I stared at Fury, unsure how to categorize what I was feeling as I tried to replay the day in my head. Shock? Horror? I… how? Did he have people following me? Had I missed some amount of time, just blacked out long enough for one of his spooks to take it? When had it been taken? If it had been at the Palm, how had he gotten past Matt?
My eyes flicked to the thin file on my table, the one with my name on it. How long had he been watching me? Did they have someone following me?
If the show had come out a few years earlier, he'd definitely be quoting
"A Circle of Accountability" as part of fake-probing Noa's loyalty.
Hell, right after I'd successfully arbitraged a windfall from Tony Stark's No Good, Horrible Trip to Iran, I'd spent a good two months triple checking that I hadn't had any unknown visitors (the local Yentas are always the best information network). But the months turned into years.
I'm impressed Noa got that past Stane.
Was that the only difference between Osborn and Fury? That he could make people ignore it?
Oh, I wouldn't be so sure. There's plenty of people commonly associated with the "hero" side of the spandex scene who would love nothing more than to tear out every single SHIELD agent, base, hidden stockpile, and absurdly overengineered vanity vehicle they call a Helicarrier. Noa's even met a few of them.
Fury smirked. "You've had quite the string of good fortune with Stark Industries, Ms. Schaefer. Then there's how heavily you've indexed into tech, except IBM."
He pulled a pen out of his pocket and—hey, that was my nice fountain pen! The one I—that bastard!
He uncapped it, and crossed out the SATURN on the folder in front of him.
"But you'll be glad to know that that's outside of my jurisdiction."
Then, with the folder still upside-down and facing away from him, he wrote a different word instead.
Winans
Lowercase. Not a code, then, and—wait. I remembered that case.
Did… did he think I was — was he accusing me of insider trading?!
... OK, so I wasn't the only one thinking playing the stock market off Stane's plan would've set off red flags.
"The SEC closed your file anyway," his tone was non-committal, as he tapped the letters of the accusation with an idle hand. "And again - it's no business of mine, professional or otherwise."
So he'd brought it up just to rattle me. The audit that came down as a result of my windfall had been by the books, done and dusted, and finally forgotten as of four years ago.
I didn't have any real response to what he said, either. All I had to
"Okay," Fury grinned again. "Minor financial crimes aside—"
I think I see what Fury's getting at, considering the later context: Everything Noa's done to get the attention of the feds is currently considered normal. Just another person in the crowd. But if they ever thing she's crossing them
all those closed cases are getting turned into ammunition. She won't just be "member of a terrorist organization", she'll be hit with all kinds of different charges.
"Is that it?" I spat. "To spook me? To have me looking over my shoulder? Am I that important to you?"
"Hey now," he warned, the barest hint of steel sending a shiver down my spine, my tail going ramrod straight behind me. It wasn't anything obvious, just a subtle change in his intonation that I probably only picked up because of my superhuman hearing.
But it was impossible to miss his eye.
I could read my own epitaph in it.
"This is a friendly conversation." Fury's shoulders shifted, and I tensed, watching one hand open his jacket wider and the other reach into the inside pocket. "Which you should feel lucky about, because I don't often have friendly conversations with people who throw bombshells from behind the Iron Curtain onto my lap."
... considering this is Old Nick? Yes. I fully, 100% believe this is how he does friendly to the type of person in the box he's placed Noa. Noa's loyalty is suspect, her ability to be an impartial judge compromised, hangs out with a group of intent on genocide, and is currently helping two of them try to go from heroes to villains.
At the bare minimum, this is him checking to see if the two can actually change.
But what I think he's really looking at is whether or not this is a scheme by Magneto to infiltrate and weaken the Avengers.
"Why don't you tell me why I should trust the word of a shady attorney who got fired from her Big Law firm and had to go it alone, and who has multiple ties, including a romantic one, with domestic terrorists, as to the moral character and fitness of these two… domestic terrorists is a strong, accurate word, to join the Avengers?"
… hold on, what? A romantic tie? Wait, he couldn't be talking about me and…
I gagged. I could not hold back my sheer, visceral disgust at the thought, for all that it popped into my head for a mere fraction of a second.
"You think…?" I trailed off, unable to even speak the name. "What—you—he is my godfather!" I yelled, standing up and slamming my hands on the table. "I am gay and he is my godfather what the fuck!?"
... Oh.
Oh. I get it. It's called a
Bridal Carry. Someone who has no idea who the hell Magneto is would probably assume that.
