Chapter Text
Friday 13th September 2013
Amelia probably shouldn’t be scuffing her trainers along the pavement as she walks, they’re damaged enough as is. Not that Skye won’t get her new ones if she needs them, but just she likes the ones she has now. They’re pink and she’s got all her doodles on the white part and she even coloured in the laces to be all rainbow and cool. New ones just wouldn’t be the same.
She starts to make a point of lifting her feet higher than necessary with each step, just to avoid dragging the Converse along the ground. She might look a little silly, but she doesn’t mind—the chances of her seeing any of the people she’s currently passing again are slim anyway, so there’s no point for her to try and appear ‘normal’ for their sakes. ‘Normal’ is boring, she’d much rather have fun.
She doesn’t really know where she’s headed; she got bored of sitting in the van and waiting for Skye to return, so she put on her shoes and decided to walk around. So long as she gets back before Skye does return, she can go pretty much anywhere she wants. Except the library, or the park, those are a little too far away. It’s a shame—there’ll be a person reading to the little kids in the library today.
Although, Amelia can totally read—for sure—she still likes to sit and listen from a distance, but she definitely can read for herself as well.
For example, she knows that the sign on the shop she’s currently passing reads that it’s a sweet shop, and that’s not because she’s been inside countless times and knows what kind of store it is, it’s because she can read the sign.
She pushes open the door, hearing the little bell ring as she enters, and waves to the shopkeeper. She doesn’t know the guy, but that won’t stop her from being kind and polite. She takes out one of the paper bags—a pink one, naturally—and fills it with a few different kinds of sweets with different kinds of flavours.
She does have the money for her candy—which she did happen to get through not-quite-legal means, but that doesn’t matter—and she doesn’t like stealing from this store. It’s a small business and she quite likes some of the people who work here. Not the current shopkeeper, obviously, because she doesn’t even know him, but she’s sure that if she did get to know him then she’d quite like him.
Amelia approaches the counter, having to stand on her tiptoes to slide the bag over to the shopkeeper and saying, “Good afternoon,” with a bright smile.
The shopkeeper smiles back, taking her bag and weighing it. “Is that all, or would you like anything else?”
She shakes her head. “No, thank you.”
“All right, then. That’ll be six dollars fifty.”
She’d expected it to be a little more. Usually when she fills up her own bag, it ends up being exorbitantly expensive, not that six dollars fifty isn’t expensive, she’s pretty sure she almost died a little inside hearing that price come from the shopkeeper’s mouth but it’s definitely better than it could’ve been. She probably just chose a smaller bag this time, so there’s obviously less candy inside which comes to a lower weight which lowers the price significantly.
She hands over her twenty dollar bill. “Sorry, I don’t have anything smaller.”
He takes the money and begins to collect her change. “That’s okay. It happens,” he assures her, passing over the money. She takes both the change and her bag of sweets, tucking the former into her jacket pocket and putting one of the sweets into her mouth as she exits the store.
-
Saturday 14th September 2013
She’s still working through her bag of sweets the next day, sitting at the bus stop with Skye as they wait for the person they’re tracking. Tracking, not stalking, Skye explained the difference. Well, she’d said there is a difference, and Amelia believed her. The person they’re tracking, apparently, is some kind of superhero. He’d saved a woman from the building Skye had been surveying yesterday, which does make Amelia regret not going with her, but there’s no time to think about what she should’ve done yesterday.
Because right now she’s being a spy. Skye gave her a rough description of the guy and told her to keep an eye out, which is exactly what she’s doing, looking at every person who passes the bus stop with narrowed eyes, checking for this Hooded Hero person.
A lime green Stark Industries bus—a tacky colour, in Amelia’s opinion, but there’s no time to be critiquing a billionaire’s design choices when she’s spying and half her field of view has been cut off—rolls into the stop. She doesn’t know if it’s luck or if Skye had figured out that he’d be getting off this bus at this stop at this time, but Amelia is fairly certain that the Hooded Hero just got off the bus at this stop at this time specifically.
Skye also seems to notice, getting up and following him into the cafe their van is always parked next to. Again, Amelia decides not to think too much about this and follows Skye inside. Before they follow him to the seat he picked—a booth by the window—Skye pulls Amelia to one side.
“I want you to let me do the talking.”
“Not even just one question?”
Skye shakes her head. “Nope.”
She had planned on asking him about if he’s got superpowers like Captain America or if his power is his hood like Iron Man—the coolest hero, obviously. But she guesses she can just sit there in silence and let Skye ask all the questions. “Fine.”
“Good,” Skye says, taking a sweet from Amelia’s bag and popping it in her mouth.
