a stab wound right now. What if-
She’d always trusted that she made her way through the ranks on merit. That her name held her back, if anything, every mistake costing her twice as much as everyone else, when they all remembered she wasn’t the Carter they wanted to be working with. If that was the case, though…
She should have been better than this.
She has to be better than this.