Chapter Text
1987
Emily remembered when the Hulk first appeared.
It was the first national-level recognition of a parahuman that wasn’t Scion. It got the level of attention that Endbringers would come to be known for, and maybe that was a little bit of an appropriate comparison, but at the time, it had completely rocked the world.
Emily had been in her junior year of high school, and her English class had a current events paper due weekly. Everyone had written their paper on the Hulk that week, even if they knew everyone else was doing the same thing, because it was just so unfathomable to write it about something else.
Every kid in that class would forever know how many square blocks the Hulk had torn through, how many civilians he had killed, and what types of military weaponry had utterly failed to stop him. Even if they hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t forget the images of the ten-foot-tall green beast packed with muscle ramaging through Brockton Bay’s residential streets.
The military had failed to stop him, and the Hulk had run free. It was a terrifying piece of knowledge on every American mind.
Later, Emily would recognize that she was taken advantage of because of it, but at the time, the National Guard recruiters that had visited her school the next week offered something Emily wasn’t finding anywhere else, and she thought she’d be a fool not to take it.
1994
“Make sure you read these personnel files before the research teams get here,” the squad leader instructed, but calling her a squad leader was a little generous. Piggot had been on these types of details before. They called it guard duty, but they were glorified babysitters.
Piggot was still going to read the files, though.
“All this stuff’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” Agent Barton asked as the manila folders were passed out and the squad got a chance to flip through the pages. “I feel smarter just looking at pictures of these guys.”
Piggot knew Agent Barton okay but not great. They worked well together, Barton being a sniper and Piggot being pretty decent at close combat, but Piggot was pretty sure he was going to get into special ops, so she was trying not to get too attached.
Still, she liked him enough to make conversation. “One of them’s my girlfriend’s cousin.”
“No shit? Wait, one of the eggheads or one of the PRT liaisons?”
“One of the eggheads.”
“Which one? Ooh, oh, wait. Let me guess.” Barton drummed his hands on the table, making more of a show of things than Piggot would have liked, but she had to admit that she liked the energy he brought to things. He was fun, even if they weren’t supposed to be having fun. “Donald Blake?”
Piggot shook her head. She didn’t know who that was.
“Rey Andino.”
“Nope,” she answered. “Have you already read through the whole file?”
“There’s a list in the back of the names. I’m just looking at the students and lab assistants,” Barton answered before guessing again. “Danny Banner?”
“Yes.”
“I knew it!”
Piggot bit her tongue to keep her from pointing out that it was his third guess.
“Is this your first time meeting him?”
Piggot nodded. “First time meeting any of her family.”
“Wait, really? Haven’t you guys been together for awhile?”
“Neither of us were out. We were planning on keeping quiet about it, but then Legend came out, and, you know. Things started looking a little better.”
“You should tell him the next time you see him,” Barton said seriously, as if Piggot ever saw Legend, let alone talked to him. “I’m sure he’d love to hear it.”
“Right,” Piggot responded, not giving him anything, and turned her attention back to the files.
Piggot was planning on treating it like a job. It was a job. For both of them. They had plans to meet up with Jen after work. They could wait until then before saying anything.
Danny didn’t share her mindset, though, it seemed. He almost immediately asked one of the other agents which one of them was Emily Piggot.
“We’ll have time to talk later,” she told him. “Right now’s your time to talk to the other researchers.”
“Jen’s important to me,” Danny protested, but he didn’t deny that he had things to do right now.
Barton had joked that just looking at these guys made him feel smarter, but being in this room, Piggot felt completely outclassed. She thought Barton was pretty sharp, even if he didn’t see it. Not booksmart, but incredibly skilled.
Piggot thought she was more of a balance. She had a college degree, she’d served time in the National Guard to get more hands-on skills, and now she was a decent PRT agent.
But the people in this room, the people like Danny, were on the other side of the spectrum. Far, far on the other side of the spectrum. Jen had told her Danny was a genius, but Piggot had thought she’d been exaggerating a little, bragging about her cousin when he got accepted into a PhD program. But standing here, listening to all these guys talk, Piggot realized just how much of an understatement calling Danny a genius was.
“Welcome to the first Interdisciplinary Parahuman Origins Research Project Conference,” a man Piggot recognized from the files as Reed Richards announced at the top of the hour. “You all know what we’re doing here. Mingle, and find someone who can support your research.”
Not very descriptive, but all these people did know what they were doing here, and Piggot knew enough from reading the file to kind of follow along. The keyword in the project name was interdisciplinary, not parahuman. Research these days was all about parahumans: what mankind could learn from studying specific powers, but also understanding how parahumans worked.
Reed Richards had suggested that no single field could find the answer. So, he proposed a project pulling people from many academic backgrounds, and he ended up with the government funding and support to do it.