They both walk over to the booth; Skye lets Amelia slide in first and then herself. Behind on the TV, they’re still playing the news footage from the explosion yesterday, but Amelia tunes that out.
“Just act natural,” Skye says, looking around like there’s people there that could arrest them or fight them or something. If Amelia had access to a gun, those people wouldn’t be a problem, but luckily there aren’t any of those people, which means Amelia’s lack of a gun is okay.
“What?”
“Just pretend that we’re talking.”
“We are,” the Hooded Hero guy says, a pretty confused expression on his face. He seems pretty basic for a hero, so maybe the hood is in fact just a hood and he’s got some power. Like how the Hulk isn’t always big and green because sometimes he’s just ordinary scientist Bruce Banner.
“Good, ‘cause you never know who’s listening.”
“I don’t even know who’s talking.”
“I’m Skye,” she says, “and you’re the Hooded Hero.” Amelia nods along, taking a sweet from her bag and putting it in her mouth, offering one to the Hooded Hero, though he declines with a shake of the head. “Please tell me that you’re not staying with that name.”
“I thought it was alright,” Amelia admits, not wanting to be rude or anything. “It’s accurate.”
“Wait, what? I’m not- I’m…a factory worker,” he deflects as Skye reaches over Amelia to take some of the sugar packets and organise them in front of herself.
She chuckles. “Yeah, sure, by day. I saw you! You’re a hero. Like a for real superhero, which, I’m not like groupie-stalker type, but—”
Amelia nods, “Yeah, there’s a difference.” She does remember she’s meant to be being quiet, but Skye didn’t explicitly say not to make any little comments. So long as Amelia doesn’t ask anything, technically speaking she’s still following by Skye’s rule.
“Yes, exactly, but anyway. You’re in danger.” He looks fairly safe to Amelia, but then again, Skye probably didn’t mean right this very second.
“You got the wrong guy, lady.”
“No, you’ve got the wrong approach,” Skye says, “The cute girl from the hospital is dying to thank you, and, possibly, thank you.” Amelia scrunches her face at that, not actually understanding, of course. “And you’re hiding. The clip of you rescuing her has had the most hits since that puppy with vertigo, and you…can’t even find a job.
The guy puts away the newspaper he’d been using to find jobs, leaning back in his seat. “What do you mean about danger?”
“S.H.I.E.L.D.”
“Shield what? I should carry a shield?” he questions, gesturing the motion with his arm.
“S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Skye clarifies, though just repeating a word isn’t exactly clarification in Amelia’s opinion, “Government. Scary men in dark suits who come after guys like you.”
“So, you know, the obvious,” Amelia shrugs.
“They knew about the Battle of New York before it even happened, and cleaned it up before anyone could ask any real questions. Overnight. How long do you think it’ll take for them to clean you up?”
“And you wanna know why I’m hiding.”
“What if you didn’t hide?” Skye suggests after a pause. “What if you got in front of this and let people know that you’re a hero?”
“I’m just a guy.”
“So was Steve Rogers,” Amelia mentions, taking another sweet from her bag and eating it.
Skye moves around the sugar packets that she’d organised previously. “Yeah. A guy like that gets work. Gets perks.” She pauses, tapping the packets. “I can help. I’m great with computers, like, weirdly great. I mean, I could help you create a whole new identity, or—ah, a mask!”
“Okay,” the guy Amelia realises she never asked for a name from says, getting up and leaving.
“We could just also stick with the…hood,” Skye follows him out and Amelia follows her after putting the sugar packets back into the stand where they’re meant to be. Amelia watches her bump into the hero guy—which obviously means she’s swiped something—and continue to talk. “Listen, you cannot walk away from this. With great power comes…a ton of weird crap that you are not prepared to deal with. Now, my office is—”
“You have an office?” the guy asks, enunciating each word which almost sounds offensive.
“Yes, I have an office. It’s a mobile…office. It’s a…van, I live in a van. By choice! But it’s always in the alley round the corner, free Wi-Fi, you can come by any time!”
“Thank you,” he says, walking away.
“They’re coming for you,” Skye says cheerily, waving. She looks down at presumably the thing she swiped and adds, “Mike,” in a lower voice. Obviously, she took his ID card, not what Amelia would personally take, but then again they had been in desperate need of his name. Hopefully taking the card doesn’t screw up his life any further.
-
After the meeting with Mike, Skye had returned to the van to record something for the Rising Tide and, not wanting to get in the way, Amelia took the opportunity to go the the library. There’s nobody here reading to the little kids—not that Amelia needs that, obviously, she can totally read by herself—but she can still mess around on Moshi Monsters on the library computers.
