Fic: Stand Down (DC/Marvel/SPN, Waller & Fury, R, Gen)
Title: Stand Down
Author: hossgal
Rating: R (language) Gen
Warnings/Spoilers: Profanity. Nebulous spoilers for DC and Marvel comics, spoilers for SPN 2.22. AU for SPN, and I don't think you need to be up on the series to follow.
Fandom: DC comics/Marvel Ultimates comics/Supernatural tv series
Characters: Amanda "The Wall" Waller, Nick Fury
Words: 2000
Summary: Waller and Fury, dealing with fallout.
Author's Notes: Written for the choc_fic challenge. The prompt was "Conflict of interests - Good? Evil? Please. It's all about control - who's got it, who's under it, who's next in line." Please do not archive without permission. This is a work of fanfiction, characters remain property of DC/Marvel/CW.
***
The elevator walls were burnished steel - floor, walls, and ceiling. Waller stared straight ahead at the hazy blot of ivory and mahogany that the metal surface cast back at her. The narrower blur of blue and pink in the corner was the S.H.I.E.L.D. escort, a hard-faced man careful to stand as far from Waller as he could.
She ignored him. There wasn't a damn thing she could do about how she smelled - twelve days deep in the field, plus eight getting out of Indian country, and the guard's sensitive nose was lucky she'd had a clean set of whites to pull on. Her offices waited for her - her offices, with her people and a private locker room and God, something to eat that wasn't goat or milo. They waited, and they could go on waiting.
She had more pressing concerns than primping her hair before she talked to Fury.
The elevator door opened and Waller strode out even before the door had fully retracted. The guard the visitor's desk had insisted on assigning to her - to protect me, or to protect them? - bustled after. Across the corridor, Fury's aide stood up, her mouth falling open to protest. Waller was already even with the lieutenant's desk as the young officer scrambled from behind it to intercept.
“Dr Waller, Director Fury is - ma'am, you can't - ma'am!”
At the door, Waller halted. Her escort jerked to a stop, Fury's aide nearly piling into the enlisted guard's back. Waller leveled a finger at the guard. “You aren't cleared for this. Stay out.” Wide-eyed, the guard nodded back. Waller dropped her hand and stepped across the threshold.
Fury's office had new doors - they slid shut behind her, without even the satisfaction of slamming closed.
The walls were done in the same monotone steel as the elevator, and like the elevator, had no windows, only a very convincing cityscape playing across the entire left-hand surface. The recording was new - the last time she'd talked to Fury, nearly a month earlier, it had been a chopper's view of Manhattan, shot sometime before 9/11. This time, it was a ground-based perspective, and the grounds were lush and Indian green. New Delhi.
When the doors slid shut, Fury turned his back on the Indian Gate and said, “Good evening. How was Ashgabat?”
“Shitty.” Fury's carpet was thick, muffling her footsteps. “Ashgabat was shitty, the flight was shitty, the food they served on the plane was shitty, and the mission was dog shit baked in a case of crap and served ice cold and I had to eat it like that, because your boy Talley was a jacked-up piece of brainless crap and left us with our asses flapping in the wind!”
She was leaning on his desk, the crystalline surface misting under her bare palms. Fury stared back. “Are you done?”
Waller felt her mouth twist into something ugly. “No. But fifteen months of work and three Squad agents are, and there's no getting either back. Not now.” She pushed away from the desk, let the momentum turn her around, send her back across Fury's thick carpet.
No matter how she ground her heels, she wasn't going to leave a mark.
The bloodstains had probably already been scrubbed away from the white-washed walls, and the dead man forgotten even by the feral dogs that had come to lick the blood clots from the cobblestones.
“How bad was it?”
“Bad enough.” If she breathed deeply enough, she could still smell the filth and grime of the alleyway, feel the rough plaster rasp against her forearms. Hear the informant's heels beat against the paving stones as Mercer held the man's mouth closed and slipped the knife in.
We go now, or we ain't getting out.
They had gone, and three of five hadn't gotten out anyway.
Fury's voice interrupted her musing. “What happened to business as usual?”
“Business as usual doesn't end up this screwed. You owe me, Fury. Talley fucked up. Met us for the first two strikes, then never showed up for the last one.”
“I read your report.”
