Nick Fury (therealnickfury) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2014-07-11 22:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | !network post, mara jade, nick fury (mcu) |
Who: Nick Fury and Mara Jade
When: backdated 7/3
Where: Classified
What: Mara Jade sees a ghost. A handsome ghost
Rating: M for Make outs. Also D for denial.
Mara Jade put a hand to the back of her neck as she stood waiting in what was presumably a SHIELD secret base, or hide-out of some variety. The photo in front of her appeared to be a white-capped mountain range and she stared at them lips pressed together as she focused on her breathing for a moment, a simple Jedi exercise that despite its overuse over the past few weeks, still maintained some effectiveness. Mara had hoped to have more than a moment to breathe. When the Empire had collapsed and her world had fallen apart, she’d fallen apart - at least until she’d been picked up by Ysanne Isard and had to work her way out of an Imperial Prison and escape elsewhere in the galaxy. It had taken her nearly six years of running, and meeting Luke Skywalker before she’d really put pieces together again. When SHIELD had collapsed she hadn’t had the chance to fall apart and she hadn’t done so -- which, growth -- but at the same time breathing and putting together some real notion of what she might do next would be helpful. She’d told Herc she was hesitant to go back to New York and part of that was because she didn’t know what she would do there. And if she was going to do something normal and boring, she’d rather do it on her terms and wherever in the world she could end up -- and if that happened to be somewhere she could make life difficult for hydra -- then bonus. Of course all of that had been prior to agents showing up at the Treehouse and it had been prior to her sitting inside a SHIELD base, all of which was making her wonder if there was something still left and maybe that changed everything. Or maybe it didn’t. Regardless, she had no intention of taking six years to sort things out this time. Thankfully, there was no Sith Lord to interrupt her dreams this time around. Just the regrets of having been unable to save friends, or the Treehouse, or anything except whatever data she and Echo had been able to pull in their last attack. She sighed and brought her hand from her neck down to her pocket to wrap around the drive. She still hadn’t had a chance to explore if they’d gotten anything of any value. Mostly, at the moment Mara wanted an incredibly long, hot shower, and a cup of amazing coffee, and an hour of television in a language she could actually understand. Maybe she should have gone back to Potts Tower. Instead of sitting here fantasizing about a clean tunic and her French Press she could be enjoying both of them in the closest thing to Coruscant this planet could offer, instead of the all too perfect and unchanging view of mountain ranges she was nowhere near at the moment. Steve Rogers had buried everything. But if there was one thing that Nick Fury did well it was a contingency plan. SHIELD might be gone for now but he had not spent the last few decades as the spy of spies to not have his own web to fall back on when everything else failed. Despite what Rogers thought there was good in SHIELD. The mission they had been led to believe was the only mission was one the world needed. And with HYDRA on the loose it was not just going to take heroes with powers who were larger than life. It was going to take all kinds of people who believed in the world being greater than themselves. And luckily HYDRA hadn't killed off all the ones he knew yet. There were still frequencies that had not been entirely compromised by HYDRA. Old distress signals, or ones that were so far out of the way that it would seem pointless to waste the resources to attack. After all it wasn't just his side of the coin that got hurt in this escapade. Too many people in deep cover had been exposed and many of get her were dead before Fury could do anything. But some he had been able to find, to recruit, or if he couldn't do that at least get them to some semblance of safety. Which was how he had found Mara in the first place. A good agent, the closest he would say he came to relying on a refugee from the tesseract. So he sent her and her people a ticket out of there. Her deciding to stay out of New York had not been an entirely unforeseen event. Which was why the orders had been there. "Mount Hiroshima." He pointed out as he walked up behind her. The wounds weren't entirely gone, but they were healed enough. Sure most doctors wouldn't agree but Nick Fury was hardier than they gave him credit for. And he was not about to stay in bed while the world was burning. "It's a nice view." Mara froze; she was too startled by the voice speaking to even chastise herself for dropping her guard long enough for someone to sneak up on her - even someone in a secret SHIELD base - no, especially someone in a secret SHIELD base. But if the voice was unmistakable, the sense of the presence through the Force was far more so. Everyone left a footprint in the Force even those who might not be able to use it, and some left a more distinctive one than others, and this distinctive presence was one Mara knew too well to mistake. She should have sensed it long before now, but in all fairness she hadn’t been looking. “Nick.” She swallowed, the word soft, but certain. Jasper had told her Nick Fury was dead. And he hadn’t been the only one. It had gone through SHIELD like a ripple before everything had fallen apart, and it had been on the news, even international news. It seemed to Mara that the media had failed to notice that SHIELD had already disintegrated so intent were they on being able to claim that they had talked the organization to death. Mara turned on her heel to face the owner of the voice while her eyes took in the changes the month since she’d seen him last