She does so for a good long while, maybe a little too long, so she logs out and rushes back to the alley. Sort of. She does walk quickly, but she does just so happen to take a few ‘wrong’ turns and take a few peeks into certain stores. She only fully stops when she notices the S.H.I.E.L.D. car in the middle of the road next to the exploded building. It did seem about time they found out about it.
After that she properly picked up the pace and got back to the alley, for some reason finding no van.
“Oh, this is not good.”
-
The van remained gone all night. She’s been sitting in the cafe next to the alley most of the day, obviously taking the time to eat many waffles. Currently, she has chocolate on her waffles and strawberries and she’s watching the TV as she eats. It’s been set to the news all day, but only now has it gotten interesting. Aka, it’s about Mike, hurting a person. Amelia is fairly certain there’s something else at play, the person they’re describing in the news footage is not the man who sat across from her in this very booth earlier in the day.
After she finishes her waffles, not only does she definitely feel sick but it’s around closing time for the cafe, meaning she’s got to leave and go somewhere. Maybe back to check on the alley, which she hasn’t since she first got back, probably a bad decision on her part. Skye could’ve been back this whole time.
She waits for the waitress to go into the back with her plate and then rushes out and back around to the alleyway, where the van is back in its usual place and presumably with Skye inside of it. There’s also a woman outside of it, so Amelia just sort of stands right behind the corner of the wall, peeking around to see if or when the woman will leave.
She doesn’t, which sucks, but the slightly cooler part is somebody drops down and knocks her out. Not wanting to lose Skye for the second time today, Amelia runs forward and climbs into the van. Skye’s naturally more focused on the guy winning the fight against the woman, but that does not stop her from putting a protective arm around Amelia. The guy fighting, Amelia also realises, is Mike.
“Mike! What are you doing?”
“Saving you. From the scary men in dark suits. And you’re gonna help save us.”
“Us?”
Mike leans across, grabbing something from the side of the van neither Skye nor Amelia can see, then he tugs his son into view. “Don’t cry, okay,” he says, putting his son into the van first before getting in himself. Amelia breaks away from Skye to sit on the bed and give the extra passengers more room, Skye also moves across. “Stay strong for me, Ace. What are we?”
“We’re a team,” Ace answers.
“That’s right.” He turns to speak to Skye, “Now drive.”
-
Sunday, 15th September 2013
For most of the drive, Amelia had been showing Ace the action figures she definitely got through legal means. That’s why she’s missing one Iron Man figure—it’s certainly not because she chose to steal a packet of Haribo over the action figure only for it to be discontinued the very next day. She happily gave Ace one of her few duplicates, and one of the ones in good condition. Giving somebody a half-wrecked present is just rude.
But after that, once they arrived at Union Station and Skye had climbed back to the back of the van to work on getting rid of any trace of Mike, Amelia climbed up into the front to look out the windows, not particularly a fan of so many people in the van.
“How long is this gonna take?” Mike asks, moving further up towards Skye. Amelia would also like to know, anxious to get out and moving again and also potentially stealing too, but she trusts that Skye’s going as fast as she can. She just watches out the window, waiting somewhat patiently.
“This is top speed, trust me. It’s not like I’m deleting a Facebook page, I’m bypassing Licence Bureau’s AES protected data stream. So…chill.”
“How do I know you can really do this?”
She hesitates. “I’ve done it before.
Around a minute of silence later, Mike talks again, though he speaks to Ace specifically so Amelia tunes the words out and rolls down the window, getting very interested in the S.H.I.E.L.D. car that just pulled up. She moves to inform the other three of this new arrival when said new arrival does it himself.
“Mr. Peterson, good morning, we’re not a threat, we’re here to help, but you’re in danger and we need to take you in.”
“What did you do?” Mike half-shouts, cheeks glowing orange for some reason. She thought she saw it before, but wrote it off in her head as crazy—most people don’t glow orange—though apparently it’s actually real. He then—as any person would obviously do in this scenario—throws the door completely off its hinges and takes Skye and Ace into the station.
“Oh, of course,” Amelia mutters, jumping out her window because just exiting normally would be far too boring. One of the S.H.I.E.L.D. guys—the old one with the megaphone—tells her to stay where she is, an instruction she doesn’t hesitate to ignore as she follows him and the second agent inside the station.
There’s a lot of people inside, all running around and making it very hard for the small eight-year-old—though she’s tall for her age—to see anything of importance, but she still just about spots Skye running through it all. She’s not particularly sure how, but she definitely doesn’t stand around thinking about it and bolts straight to Skye.