“It’s a really good opportunity for people like me,” Danny told Piggot and Jen when he met up with them for dinner that night. “See, I’m getting my PhD in nuclear physics, and I am working in an astrophysics lab, but they’re also putting us students in labs outside of our focus, so I’m getting more of a biology angle too.”
Danny’s research was about radiation and how it mutated cells, as far as Piggot could tell. Anything he said more than that was beyond her. The purpose of the project, at least Danny’s part in it, was to have PhD students give outside perspectives in other labs’ research, and use their younger, more malleable minds to learn from both disciplines, giving them an edge on truly working in that middle point.
This was all kind of over Piggot’s head, though. Jen’s too, and Danny knew it, so Piggot tried to find a little more common ground.
“What made you want to go into parahuman research?”
Jen’s eyes widened, and she very quickly began making the ‘no’ motion, waving her hand parallel over her throat and shaking her head.
“Jen didn’t tell you?” Danny asked, surprised. He noticed Jen. “It’s fine, Jen. It was so long ago.”
Jen looked a little sheepish. “Sorry. I know.”
Danny was from Brockton Bay, it turned out. He’d lost his home and father in the Hulk’s first attack. He’d only been seventeen at the time, and he’d gone to live with Jen’s family until he started his undergrad.
“It didn’t make me particularly want to study parahumans,” Danny explained, “but the project was just too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I mentioned it on my application. Dr. Richards and Dr. Storm thought it gave me something interesting to contribute to the lab, I guess.”
He talked about it a little bit, not much but enough that Piggot’s mind immediately went to him when the deployment alarms went off late that night, and Piggot learned the Hulk was attacking New York.
They set the Endbringer warning system off because what else were they supposed to do? The Hulk had never come this far North. They didn’t have a Hulk alarm.
But that ended up being the wrong move. It just sent more people into the streets, thinking they were going to the Endbringer shelters, and ending up in the Hulk’s path.
At least being in New York meant the capes could be deployed quickly. And unfortunately for Piggot, that also meant the PRT agents could get deployed quickly.
The higher-ups weren’t dumb enough to think containment foam could do a thing against the Hulk, so the agents were sent to the streets, hoping to wrangle the civilians to the evacuation zones.
It was utter chaos out there, and it wasn’t over when the Protectorate managed to drive the Hulk off. He was still out there, for one, and the PRT’s work wasn’t over when the Hulk was no longer in the city.
It was very late—or very early, depending on how you looked at it—when Piggot got home. Her and Jen’s apartment was out of the danger zone, so she wasn’t all that worried when she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
That very quickly changed when Jen suddenly appeared in front of her. “Jesus!”
“Did you get my calls?” Jen asked, voice as frantic as she looked. Her eyes were wild yet red and puffy like she’d been crying, and there was dirt streaked on her face, and her hair was messy and tangled with debris. Piggot had assumed she had been out of the danger zone, but evidently that wasn’t true.
“No,” Piggot answered, fighting the urge to fish her phone from her pocket. She didn’t doubt she had a dozen missed calls from her on there. “What happened?”
“It’s Danny,” Jen said, and Piggot’s stomach sank.
There were too many people caught up in the Hulk attack to really confirm anyone as dead or missing for some time, but when they finally got the call, Piggot had to admit it was a relief because Jen could finally let go and grieve.
“They’re making a special ops unit for tracking down and taking down the Hulk,” Piggot told Jen when she heard the news, and she expected Jen to be happy. Afterall, the Hulk had killed her uncle and cousin.
But Jen just got weirdly quiet. Upset, Piggot felt confident saying, even if she didn’t understand why.
She didn’t tell Jen she’d been given the chance to apply to work on the team. She just deleted the email and hoped she’d get another chance to join some other squad. She wanted her big break, but she didn’t want Jen to lose yet another person to that monster.
2001
In her time with the PRT, Piggot had responded to all kinds of Endbringer invasions and parahuman attacks. And now that the PRT was expanding, she even got to lead squads here and there.
But none of that prepared her for Ellisberg, nor did it prepare her for what came next.
“We were the only ones who survived,” Agent Barton told her when she was finally allowed visitors in her hospital room. Only, he wasn’t Agent Barton anymore. He was Goliath, a fifteen-foot-tall parahuman packed with pure muscle.
Barton had survived in part because he was a sniper. He’d been far enough to avoid getting caught up in the worst of the attack, and he’d had the perfect vantage point to be traumatized enough to trigger by the time the monsters were done tearing through the ground squads and ready to go after the stragglers.
Piggot wasn’t sure how she’d survived, especially without triggering herself, but her legs had been shredded, and she’d lost both her kidneys, so she wasn’t sure if she could call this surviving.
“Stop thinking about it,” Jen told her when it was finally time to come home from the hospital.
