My Star Spangled Invisi-Gal [MCU/Dispatch]

Earth-Dispatch
Arrival: D Plus 34

Steve Rogers finished stirring the pot sitting on the electric stove in the apartment's tiny kitchen, and took one last spoonful and sniff to check the taste. He sighed in satisfaction. "Dumplings are ready."

"Finally!" Courtney teased from where she was sitting at the small countertop in-between the kitchen and living area that served as a dining room table. "I think I grew a gray hair over here waiting."

"One home-cooked meal, just as promised." Steve said as he finished ladling the chicken dumpling stew into two large bowls. Removing his apron, he carried them over to the countertop and sat down. It was the evening of the same day that they'd attended the proto-pulse test, and Steve and Courtney had decided to celebrate the almost-one-month anniversary of their having originally met each other with a nice dinner at his place.

"Mmph!" Courtney moaned in satisfaction through her stuffed cheeks. "Delshus." she mumbled.

"Old family recipe." Steve smiled slightly in reminisce. "Mrs. Barnes used to cook this all the time. When I got old enough to use a stove, she showed me how."

"Barnes? You were adopted?" Courtney asked.

"No, no. My dad died before I was born – in World War I, actually – but my mom didn't pass away until I was grown up. But she had to work shifts at the hospital late sometimes, so a lot of the time I ate dinner at the neighbors'." Steve explained. "I'd known her son Bucky for years and years, so Mrs. Barnes was used to having me over."

"Okay, I've gotta ask. 'Bucky'?" Courtney grinned. "They actually named people that back then?"

"On his birth certificate it was James Buchanan Barnes, but since his dad was also called James you can guess what happened there." Steve chuckled.

"Not really hard, no." Courtney smiled and kept eating.

"This is nice." Steve continued after a couple minutes of just enjoying the food. "And I'm glad you came over. I was kinda afraid you were still mad at me."

"I wasn't ever mad at you." Courtney explained patiently. "I just… have stupid coping mechanisms sometimes." She looked up at him ruefully over her dripping spoon. "You live alone for long enough and also have a superpower for vanishing, then your easiest way of dealing with uncomfortable shit becomes running."

"I get it." Steve nodded. "But once you start running, it gets kinda hard to let yourself stop."

"Tell me about it." Courtney sighed. "But you… you weren't ever the running kind, were you?"

"No." Steve admitted. "And that got me beat up in practically every back alley in Brooklyn. If I had a nickel for every time Bucky had to get his knuckles skinned up bailing me out of another fight before they had to carry me out on a stretcher, I'd be richer than Tony. So… sometimes I look back and I wonder. I was brave, yeah, but was it right for me to drag him into that much trouble on my behalf? Because he'd never have needed to get into any of those fights unless it were for me. Seriously, he was the toughest kid in the neighborhood. Nobody messed with him if they had any sense at all."

"Did he ever complain?" Courtney asked simply.

"Not once." Steve shook his head.

"How'd you meet him?" Courtney continued.

"Mom had just moved into the neighborhood. First week I'm there, some punk kid tells me to hand over my lunch money or else he'll take it off of me. And since I never had the sense to stay out of trouble I just run my mouth right back at him-" Steve began.

"Hold up. You, Mister Self-Control incarnate, ran an automatic mouth?" Courtney said incredulously.

"Oh, I was incorrigible." Steve agreed. "I didn't start getting a lock on my mouth until after the serum. After I got powers then picking fights with people would've been bullying. But when I was the underdog?" Steve rolled his eyes gently. "Seriously. Every back alley in Brooklyn."

"So you ran your mouth back at a bully, and…?" Courtney continued knowingly.

"I got pasted." Steve nodded. "I had my fists up and I was trying, but I wasn't getting any licks in. And if I did manage to get any in then I wasn't doing enough damage to wake up a sleeping kitten. So soon enough I'm down on the ground and he's about to start putting in the boots, and suddenly this other kid comes flying in and lays the bum out with one punch. He bends down to ask me if I'm all right, and-" Steve laughed softly at himself. "And I'm sitting there with a fat lip and a shiner I can barely see out of one eye with, completely out of wind, and the first thing out of my mouth is 'I had 'em on the ropes.'"