had brought with it. With him in front of her it seemed her own voice had lost its certainty, and possibly its ability altogether. Whatever Jasper had said, or SHIELD had said, or the news media continued to say Nick Fury was certainly not dead. And it had taken her far too long to process that and she was still standing here like a love-sick insecure teenager who didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She pulled back command of her voice and took in a breath. But command of her voice or not, she found herself scrambling for words. From the obvious ‘they said you were dead’, to the sass she’d given him from almost day one, nothing quite felt right. By the time she’d settled on something the remaining command was tenuous as she forced her words around an emotional catch in her throat: “This view’s better.” Lying was second nature to Nick Fury, as it should be. The spy business was not won on truth and despite what Captain America might think that war was still ongoing. HYDRA being unmasked didn't show everything. Nick knew how people like that thought, how they twisted good men and women until they were no longer recognizable from who they once had been. This was not the first time he had to convince people he was dead either. Though a battle zone possum was different from the entire world. It was different from photos of his mother at his funeral, a woman who's death he had fake nearly a decade prior. The woman would understand. That's what mothers did. The strangest thing about coming back from the dead was the look on people's faces when they got that glimpse of the truth. He had been prepared for all manner of reactions for Mara to turn around. She was a Jedi and from what Agent Shaw had said, gone through a special kind of hell with her team in the depths of the jungle. And even then she was still trying to get back out into the field. It was bullheaded determination and Nick needed that around. And Nick could tell himself that was why he was letting her into this secret that only a handful of agents left knew. Because if Nick were honest with himself about everything he wouldn't be nearly as good a liar as he was. What he wanted didn't matter. Because what he needed, or what he told himself he needed, was Agent Mara Jade in all that glory at his side to help maybe drag a win out of this. She was a refugee who had proven herself, maybe even enough to be counted as someone he would rely on. The only refugee he could count on that number. That wasn't true, there were others that he had spared information to. But there was a reason that she was the first from outside his world to have this glimpse. And Nick would say what was needed, not what was wanted. But sometimes they weren't as different as he wanted them to be. "I got your message." He offered, the smallest bit of a smile at seeing her face twinkling in his eye. "Hope they helped." “Yeah. They did.” Mara grasped onto mission report mode and the emotional control that it offered, she tilted her head and looked up at him. “It was good timing. And it got my team back to New York. Between Charles and myself, we probably could have played ‘not the droids you’re looking for’ back, but this was infinitely better.” And not just because it had been simpler. There was a very grey area with Jedi mind control -- a line that got very blurred very quickly when you started manipulating people’s actions with the Force. It was something she and Luke had both experienced, and from her conversations with Charles she knew he was aware of it too even if not in exactly the same way. Not having to resort to asking the question of how much she was willing to do to get her team back had been a gift she hadn’t expected. Of course, all of it was unexpected, and nothing more so than the man in front of her. Mara had spent a lifetime around people who dealt in information and made decisions that affected the outcome of the galaxy, but it had been a long time since she’d been around someone who held information quite so tightly as Nick did. Most of the world thought he was dead, and he was standing here in front of her showing her that he wasn’t. She moistened her lips and looked up to meet his gaze not entirely unaware of the implications of her standing here. “No one in the Treehouse is likely to be using the south laboratory for any work any time soon. Their network is pretty kriffed -- not as much as I wanted, but,” she reached into her pocket and pulled out the drive. She hadn’t been planning on showing it to anyone, but even in her own estimation ‘anyone’ hadn’t included Nick. “We at least will have some idea what they know,” she glanced down at it and tilted her head in a shrug. “Probably. We’ll see how good a teacher Jasper was.” The thought of Jasper sobered her and she turned the drive over in her hand then pushed it back in her pocket. Her mind was running arguments over which of any number of questions to ask first with each suggestion being weighed over the likelihood of Nick telling her anything resembling the truth. In the end what came out was edged with accusation more than curiosity: “It’s a little difficult to watch someone’s back when you’re in different hemispheres.” Hiding emotions was trained into Nick long before he has joined SHIELD, long before he had joined the military even. There were some skills that just made life more tolerable. But there were certain failures that managed to sneak their way out around certain people. And Jasper was a failure. With everything in his power he had tried to keep that man alive and instead all there was to show for it was a funeral and lies that everyone would believe because it was what needed to be believed. If it got out that Jasper had never been loyal then any additional work outside of insight the agent had managed would be worthless. One day Nick might be able to fix that, but that day was a long way off. Instead today the creases between his