“Those capes abandoned us,” Piggot responded even though she’d told Jen this a million times. “We definitely have grounds to sue.”
Jen didn’t disagree. She was a full-fledged lawyer by this point, after all. She just didn’t want Piggot getting all worked up thinking about what happened, not when she was still so vulnerable. There would be time to figure out what to do later.
Jen tried. She really did. But Piggot had no interest in playing board games, or working on puzzle books, or chatting with neighbors, or trying video games, or any of the things Jen tried to get her to go now that her mobility was so severely limited.
Mobility might not be the right word for it. Piggot couldn’t do any sort of exercise right now, and even when she healed, anything vigorous was out of the question. That meant Piggot’s career in the PRT was over, and her backup plan of going back to the army wasn’t an option either.
It made her realize how much of her life surrounded being physical. In the mornings, she would run. To socialize, she’d bring a friend or coworker to the gym. On the weekends, she and Jen would go on hikes. There were infinite little things, too. Taking out the trash, walking to the grocery store…
Her life wasn’t over. Jen was always telling her that, and Piggot knew that, even if it was hard to believe it in the day-to-day. She couldn’t get fired for her disability, especially when she’d gotten injured on the job. They’d find some other job for her to do, some kind of desk position probably. Piggot wasn’t looking forward to it.
Then she got a call from Chief Director Costa-Brown herself.
“You know how the PRT has been expanding out of New York?” Piggot asked Jen once she was finished with her phone call. Or, well, the next time she saw Jen after she finished her phone call. It’d been months since her injury at this point, and Jen couldn’t stay home with her forever. “They want me to head a new department.”
Jen was happy for her, because of course she was, but she was hesitant. Heading a new department meant going to a new city, and Jen loved New York. She had built her life here, after all.
“Call your friend,” Jen suggested after a few rounds of discussion, and Piggot didn’t have to clarify who she was talking about. “See if he got a similar offer.”
Piggot thought that was a good idea, but honestly, she’d kind of forgotten that Barton had gotten powers.
“They’re making a parahuman team in the Hulkbuster unit,” Barton told her when she gave him a call. “The Chief Director asked me to lead it.”
Damn. That was a lot better than starting up a new PRT branch, though it wasn’t like Piggot was getting offered field opportunities. For desk jobs, hers was pretty good. Still, she couldn’t help but be a little jealous of her friend’s success.
They said trigger events happened when someone experienced trauma so intense, their body did what it had to in order to survive, granting the person powers, often ones that healed or compensated for their injuries if they had one. Piggot didn’t want to be a parahuman, not after seeing what kind of person a trigger made someone, but by god, she would love to have Barton’s powers.
He’d figured out how to control them, he told her, so he wasn’t stuck as this massive, hulkish man all the time, but even if it wasn’t a Breaker power and Piggot had gotten stuck like that, it sounded infinitely better than her current existence.
“Do you get a say in where you go?” Barton asked, and Piggot confirmed that she did. “You should look into Brockton Bay.”
Piggot thanked him and did some digging. She had some good news for Jen when she got back from work.
“There’s a parahuman law firm starting up in Brockton Bay,” Piggot explained, and she saw the interest gleam in Jen’s eye. “There’s a pretty high parahuman population, and starting a PRT department there is really going to shake things up. I think it would be a really good opportunity for you.”
Jen was still hesitant, but after putting out some feelers in Brockton Bay, she too agreed that this was too good an opportunity to pass up. They were moving to Brockton Bay.
2002
Piggot getting a job didn’t magically fix everything that was wrong. It was still hard.
Piggot still couldn’t do much more physical activity than walk. She had long hours, and she worked even longer ones than she had to because she didn’t really want to go home and deal with Jen’s pushing to get her to do all these different things that she thought were good for her.
Now that Piggot was getting out of the house a bit, she was able to recognize why she didn’t like it. She felt like she was being minded, like Jen saw her as a child she needed to entertain and take care of.
Jen did not appreciate it when Piggot brought it up.
“I’m trying to help you!” Jen exploded with more anger Piggot thought was capable of existing in her tiny body. It must have been brewing for some time, because once Jen started, she couldn’t stop. “It’s like you’re not trying to live anymore!”
Jen went on. She talked about how Piggot never tried to have anything outside of work anymore. How hard it was to try when Piggot was being so stubborn all the time. How Piggot didn’t even seem to notice everything Jen was doing for her, and when she did, she seemed upset with her. How she just seemed to give up. How she didn’t feel like the Emily she’d fallen in love with anymore.
Piggot only heard about half of this, though, because Jen was growing. “Jen?”
Jen ignored her and kept her rambling going. She had some good points, but Piggot was really not in the right headspace to hear her out.
“Jen!” Piggot snapped, and Jen stopped. She stared at Piggot for a moment, surprise on her face before realization enveloped her face.