Courtney laughed until she snorted. "You were hopeless."

"And Bucky looks back down at me and laughs, and the first thing he says back to me is 'I guess you did.' And from that moment on we were inseparable."

"After you went into the ice, did he have a good life?" Courtney asked, and then winced in distress at Steve's expression.

"Bucky didn't wait to be drafted, he joined the Army right after Pearl Harbor. I tried to join up with him, but I already told you about my health." Steve shrugged. "Tried several times, actually. I told you about Dr. Erskine waivering me. I didn't tell you that I originally came to his attention because he'd wondered why a kid who had maybe half the disqualifying physical conditions in the manual had lied on his enlistment forms five separate times trying to sneak or beg his way past the physical."

"You falsified government documents? You?" Courtney goggled.

"And each attempt was a Federal crime potentially chargeable as perjury." Steve agreed. "Said so right on the fine print at the bottom of the form." He chuckled. "I always wondered why people in the modern-day always believed the fable that I was 100% incapable of telling even the littlest white lie, when it was public record how I'd originally gotten noticed by the project."

"I don't even understand how that works. Wouldn't getting caught trying to fake your way in get you failing a security clearance, not earning one?" Courtney puzzled.

"What Dr. Erskine had originally been looking for when he'd been going through the medical reports from the induction centers was exceptional physical specimens, yeah, not guys like me." Steve admitted. "I was just a pattern that happened to catch his eye. And since I also happened to be in the induction center the day he was there he took a moment out to indulge his curiosity and talk to me about why the heck was I was even doing this. I didn't even know he was part of any project until after he introduced himself, I originally thought he was just one of the Army doctors working there." Steve looked briefly into the distance, reminiscing. "He wanted to know why I was so desperate to get over there and start killing Nazis. I told him that I didn't want to kill anyone but that I didn't like bullies, and I didn't care where they were from." Steve looked across the counter at her. "But you were originally asking about Bucky. And the real reason I was so desperate to get in the Army was that I didn't want him to go over there alone."

"And?" Courtney drew Steve out gently.

"I got taken up by the project, and then picked to be the candidate." Steve said. "So there I was, America's first super-soldier… and then the only one, because a Nazi spy assassinated Dr. Erskine the day I was injected. Stole the last sample of the serum as well, then smashed it before letting us recapture it. I don't know why they didn't have any backup records or if something had happened to them, they didn't ever explain that part to me, but I was intended to be a prototype and then I was the only one."

"So they sent you over there by yourself?"

"Nope. Put me on a USO tour to go sell War Bonds. I'd show off my superpowers in public for morale purposes and do a whole song and dance, while they were implying there were other guys like me secretly over there doing commando stuff without actually having to tell that lie out loud. Which is actually why I've got the flag costume instead of something more tactical, it was originally from a propaganda tour. I just kept wearing it after it started to mean something else." Steve explained.

"War Bonds tour? No wonder you hate the PR fluff stuff SDN tries to make the A-Team do so much." Courtney laughed.

"The really funny thing is I can't even honestly say it was a waste of time." Steve huffed amusedly. "During the months I was on the tour War Bonds sales were up five percent overall. And that was real money, even in 1940s dollars."

"Yeah, all the extra bullets that much money would buy? That was probably a hundred times as much damage to the German army as you did personally." Courtney acknowledged.

"I don't know, I did a lot of damage." Steve joked. "But yeah, looking back I couldn't even say they were wasting me. The decision made sense from a logistical standpoint. I just hated it. Pretending to be a hero when I hadn't so much as gotten within five thousand miles of the enemy… it drove me nuts. And then they sent Captain Phoney overseas to do a morale tour for the real combat troops, which was maybe the stupidest idea anybody had ever had in the history of the Army." Steve looked down. "And I got over there just in time to find out that Bucky's unit, which was in the area - we were up by Azzano during the Italian campaign then - had been lost behind enemy lines and he was a POW in a Nazi base too heavily defended to try and raid."