eyes simply became a little heavier, the skin around his jaw tighter, and that low hum of an ache that accompanied the thought of Jasper Sitwell happened. Mara had been close with Jasper, as much as anyone can be close to an agent of SHIELD that played the game as well as a top agent could. And he had asked. The hope had been that once the explosion happened there would have been allies to doubt Jasper's turn, someone to help him into hiding, to disappear. There were few better equipped than a Jedi for that, especially one that was invested. "He had Natasha with him." Nick kept his voice unnaturally steady from force of habit. "There wouldn't have been anything you could have done that she didn't." Nevermind that Rogers was with them as well. Natasha would have known better than to risk an asset that knew everything about their enemy. Rogers might have tried to protect him as the right thing, but not against the Winter Solider. Sitwell hadn't stood a chance. Mara’s jaw tightened slightly and she looked up to meet Nick’s eye. Mara respected Natasha. If she had to have a face-twin at all Natasha was unlikely to embarrass her with incompetence. If forced, Mara might even admit that Natasha was a slightly better spy (something Mara would say was less ability than a choice of priorities). But Natasha was not a Jedi. For all her numerous strengths, including the privilege of having the experience and knowledge gifted to someone native to this world, Natasha lacked Mara’s particular skill set. Nick’s statement had all the sound of the sort of thing you told yourself when you needed to believe everything that could have been done had been. The problem with it, of course, was that it was blatantly untrue. Whether Mara could have saved Jasper was a different issue. She might not have been able to -- Jedi or not, she couldn’t control everything -- but she very certainly could have done things Natasha could not have. The suggestion otherwise was downright maddening. Mara was willing to put up with Nick’s version of the truth on many subjects, but not this one. “Really.” She reached out in the Force, extending a hand to catch a book from the bookshelf before flipping it into her other hand and holding it out to Nick. “Because last time I checked, she isn’t a Jedi. And unless I’m dreadfully mistaken, you didn’t ask her to help Jasper. Although if you did, then I guess you at least gave her a fighting chance at success when you didn’t have her shipped off to the middle of the kriffing jungle a week before you planned to fly an X-Wing into the damn reactor core.” Her words had started out clipped and controlled, but the control was slipping and her volume increasing and Mara stopped, trying to regain it again. “Dammit Nick. Jasper gave me more to work with than you did, and I wasn’t-” she caught herself before she finished the sentence with ‘fucking him’. She dropped her gaze followed closely by the book she’d been holding and stepped back, wrapping her arms around her chest. Complicated. So damn complicated. Despite her best intentions, somewhere along the way she’d began expecting more. She’d blurred the lines between them after her every intention not to do so. She’d expected Nick to somehow intuit that he had her loyalty and to respond to that -- even knowing how few people he trusted. And now she was standing here in front of a man that was supposed to be dead knowing he had to at least trust her enough to keep that secret and she had no fucking clue where anything between them stood anymore. When she spoke again her words were steely calm, but she didn’t look at Nick. She’d seen the look on his face before and she knew if she saw it again she might break and it was the last thing she wanted to do right now. “When you’re in the middle of the jungle knowing you’ve got ten minutes to communicate anything, and your best friend is hundreds of miles away, and you ask if he’s okay, and he says ‘no, but it’s not important’, and you know he’s right -- because there are so many lives resting on his shoulders -- but he’s also wrong because he is so very important to you. And you just want to help him and you can’t do a single kriffing thing. I’d rather fight a hundred centipede soldiers by myself, Every day, for the rest of my life.” Pride and anger he could understand, he could deal with. And in many ways it was deserved. The situation they had all been put in the pain was unavoidable. But he had done the best he could to save the most people, just as he had always done. And no matter how much those decisions hurt he had to stand by them. He looked at Mara dead on for a moment as she railed against Natasha. "Natasha knows this world. She knows how to hide people in when everything is stacked against her. That doesn't take powers, Mara, that takes experience that you just don't have here." His voice was soft but steady. Jasper was important to both of them. Few people realized just how important he was to Nick. The man hadn't just been Furys most loyal hacker, the man behind most of SHIELD's current mainframe security. Or what had been SHIELD. All of it would have been lost if not for Sitwell and instead there were a few secrets that they could still seek out to fight against HYDRA. And he had died thinking Nick had abandoned him with his own demise. That sort of pain was what Nick couldn't acknowledge. The loss of the family he had built so very carefully out of guarded secrets and constantly tested loyalties and devotion. A handful that believed in SHIELD's supposed message as much as he had, no matter the cost. So Nick took the risk, reaching out and resting a hand on her shoulder. First contact, that breach of a gulf between them that was a matter of inches instead of countries right now. Nick wasn't sure if it was to ground her, to reassure her, or even to give her better access to hit him, but he had to touch her in part to show himself she was real. "And if you hadn't