Work Text:
When they recruit you to SHIELD, they show you the official recruitment video.
(You have no idea what you’re getting into. You have some idea what your natural talents might lead to, and there are exciting possibilities and scary ones.)
They also give you the official SHIELD handbook during your induction which is about the size of ten Manhattan phonebooks.
(Somewhere in those pages the exciting possibilities are the scary ones.)
There’s a lot in those pages, but there are certain things they don’t tell you.
(A favorite prank for SHIELD recruits: the helicarrier’s rest rooms are outside.)
These are things you have to learn for yourself.
(The helicarrier restrooms are not outside. But if you’re going to fall off a helicarrier, it’s best while it’s still a hundred feet or so over the ocean.)
Such as, there will never be a job – in this realm or others – that will make you re-evaluate everything you know quite so thoroughly.
(The Norse gods, all real. A base can fly and turn invisible. Superheroes are real... and we made them.)
There’ll be skills you pick up which you would never believe could be yours.
(Stopping a hold-up with just a bag of flour.)
And some skills you never pick up.
(Like how to choose which color donut you want.)
There will never be a job which causes you so much emotional pain.
(The way she looks at you when your cellphone goes off again, you were supposed to be spending the weekend together, and you can’t tell her you’re stopping aliens from causing the apocalypse, or shepherding unruly superheroes.)
Or physical pain.
(A staff through the heart; oh god, did that hit? Did it miss? – and that’s something else to learn too.)
Did you mention the emotional pain?
(It didn’t miss.)
Yeah, you did.
(You never wanted to learn this. And what does this thing do anyway?)
Even up to the end of the job, you learn new things.
(Oh, that’s what it does. And oh, dying hurts.)
You’ll learn crazy things.
(Like how to handle Tony Stark.)
You’ll learn how to be realistic.
(Not so much handling Tony Stark as cleaning up explosions.)
And learn that everything is classified,
(Loki didn’t miss and you’re dying and all you can think – you should have broken the rules and told her. You’re going to miss the resin dust she kept getting on your suit, and her string-callused fingers, and the way the curve of her hip matched the indent in her ‘cello.)
that regrets are inevitable,
(You didn’t tell her.)
and that most people die on the job.
(...)
You’ll never learn the impact you make on the world.
(There's one more guy you pissed off... His name was Phil.)