She'd written it on the tarmac in Kabul, waiting for the chartered transport to bring them back to the States and civilization and hot water. Typed it with fingers that still had Mercer's blood under them, with eyes dry and rasping with exhaustion. She'd shed the burka by then, but the sweat stains had set under her arm pits and behind her knees.
It probably wasn't her most diplomatic piece of correspondence.
“Good. Then you know how badly I want his ass. My people dead, the mission screwed - I want him to -”
“Jake Talley is dead.”
She turned around “Dead?” Eliminated, was her first thought. Jesus, she'd heard the stories, that Fury had changed, had gotten vicious, but she'd never credited them.
She'd wanted Talley dead, herself - not just in the days after the Ashgabat hit went south, when she and the remains of the Squad had been hiding for their lives, creeping across the mountains in a clapped-out Nissan. She'd wanted Talley dead so badly, she could have tasted it. Even before, in the four long hours that they'd lingered at the rendezvous site, as the night slipped away and the stars slid across the sky, she'd maligned Talley's name and ancestry and the idiot woman who had born him. Up until the hour came, and she had to decide to abandon the hit or go on without their main heavy, she had cursed him for a fool and a liar - trust me, I'll make the meet - and a fuckup.
Cursed Talley, and herself, for letting Fury talk her into a mission that depended on a resource she didn't know and couldn't trust.
But that was then, and now all she wanted was the chance to dress the idiot boy down, to let him know what he had cost her - time and lives.
“Dead.” Fury held out a page. “Read this.”
She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest. Fury sighed. “Just read it.”
She took the page, scanned halfway down and then started back at the top again, more slowly.
“...South Dakota?” She looked up from the page to Fury, then back again. “What is this bullshit?”
“Not bullshit. Fact. Wildfire crews found a pair of bodies at the site of a suspected arson, and the local corner uploaded prints into the national database. I just got the call from our own people, confirming the fast-blot DNA match. It's Talley.”
The paper was thin, flimsy, too fragile to hold a death notice. “Estimated time of death - ten days ago?”
“The night before he was scheduled to meet you.”
“Impossible. Twelve days ago, Talley was at Camp Sargo. Afghanistan. Not in goddamn South Dakota. I saw him myself.” Not impossible, her mind reluctantly reminded her - never mind that it had taken her and the rest of the Squad eight days to get out of the area by covert routes. There were other options - transporter, doppelganger, even something as ordinary as military MEDEVAC.
She realized Fury was studying her face. Something he read there made the Director sit back, tension easing out of his posture. “It wasn't you then. Or one of your team.”
“No. Jake Talley was a fuck-up, but we didn't do this.” Might have, if I'd had the chance. But no.
“If he'd been another Steve Rodgers, I'd never have given him to you.” But Fury wasn't looking at her. He was staring at the cityscape again, watching the ocher stones flow past.
“You know what happened.”
“No. I don't.”
“You suspect.” Tell me what's in that brain of yours, Fury.
“Always. Everyone. Everything.”
“Cut the crap.”
Fury sighed. This time, it was his turn to sigh and push his chair back, slowly rising to his feet. Waller leaned her butt against his desk and let the man pace.
Once across the room, then three steps back. “What do you know about how Jake Talley became the next contender for the man of steel?”
“Less than I'd like.” She waved the page. “Very recent acquisition of powers. Super-strength, in the moderate-to-low-meta human range, with significant increases in hand-to-hand abilities, as well as some calculation and mathematics cognitive jumps as well.” Everything that would have made the difference in Ashgabat.
The first time she'd seen him, it had been like watching a novice version of the Tiger - Talley was younger, less experienced, and without Turner's iron self-control. But there had been promise there, and enough discipline to counter the self-initiative that made him bristle at Waller's first order. She'd considered recruiting him into Checkmate, where he'd do more good than as canon fodder for the Squad's no-hope missions.
She'd been wrong.
“We're suspecting demonic influence.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“We have top people on it. We still working on a name, but the source is...distinct.”
“Shit. And you were going to give this All-American All-Star to me?” This wasn't going anywhere good. Waller felt a shiver run down her spine.
Fury folded his arms and glared at her. “You've recruited with unsavory types before, Waller. Don't play the violet with me now.”