been with your team, how much of a chance would they had had without you leading them, Mara? Middle of the jungle where anything could have gone wrong and everything did go wrong but you got your entire squad out alive." Experience she didn’t have, and would likely never catch-up on. Mara swallowed, pushing down the uncomfortable recognition of truth in what Nick was saying. She could have continued railing in an attempt to get him to agree with her, it might have even been partially justified because who was to say that a Jedi’s insight might not have been the split second’s difference between life and death, but it also would have been an exercise in trying to make herself feel better at Nick’s expense. With Nick her actions would always speak louder than any words so she swallowed the bitter taste of frustration - the near constant frustration really - of knowing her experience in this world would always lack that of any native Agent, much less one of Natasha's caliber. It was possible the question of whether or not she could have saved Jasper would always haunt her, but if so, she’d have to learn to live with that ghost and now was as good a time to start as any. She ran a hand across her eyes, ignoring the moisture it picked up, and then dropped it to Nick’s chest to rest and for a moment she was very aware of the heart beating underneath the skin. “I had a good team,” she said softly. She couldn’t take full responsibility for the jungle. She’d had dedicated agents, who had put everything into the ring and given it everything they had. “Jasper had told me enough that I wasn’t taken off-guard when things turned bad. The number of times he told me there was no shame in going to ground,” she smiled a bit and shook her head. “It was the last thing he told me, even. As if he would have done so. It’s not what we do.” She looked up to meet Nick’s gaze finally, stepping forward just enough to easily be able to move her hands from his chest to cup his jaw in her hands, and she searched his face. If she’d walked to hell, Nick had been sent there and come back from it. If Jasper had been her best friend, he’d been Nick’s family. If SHIELD had been the only life she really knew here, it had been Nick’s life’s work. Mara didn’t need Jedi intuition to know he was hurting; she’d seen it in his face. She ran a thumb along his cheek, wrapping him in all the warmth she could manage as she pulled a smile and asked the only question that really mattered: “Listen to me. You die and come back, and I can’t even bother to say how very glad I am to see you. I’m here and I’m all yours, Nick: What do you need me to do?” There were times for orders. The entire world was on fire whether people wanted to see it or not. Bringing HYDRA into the light had done nothing to truly stop them, even if their immediate plans to pacify the planet had been butchered. More of the dark agents were dying every day, chased down like animals by the very people who were originally on their side. This world was one of too many missions and not enough agents at his disposal that he had managed to pull out of the fire in time. Too many stories ended with Fury or one of his own getting there too late with nothing to show for their attempt but a body that they might not even have the resources to send back to their families. What he needed was control over a world that had spun outside of even his own machinations. He would catch up, he always did, but there had been no time for grief, no time to do anything but plot the next move and hope he was still five moves ahead. There had been no time to go to the jungle a himself to try and pull Mara out, not that he would have with the telepath in her company. The people he trusted were barely enough to fit a hand and a mind reader with an agenda of his own certainly had no place near it. He could send her to command, to another base, on another mission to try and pull someone out like someone had just pulled her. At least six different odds ran through his mind as he gauged just which one would be the ideal fit. And instead Nick didn't speak at all. Instead his hand ran to her neck, pulling her in close to kiss her. There was no glad to see her too, no check on her health, no picking at all the other topics that they could have talked about, that they should talk about. In its place was Nick pulling her close and damn if anyone saw. The rules carefully laid out to avoid a minefield didn't matter right now. And if they did Nick decided at this moment they didn't apply to him anyway, opting to wrap his arms around her to show just how glad he was. Mara’s arms slid around his neck, and she melted into his embrace as their lips met. It was strength and comfort and simplicity. The first two sensations as real as the ground under her feet, the last one an illusion Mara would hold onto for as long as possible. From their very first kiss, this part had never felt as complicated as the questions she wouldn’t ask, and he wouldn’t answer if she had, the fiance she had in another galaxy, the boundaries they’d both discussed and agreed to and possibly ignored outright, or the undeniable conflict of agent and director. As long as his arms were around her the world - his or hers - could be ignored. Her question had been genuine despite the fact that Mara was well aware it might separate her from Nick again. But his arms around her were far more welcome than orders to send her away from him. Nick Fury was a man she respected and believed in, and he’d suffered far more losses and gave more of himself to the world in the past few weeks than she was likely to ever know. If she could give him comfort and support before they had to return to saving the world she would do so. Her hands found the back of his neck, and she stepped forward, almost pushing up on tiptoes as she answered his kiss. The warmth of his embrace all the more warm for having believed she’d never feel it again. |