And speaking of knowing who Magneto is, when's Noa going to mention to Erik that she outed him to Fury?
"Pietro Maximoff has the potential to be among the worst villains you've ever seen," I started. "By the time you could even begin to consider that something might be wrong, he's already come through, slit your throat, stolen everything that isn't nailed down, read through all of your documents, and gotten halfway across the city to his next target. His powers mean that you cannot stop him. You can read, predict, and preempt him all you like, but he has all the time in the world to counter it. He could very easily be a monster.
Between Reverse Flash and that one speedster from The Dire Saga, I would say murder and theft is the
least bad things Pietro could do.
Fury was quiet for a moment that felt like eternity. "Damn it, girl," he growled, though there was no heat in it. "Can't you just say he's blackmailing you? It would make my job a lot easier. "
I tilted my head to the side slightly, turning his words over in my head. There were two possible people 'he' could be, and he didn't tap the picture of Pietro on the table. Therefore…
"He's my godfather." What else could I say to that?
"God save us from idealists and liberals," Fury sighed. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pen, and crossed out the Winans he'd written on the file with my name.
Which he then replaced with CASSANDRA, before starting to stand up, picking up the folder as he did. "Well, if you change your mind—"
So the significance of
the name I think has less to do with any precognition, as I would think that could be filed under time-travel, and more relationships to ultra-powerful villains.
EDIT: There's also three other options. One is
Xavier's Literal Evil Twin. The second is
Scott Lang's kid. And then there's
Madame Web.
There's a reason I hope it's not the former or the third.
"Ask for Fury," he said, already at my front door. I hadn't even heard him stand up, much less take his trench coat and put it on. "My nephew will handle it."
So Sammy is also around? Neat.
"Did I do nothing?" Stephen interrupted. "I was busy, and I trusted your visitor. He is occasionally a colleague, and I consider him a friend. You were never in any danger, so—"
"I didn't know that!" I yelled. "I got back from work and there was a dangerous man twice my size in my home, Stephen! And you can say you trusted him til the cows come home, but do you think that you saying that does anything to change how scared I was!?"
Stephen reached up and across the table with one arm, laid it on my shoulder, and pushed me back down into my seat. I hadn't even noticed myself standing up. My breaths still came in ragged gulps, and my eyes felt hot and wet.
Oh. I hadn't taken my makeup off, had I? And now it was about to run down my face. The stress had finally gotten to me, and I was crying, and it was going to take my eyeliner and mascara with it. Why did I even put on mascara today? I hated mascara.
"I see." Stephen stood from his chair. "I'll be about five minutes. You know where the powder room is."
I've mentioned this about a different character in a different fic, but the gist is the same. Stephen gets told he fucked up, gave acknowledgment that he fucked up, and immediately moved to apply the best remedy that he can think of. He'll drop everything and show up. Even if it's Fury or someone else he considers a friend, he'll teleport in and say "Please stop, you are scaring my client, or I will make you experience Mahvel."
Stephen's assurances that Fury was trustworthy, and had run everything past him first
But here's the thing I'm a bit mixed on. Strange
never apologizes. Yet I'm not entirely sure that would've helped. Maybe my mind is too bent into result-oriented thinking to grasp those nuances, but Strange could've said that he's sorry Fury scared Noa and that he didn't prepare her or push for some formal appointment thing. But given everything he said, I don't think he's sorry Fury did this. He's sorry, if that, that Noa had a bad experience about it.
"Noa, nobody ever thought you were crazy," Cate said with a sigh, flouncing atop the love seat, Chester hopping up next to her and half-spreading across her lap. "Listen, we've all heard the stories, so trust me when I say the FBI definitely believes you met who you say you did. Hell, Langley calling back to tell us not to ask again?" She scoffed and took a sip of her wine, then picked up one of the kitchen towels she kept on her coffee table to start going at some of the flour sticking to her old Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. "Yeah, that clinched it."
Considering the
CIA outright told Noa that she should stop asking whether Nick Fury broke into her home? Yeah. They rarely talk to people like Noa. The whole point of their operational shakeups after the late 70s was to remove even the slightest
appearance of impropriety regarding anything domestic. The CIA until recent years was very reluctant to work with the FBI, and presumably SHIELD, in part because they didn't want to be slapped for doing more Hoover/Nixon shit.
They shouldn't know anything about Fury. Yet revealing that they do, is how seriously every other acronym agency in the US is taking the evaluation of the Maximovs and what SHIELD is doing.