“Demons are different, Fury, and you know it.”
He didn't argue, just stood there. The lines on his face stood out in stark relief, marking him as much as the patch over his eye.
Waller looked down at the page in her hand again. “So, you think Talley got to South Dakota by...?”
“We...suspect that this demonic influence...is still active. And was using Talley at the time of his death.”
“And you missed it. Missed him.” And left Talley in his cover, as one more soldier among hundreds - among thousands stationed throughout Afghanistan. Where a demon could jump from body to body, wrecking havoc and mischief for years before being rooted out.
No wonder Fury was looking like his ass had a chunk taken out of it. The DoD meta-threat monitors must have had a shitfit when they realized what had been living in their house.
“What's the contamination risk?”
“Unknown. A team's heading out within the hour, to do on-site assessment in Camp Sago. And to handle any...suspected infection.”
Waller sighed, rubbed her eyes. Three bodies and fifteen months. Butcher's bill. Suddenly, it didn't seem as high as it could have been. She flipped the page over, read the print on the back. “The family has the body? Talley's, I mean.”
Fury nodded, circled the desk again. “The hazards of letting a case fall into civilian control.” He settled into his chair, eyes going to the cityscape. “He's going to be listed as AWOL, as far as official records go. There will be a funeral on Thursday, in Omaha.”
“You're going.” It wasn't a question.
Fury nodded, eyes watching the bustling marketplace. “Will you?”
Waller looked at her hands, at the thick fingers creasing the deathnote. You die, you'll be buried where you fall. When you're dead, you're of no more use to me. And, don't think I give a damn about any of you.
It had been a lie the first time she'd ever said it.
There had been four assigned hits - three out in the countryside, the last one in the capital. The second hit, there had been four more guards than the Squad scout had counted. One of them had gotten the drop on Waller. And had died, a heartbeat later, when Talley had broken his neck.
He'd moved like quicksilver, fast and silent and so damn young.
Waller heaved herself to her feet. “Send me the place and time.”
Fury nodded again. The carpet was still thick under her heels, and still it left no trace of her leaving.
***
Feedback of all sorts - positive, not positive, concrit - welcomed and printed out to hang on the frig.
Author: hossgal
Rating: R (language) Gen
Warnings/Spoilers: Profanity. Nebulous spoilers for DC and Marvel comics, spoilers for SPN 2.22. AU for SPN, and I don't think you need to be up on the series to follow.
Fandom: DC comics/Marvel Ultimates comics/Supernatural tv series
Characters: Amanda "The Wall" Waller, Nick Fury
Words: 2000
Summary: Waller and Fury, dealing with fallout.
Author's Notes: Written for the choc_fic challenge. The prompt was "Conflict of interests - Good? Evil? Please. It's all about control - who's got it, who's under it, who's next in line." Please do not archive without permission. This is a work of fanfiction, characters remain property of DC/Marvel/CW.
***
The elevator walls were burnished steel - floor, walls, and ceiling. Waller stared straight ahead at the hazy blot of ivory and mahogany that the metal surface cast back at her. The narrower blur of blue and pink in the corner was the S.H.I.E.L.D. escort, a hard-faced man careful to stand as far from Waller as he could.
She ignored him. There wasn't a damn thing she could do about how she smelled - twelve days deep in the field, plus eight getting out of Indian country, and the guard's sensitive nose was lucky she'd had a clean set of whites to pull on. Her offices waited for her - her offices, with her people and a private locker room and God, something to eat that wasn't goat or milo. They waited, and they could go on waiting.
She had more pressing concerns than primping her hair before she talked to Fury.
The elevator door opened and Waller strode out even before the door had fully retracted. The guard the visitor's desk had insisted on assigning to her - to protect me, or to protect them? - bustled after. Across the corridor, Fury's aide stood up, her mouth falling open to protest. Waller was already even with the lieutenant's desk as the young officer scrambled from behind it to intercept.
“Dr Waller, Director Fury is - ma'am, you can't - ma'am!”
At the door, Waller halted. Her escort jerked to a stop, Fury's aide nearly piling into the enlisted guard's back. Waller leveled a finger at the guard. “You aren't cleared for this. Stay out.” Wide-eyed, the guard nodded back. Waller dropped her hand and stepped across the threshold.