Amelia doesn’t bother asking what’s going on, mostly due to the chaos but also the fact that Mike jumps—literally jumps—over to them and also the gunshot that almost takes him out. If she had a gun herself, she wouldn’t have to run because she’d just shoot back, but she doesn’t have a gun so she does run.
She does have a pocket full of glitter, though. It’s more of a short-range weapon, but she keeps it in mind just in case.
They go up and around to an empty room, seemingly under construction from all the construction-looking things around. It’s in here that Mike and Skye decide to stop—the latter of which pulling her arm away—though Amelia would actually prefer it if they continued moving. After all, there’s a guy with a gun after them apparently and all three of them are unarmed. Or maybe Mike is the weapon, she’s unsure.
Skye tries to reason with him, “You’ve got to stop! These people can help you!”
Unfortunately, he is evidently not in the mood to be reasoned with. “The men in suits? They’re your buddies now?” He grabs Skye’s arm and begins to pull her toward the railing, “Where’d they take my son?”
Amelia’s pretty sure she saw the old S.H.I.E.L.D. guy push Ace to a police officer, so she’d bet he’s probably outside of the station. Not getting shot at. Where she would like to be. Why did she run in again? She could’ve stayed outside.
“Uh, guys,” Amelia begins, noticing the Shotgun Guy returning on the other side of the room. The first shot doesn’t get Mike and he’s able to get Skye out of the way, but the second shot does get him and he falls over the railing to the floor below. As Shotgun Guy prepares another bullet, some cool ninja lady comes in and takes him out.
If Amelia doesn’t get a gun, she should definitely get taught how to fight. It seems only fair to her.
Skye gets to her feet, rushes over to Amelia and grabs her hand before pulling her out towards the cool ninja lady and the three of them head down the ground floor where Mike had fallen and, apparently, destroyed a kiosk.
“You think this is killing me?” he asks, holding up his left arm that apparently has some glowy device attached to it. That explains the orange glow in his cheeks before. “All over, there’s people being pushed down, being robbed, one of them tries to stand up,” he pulls up a pillar from the broken kiosk, “You gotta make an example outta him.”
“You bring this building down on us, will that help them?” asks the old S.H.I.E.L.D. guy.
“That’s a lie! All you do is lie!” he turns, smashing more of the kiosk with the pillar. “You said if we worked hard, if we did right, we’d have a place. You said it was enough to be a man, but there’s better than man: there’s Gods. And the rest of us, what are we? They’re giants, we’re what they step on.”
The old S.H.I.E.L.D. guy walks up to him—only needing to take a couple steps thanks to Mike inching closer throughout his speech—and says, “I know. I’ve seen giants, up close, and that privilege cost me. Nearly everything. But the good ones, the real deal, they’re not heroes because of what they have that we don’t, it’s what they do with it. You’re right, Mike. It matters who you are.”
“I could, you know,” Mike says, “Be a hero.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Then, something, well technically someone, shoots Mike, knocking him down, and hopefully just unconscious. Though, Amelia’s pretty sure nobody can survive a shot to the head.
The old S.H.I.E.L.D. guy turns around briefly, but Amelia focuses her attention on the woman that runs over to Mike’s body. As her view clears up a little, she can see something blue glowing in his cheeks, which might be better than the previous orange. Amelia wouldn’t know, seeing how she’s not known what’s going on all day. The woman who ran in seems happy, though, so Amelia can only guess it’s a good thing and Mike’s alive.#
-
Monday 16th September 2013
They are now living on a S.H.I.E.L.D. plane, though they actually call it the Bus, which she doesn’t understand. It just seems confusing more than anything. She’s currently sitting in the main area—because apparently there’s more than one area of this plane—with Fitz, Simmons and also Ward, who she barely knows past their names and the fact that she’s currently in possession of Ward’s wallet.
Unfortunately, Skye is not with her right now, having left with Coulson—the old guy from yesterday—to tell Ace that his dad’s okay. But after getting some kind of alert from big S.H.I.E.L.D. or something, Ward did call Coulson and therefore Skye to inform him of whatever it is the alert’s about and Fitz and Simmons gather around the computer. Amelia just keeps eating her noodles while listening in.
“Sir, we’ve got an 0-8-4,” Ward says. Amelia wonders why she bothered listening, obviously she wouldn’t understand what they’re talking about. Coulson presumably says something, then he answers, “They want us to go in and confirm it.”
Fitz hits Ward on the back and then Ward hangs up the phone, giving Amelia the opportunity to give him back his wallet. It’s probably not the best first impression to steal someone’s wallet, so she gets up and walks over to him, tapping his shoulder to get his attention.
“Here,” she says, holding the wallet out.
He takes it cautiously. “What is it?”
“Yours.”