Fic! Yes, contrary to reports, I really AM alive.
Fic: Rows And Columns
Fandoms: Marvel Movieverse/The Bletchley Circle
Rating: PG
Words: 536
Warnings: None.
Notes: AU for Avengersverse, unless Natasha’s been taking the same Infinity Formula as Nick Fury. Beta-ed by my beloved ashen_key.
Summary: It isn’t every evening that one finds an agent of SHIELD standing on the doorstep... Part 2
The stranger is waiting for Susan at her front door when she struggles home from the shops, shrouded like a widow in the musty drizzle of London’s early autumn evening. Susan doesn’t see her at first, being as she is fully occupied with a sack of potatoes which has inconveniently developed a large hole, so that in fact she nearly dumps her shopping directly onto the stranger’s exceptionally expensive patent-leather shoes.
“Oh,” she says apologetically, squinting at the woman in the lukewarm grey light. “Are you, er, collecting for something?”
She knows it is a stupid thing to say even before she says it: if anything, the stranger actually resembles one of Millie’s friends in her insouciant self-containment as she stands on a stranger’s doorstep as if Susan herself is the trespasser here. She looks at Susan almost imperiously, all elegant black dress-coat and pillarbox-red lipstick, her amber curls set in the very latest (or so Ruby at the fishmonger’s had informed her) style, and suddenly Susan cannot help herself but feel an absurd stab of jealousy. This woman is so self-composed, so female: surely for her there are no maths problems at midnight, no feelings of displacement, no yearning for numbers as if she has something urgent she should be doing when the cold light of a peaceful world says there is nothing, nothing at all. Too late, too late, says the White Rabbit; ‘projecting’ say Millie and Jean.
The woman puts out her hand; Susan attempts to juggle the potato bag and her handbag and finally drops both in confused disarray. “Susan Gray?”
“Yes.” She frowns, worried by her memory’s apparent deficiency. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
“My name is Natalie Rushman.” Her voice is generic American, all Marilyn Monroe softness, but Susan’s war-brain (the tiny voice behind her thoughts, nagging her with all she could have been) hears the Eastern European behind it like a bell, possibly Polish or Czech but most likely Russian. “I’m here on behalf of SHIELD.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” But the power of good manners is such that she shakes the woman’s hand anyway, even as the number-patterns in the back of her mind tell her that she understands perfectly well.
(SHIELD, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division: sister division to STRIKE, both products of the former Scientific Strategic Reserve. Jean did some work for them immediately post-war, dividing operatives between splintering agencies, which none of the rest of them were ever supposed to know about.)
“We heard about your team’s work for SOE,” the woman explains, and to hear the forbidden name spoken aloud so plainly is like a slap in the face after hysteria. “And in the... other affair in '52.”
“Oh,” Susan says stupidly, but in her head she can already see herself and Millie and Lucy and Jean, slotting into place like a well-solved code. “What can I do for you?”
“There’s been a situation,” Miss Rushman says primly, “And you were recommended by a mutual friend.”
Who? Susan wonders, but she doesn’t really care; only cares that there is a problem, a new conundrum, a new puzzle for her to solve.
“We’d like you to come in.”
Fandoms: Marvel Movieverse/The Bletchley Circle
Rating: PG
Words: 536
Warnings: None.
Notes: AU for Avengersverse, unless Natasha’s been taking the same Infinity Formula as Nick Fury. Beta-ed by my beloved ashen_key.
Summary: It isn’t every evening that one finds an agent of SHIELD standing on the doorstep... Part 2
The stranger is waiting for Susan at her front door when she struggles home from the shops, shrouded like a widow in the musty drizzle of London’s early autumn evening. Susan doesn’t see her at first, being as she is fully occupied with a sack of potatoes which has inconveniently developed a large hole, so that in fact she nearly dumps her shopping directly onto the stranger’s exceptionally expensive patent-leather shoes.
“Oh,” she says apologetically, squinting at the woman in the lukewarm grey light. “Are you, er, collecting for something?”
She knows it is a stupid thing to say even before she says it: if anything, the stranger actually resembles one of Millie’s friends in her insouciant self-containment as she stands on a stranger’s doorstep as if Susan herself is the trespasser here. She looks at Susan almost imperiously, all elegant black dress-coat and pillarbox-red lipstick, her amber curls set in the very latest (or so Ruby at the fishmonger’s had informed her) style, and suddenly Susan cannot help herself but feel an absurd stab of jealousy. This woman is so self-composed, so female: surely for her there are no maths problems at midnight, no feelings of displacement, no yearning for numbers as if she has something urgent she should be doing when the cold light of a peaceful world says there is nothing, nothing at all. Too late, too late, says the White Rabbit; ‘projecting’ say Millie and Jean.
The woman puts out her hand; Susan attempts to juggle the potato bag and her handbag and finally drops both in confused disarray. “Susan Gray?”
“Yes.” She frowns, worried by her memory’s apparent deficiency. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
“My name is Natalie Rushman.” Her voice is generic American, all Marilyn Monroe softness, but Susan’s war-brain (the tiny voice behind her thoughts, nagging her with all she could have been) hears the Eastern European behind it like a bell, possibly Polish or Czech but most likely Russian. “I’m here on behalf of SHIELD.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” But the power of good manners is such that she shakes the woman’s hand anyway, even as the number-patterns in the back of her mind tell her that she understands perfectly well.
(SHIELD, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division: sister division to STRIKE, both products of the former Scientific Strategic Reserve. Jean did some work for them immediately post-war, dividing operatives between splintering agencies, which none of the rest of them were ever supposed to know about.)
“We heard about your team’s work for SOE,” the woman explains, and to hear the forbidden name spoken aloud so plainly is like a slap in the face after hysteria. “And in the... other affair in '52.”
“Oh,” Susan says stupidly, but in her head she can already see herself and Millie and Lucy and Jean, slotting into place like a well-solved code. “What can I do for you?”
“There’s been a situation,” Miss Rushman says primly, “And you were recommended by a mutual friend.”
Who? Susan wonders, but she doesn’t really care; only cares that there is a problem, a new conundrum, a new puzzle for her to solve.
“We’d like you to come in.”