While she’d been talking, Jen had been growing. Her spine stretched and her shoulders filled out until she was maybe seven feet of lean, green muscle.
Piggot’s first reaction was fear. As a PRT agent, it was baked into her. This Hulk-like figure standing in her apartment? Anyone would be afraid.
Piggot’s second reaction was guilt. She had been around parahumans enough to recognize a Breaker state. Jen had triggered.
She’d caused Jen to trigger. What Piggot had been putting her through, it was bad enough to cause her girlfriend to trigger.
Even with all he put her through, Nilbog hadn’t made Piggot trigger, but he had changed her into something that could make Jen trigger.
And that was a hell of a lot worse.
Jen buried her face in her hands, almost like she was hiding, and even though her words were muffled, Piggot heard them as clear as day. “I didn’t want you to find out.”
I didn’t want you to find out. Not even I didn’t want you to find out like this.
Jen had triggered some time ago.
Jen had triggered some time ago, and she didn’t tell Piggot.
Piggot wanted to blame the nature of parahumans. Their definedness by their traumas and exemption from human law reshaped parahumans into the selfish, irresponsible, and unreliable. She knew that wasn’t Jen, though. Jen hadn’t told her she had triggered because she was a parahuman and that was what they did. She hadn’t told her because Emily was Piggot.
The source of her trigger. Someone who had expressed her dislike of parahumans to her face time after time.
“Why-” Piggot started before realizing she didn’t want to know the answer to that question.
Jen spoke before she could finish. “Danny’s the Hulk!”
Fuck.
“Don’t tell me anything I have to do anything about!” Piggot cautioned, the response coming almost automatically, and from the look on Jen’s face, she knew that was the wrong thing to say.
They both knew the decision Piggot had just made, and they both knew they weren’t coming back from this.
Piggot called Barton because that was the person she thought she had to call. It only occurred to her once the Hulkbuster unit arrived that Barton was only the leader of the parahuman squad. Someone else was the director of the division.
Director “Thunderbolt” Ross, former army general and current pain in the ass to PRT divisions across the West Coast.
They arrived with tanks and armed with power armor, the picture of guns blazing.
Right in the middle of the city.
Piggot stormed out of the PRT Headquarters to yell at them herself. Her doctor would probably scold her for it, but seriously, sending out an army in the middle of downtown was just plain stupid.
It took a minute to clear things up, but the Hulkbusters’ ire turned on Ross pretty quickly. Most of them were Breakers, so their annoyance was palpable. It would have been a little amusing if it wasn’t Jen they were after.
Ross’s reaction to Jen—tiny, little Jen—sitting in the PRT holding room was gold, though.
Piggot wasn’t present for Jen’s questioning, but Barton and her were still on good enough terms for Piggot to have a general idea of what was going on.
It wasn’t a crime to be a parahuman, but Jen did know the Hulk’s identity, and she’d failed to inform anyone. More than that, she knew how the Hulk’s power worked. He was a Breaker, like Goliath and Jen herself, not a Case 53 like the PRT and the Hulkbusters had assumed for so long. Knowing that may have allowed the Hulkbusters to stop the Hulk sooner.
She didn’t tell them anything about Danny, though, and Barton sounded both frustrated and impressed when he told Piggot.
But that was where Jen’s backbone ended. She was offered a deal to escape being charged with being an accessory to the Hulk’s crimes, and she took it even though she definitely had grounds to argue out of it. She could have too. She was literally a lawyer, and she’d been working in an office that specialized in parahuman law. But Jen just let it happen.
And she’d accused Piggot of giving up, Piggot thought bitterly, even though she knew that wasn’t fair.
“I’m joining the LA Protectorate,” Jen told her, and she was telling, not asking. Not that she needed to ask. They were both adults. But it at least should have been a conversation. Piggot wasn’t surprised that it wasn’t, though.
They’d both fucked up, and they were ready to accept it. Piggot had still sort of hoped to cling to what they once had, but she’d changed so much, and now so had Jen. This might just be for the better.
That didn’t mean Piggot was happy about it, though.
“Do you think you’ll come back?” Piggot asked, feeling a little pathetic for letting the question come out at all.
Jen just shrugged, and that was as good as shaking her head.
2011
It was nearly a decade until the Hulkbusters came back to Brockton Bay. Piggot threw them out of her headquarters without a second thought.
It wasn’t just because she was too busy to play Ross’s games. It wasn’t even because of the role the Hulk had played in Leviathan’s attack. Okay, maybe a little bit. Piggot wasn’t a slave to her whims and feelings.
But she was thinking of Jen when she did it. One last kindness, maybe, even if she’d never know about it. Even with all they’d been through, Piggot still loved Jen, and Jen loved the Hulk enough to lie to Piggot for him. The least she could do was honor that love.