Fury's office had new doors - they slid shut behind her, without even the satisfaction of slamming closed.
The walls were done in the same monotone steel as the elevator, and like the elevator, had no windows, only a very convincing cityscape playing across the entire left-hand surface. The recording was new - the last time she'd talked to Fury, nearly a month earlier, it had been a chopper's view of Manhattan, shot sometime before 9/11. This time, it was a ground-based perspective, and the grounds were lush and Indian green. New Delhi.
When the doors slid shut, Fury turned his back on the Indian Gate and said, “Good evening. How was Ashgabat?”
“Shitty.” Fury's carpet was thick, muffling her footsteps. “Ashgabat was shitty, the flight was shitty, the food they served on the plane was shitty, and the mission was dog shit baked in a case of crap and served ice cold and I had to eat it like that, because your boy Talley was a jacked-up piece of brainless crap and left us with our asses flapping in the wind!”
She was leaning on his desk, the crystalline surface misting under her bare palms. Fury stared back. “Are you done?”
Waller felt her mouth twist into something ugly. “No. But fifteen months of work and three Squad agents are, and there's no getting either back. Not now.” She pushed away from the desk, let the momentum turn her around, send her back across Fury's thick carpet.
No matter how she ground her heels, she wasn't going to leave a mark.
The bloodstains had probably already been scrubbed away from the white-washed walls, and the dead man forgotten even by the feral dogs that had come to lick the blood clots from the cobblestones.
“How bad was it?”
“Bad enough.” If she breathed deeply enough, she could still smell the filth and grime of the alleyway, feel the rough plaster rasp against her forearms. Hear the informant's heels beat against the paving stones as Mercer held the man's mouth closed and slipped the knife in.
We go now, or we ain't getting out.
They had gone, and three of five hadn't gotten out anyway.
Fury's voice interrupted her musing. “What happened to business as usual?”
“Business as usual doesn't end up this screwed. You owe me, Fury. Talley fucked up. Met us for the first two strikes, then never showed up for the last one.”
“I read your report.”
She'd written it on the tarmac in Kabul, waiting for the chartered transport to bring them back to the States and civilization and hot water. Typed it with fingers that still had Mercer's blood under them, with eyes dry and rasping with exhaustion. She'd shed the burka by then, but the sweat stains had set under her arm pits and behind her knees.
It probably wasn't her most diplomatic piece of correspondence.
“Good. Then you know how badly I want his ass. My people dead, the mission screwed - I want him to -”
“Jake Talley is dead.”
She turned around “Dead?” Eliminated, was her first thought. Jesus, she'd heard the stories, that Fury had changed, had gotten vicious, but she'd never credited them.
She'd wanted Talley dead, herself - not just in the days after the Ashgabat hit went south, when she and the remains of the Squad had been hiding for their lives, creeping across the mountains in a clapped-out Nissan. She'd wanted Talley dead so badly, she could have tasted it. Even before, in the four long hours that they'd lingered at the rendezvous site, as the night slipped away and the stars slid across the sky, she'd maligned Talley's name and ancestry and the idiot woman who had born him. Up until the hour came, and she had to decide to abandon the hit or go on without their main heavy, she had cursed him for a fool and a liar - trust me, I'll make the meet - and a fuckup.
Cursed Talley, and herself, for letting Fury talk her into a mission that depended on a resource she didn't know and couldn't trust.
But that was then, and now all she wanted was the chance to dress the idiot boy down, to let him know what he had cost her - time and lives.
“Dead.” Fury held out a page. “Read this.”
She narrowed her eyes and folded her arms across her chest. Fury sighed. “Just read it.”
She took the page, scanned halfway down and then started back at the top again, more slowly.
“...South Dakota?” She looked up from the page to Fury, then back again. “What is this bullshit?”
“Not bullshit. Fact. Wildfire crews found a pair of bodies at the site of a suspected arson, and the local corner uploaded prints into the national database. I just got the call from our own people, confirming the fast-blot DNA match. It's Talley.”
The paper was thin, flimsy, too fragile to hold a death notice. “Estimated time of death - ten days ago?”
“The night before he was scheduled to meet you.”
