Chapter Text
You walk into the office with an air of confidence you don’t feel. It’s a forgery, a persona you’re used to creating. After all, you became a spy at 15, a disadvantage you have learned to work around and even make the most of. After all, no one expects a kid to be smuggling secrets across lines. Not that you always look like a kid—you have to get in on the action somehow.
Another thing is, no one expects the famed spy, code name Mirage, to be female. You had made a name for yourself in intelligence sectors, and much of the time your gender was left out of posts, meaning that informants were more cooperative and that the myth that spread of you was rather incorrect.
Unfortunately, your luck ran out. Only the person who had gotten you the job had known you were a female. When higher ups discovered it, despite your accomplished record—more so than most others, with the addition of being impeccably flawless (Robert Hogan didn’t raise an underachiever, although raise might be a too strong word for an accurate description of your upbringing; but that’s another point for another time)—despite that, you are being disregarded and reassigned to a dead-end science project in the middle of New York City.
Still, you walk into the office of your superior with your back straight and your chin held high. You aren’t going to complain, no matter how shitty your circumstances. After all, your father, for all his faults, is a POW, as are countless other soldiers and spies—those who aren’t dead or MIA. You have no right to bemoan your situation, considering the woes that have befallen your colleagues—your friends, even.
After the brief meeting with your superior, who you had met in person for the first time today, you were discouraged but determined both to not let that show and to work even harder in the face of getting reassigned. You flash back to his patronizing smile as he tells you of your reassignment to Camp Lehigh, New Jersey. “After all, it’s a safer place for dames like you.” God, you wish you could punch the smirk off his face, show him how “weak” your being a woman made you, but instead you had had to grit your teeth and smile through it.
For not the first time, you’re jealous of your friend, Susan Pevensie. She had pulled a Virginia Hall (minus the wooden leg) and gone to a different country to join resistance efforts—the difference being, Virginia Hall was and American who had gone to England and joined the SOE; Susan was a Brit who had joined the Alliance intelligence network in France. Due to its leader, Madame Fourcade, being female, she faced far less discrimination comparatively, although there would always be some.
Speaking of Susan Pevensie, code name Veuve Noire (Black Widow), you and she technically weren’t supposed to know each other’s names. You had ended up on an intelligence retrieval mission with her, a short in and out one that turned into a few weeks being trapped in a small, freezing storage facility while the Gestapo hunted you both, with only some wine, a blanket, and a little food between the two of you. Suffice to say, you had both learned a lot about each other—even running into each other later and helping each other out. Despite the lack of communication in regard to each other’s and the Underground’s safety, you and she had formed a tentative friendship—one that, should you have been allowed such luxuries as communication, would’ve most probably blossomed into a strong, close friendship. As it was, there was some of that already—one doesn’t go through an ordeal like the two of you without cementing a bond.
You turn your thoughts back to Camp Lehigh. Apparently, there was a Super Secret Science program going on to create the perfect soldier. You were going to help with the recruitment of volunteers to be experimented on; although your superior had avoided using those exact words (‘Experiment’ is such a harsh summary), you got the gist of it. The volunteers were then to be weeded down until you had the one to undergo said experiments, which would take place in a secret base in New York City, with much of the brass looking on—and who knew where it would go from there.
All you know, as you hail a taxi to take to the airport (your ticket to New York had already been purchased, although reimbursement to the SOE would be necessary ASAP), mulling over the information in your mind (you’re a spy—you won’t get the file out in public, especially not in broad daylight) is that you haven’t even begun and you’re already tired of it.
You just hope to god there will be something or someone to break up the already-expected monotony.