“Impossible. Twelve days ago, Talley was at Camp Sargo. Afghanistan. Not in goddamn South Dakota. I saw him myself.” Not impossible, her mind reluctantly reminded her - never mind that it had taken her and the rest of the Squad eight days to get out of the area by covert routes. There were other options - transporter, doppelganger, even something as ordinary as military MEDEVAC.
She realized Fury was studying her face. Something he read there made the Director sit back, tension easing out of his posture. “It wasn't you then. Or one of your team.”
“No. Jake Talley was a fuck-up, but we didn't do this.” Might have, if I'd had the chance. But no.
“If he'd been another Steve Rodgers, I'd never have given him to you.” But Fury wasn't looking at her. He was staring at the cityscape again, watching the ocher stones flow past.
“You know what happened.”
“No. I don't.”
“You suspect.” Tell me what's in that brain of yours, Fury.
“Always. Everyone. Everything.”
“Cut the crap.”
Fury sighed. This time, it was his turn to sigh and push his chair back, slowly rising to his feet. Waller leaned her butt against his desk and let the man pace.
Once across the room, then three steps back. “What do you know about how Jake Talley became the next contender for the man of steel?”
“Less than I'd like.” She waved the page. “Very recent acquisition of powers. Super-strength, in the moderate-to-low-meta human range, with significant increases in hand-to-hand abilities, as well as some calculation and mathematics cognitive jumps as well.” Everything that would have made the difference in Ashgabat.
The first time she'd seen him, it had been like watching a novice version of the Tiger - Talley was younger, less experienced, and without Turner's iron self-control. But there had been promise there, and enough discipline to counter the self-initiative that made him bristle at Waller's first order. She'd considered recruiting him into Checkmate, where he'd do more good than as canon fodder for the Squad's no-hope missions.
She'd been wrong.
“We're suspecting demonic influence.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“We have top people on it. We still working on a name, but the source is...distinct.”
“Shit. And you were going to give this All-American All-Star to me?” This wasn't going anywhere good. Waller felt a shiver run down her spine.
Fury folded his arms and glared at her. “You've recruited with unsavory types before, Waller. Don't play the violet with me now.”
“Demons are different, Fury, and you know it.”
He didn't argue, just stood there. The lines on his face stood out in stark relief, marking him as much as the patch over his eye.
Waller looked down at the page in her hand again. “So, you think Talley got to South Dakota by...?”
“We...suspect that this demonic influence...is still active. And was using Talley at the time of his death.”
“And you missed it. Missed him.” And left Talley in his cover, as one more soldier among hundreds - among thousands stationed throughout Afghanistan. Where a demon could jump from body to body, wrecking havoc and mischief for years before being rooted out.
No wonder Fury was looking like his ass had a chunk taken out of it. The DoD meta-threat monitors must have had a shitfit when they realized what had been living in their house.
“What's the contamination risk?”
“Unknown. A team's heading out within the hour, to do on-site assessment in Camp Sago. And to handle any...suspected infection.”
Waller sighed, rubbed her eyes. Three bodies and fifteen months. Butcher's bill. Suddenly, it didn't seem as high as it could have been. She flipped the page over, read the print on the back. “The family has the body? Talley's, I mean.”
Fury nodded, circled the desk again. “The hazards of letting a case fall into civilian control.” He settled into his chair, eyes going to the cityscape. “He's going to be listed as AWOL, as far as official records go. There will be a funeral on Thursday, in Omaha.”
“You're going.” It wasn't a question.
Fury nodded, eyes watching the bustling marketplace. “Will you?”
Waller looked at her hands, at the thick fingers creasing the deathnote. You die, you'll be buried where you fall. When you're dead, you're of no more use to me. And, don't think I give a damn about any of you.
It had been a lie the first time she'd ever said it.
There had been four assigned hits - three out in the countryside, the last one in the capital. The second hit, there had been four more guards than the Squad scout had counted. One of them had gotten the drop on Waller. And had died, a heartbeat later, when Talley had broken his neck.
He'd moved like quicksilver, fast and silent and so damn young.
Waller heaved herself to her feet. “Send me the place and time.”
Fury nodded again. The carpet was still thick under her heels, and still it left no trace of her leaving.
***
Feedback of all sorts - positive, not positive, concrit - welcomed and printed out to hang on the frig.