Courtney drew a pained breath, and then her eyes went wide as Steve continued without a beat. "So of course I went completely out of my mind, convinced a couple people I knew to help me steal a plane and a parachute, and jumped in all by myself to try and do a one-man POW rescue."

"Every back alley in Brooklyn, huh?" Courtney eventually snarked.

"Remember back at the donut shop, when I said that you wouldn't believe some of the orders I'd disobeyed even if I'd told you?" Steve grinned back at her. "So yeah, the base turned out to be an experimental facility run by the Nazi mad science division, HYDRA. Which, as it happened, had also been experimenting with the super-soldier serum. Dr. Erskine had originally been a defector from there before he made it over to try perfecting his serum for the US instead, and the Nazis had a guy who'd also been injected with an earlier version of it. Johann Schmidt, aka the Red Skull. HYDRA's commanding officer." Steve looked grave. "He's where Dr. Erskine had learned that psychological stability was really important for serum recipients, because Schmidt had already been off his nut even before getting juiced. And afterwards he was so far gone that he made Hitler look well-adjusted. The serum magnifies everything, you see. Good becomes better, and bad becomes worse." He breathed out. "Anyway, I can't even begin to take the whole base by myself, superpowers or not… but I don't have to. They've got like several hundred guys held prisoner there, including Bucky, and as soon as I started to bust them out they all grabbed what weapons they could and then we started the biggest damn riot you ever saw. That's why they'd all been sent to the HYDRA base from the regular POW camps in the first place. They'd been troublemakers."

"How'd you get back?" Courtney asked.

"Walked." Steve answered simply. "Took us a couple days, but we made it back across the lines and to our unit. And after they decided not to court-martial me, I finally got my combat posting. I was already a captain – they'd directly commissioned me for propaganda purposes, even if I made sure to actually get the officer training as well – so they put me in charge of a new special company, the Howling Commandoes. Our mission was to go up against HYDRA and all their mad science projects. They gave me free choice of any men I wanted for it. Bucky was the first guy I picked, and the men who'd broken out of the POW camp with us were the rest."

"So you finally got your wish, to fight alongside him." Courtney smiled.

"I did." Steve smiled, before his face fell. "And I brought the Howlers through the war practically intact. We lost only one man in action in the entire war, a record no other combat unit equaled." Steve's expression told Courtney everything she needed to know.

"Bucky." She nodded sadly. "Steve, I'm so sorry."

"It was on the next-to-last mission of the war, the one before we finally took down Schmidt and his last base… and I went into the ice." Steve continued softly. "We were basically doing a train robbery, only the 'robbery' was to capture Dr. Zola, Schmidt's chief scientist. We needed him alive to find the base. There was a fight on the train-" Steve shook his head, visibly waving away the details. "And Bucky fell off the train to his death, saving my dumb ass in a fight one last time."

Courtney got up and crossed over to give Steve a hug, and the two of them silently reassured each other for a long moment.

"He never regretted a thing." Courtney finally said. "I'm as sure of that as I can be of anything."

"I know." Steve sighed. "Still miss him, though."

"Of course you do." she agreed.

Steve and Courtney both got up to put their empty dishes in the sink and then moved to the couch, where they sat down side by side with their arms around each other.

"I… really wish I'd had a Bucky, growing up. Or a Mrs. Barnes. Or a Steve Rogers." she continued reluctantly.

"Rough?" Steve asked simply.

"Not quite Great Depression rough." Courtney answered slowly. "But yeah, we were poor. Bad neighborhood. Parents that had to work all the time just to make ends meet, latch-key kid. And, of course, health problems."

"Living not knowing when even a simple game of tag is gonna knock you down into a crisis isn't fun even if you can afford all the doctors in the world." Steve agreed. "And I definitely couldn't. If my mom hadn't been a nurse I don't think I'd have lived to grow up."

"My mom was a waitress." Courtney answered. "Dad did day labor when he could get it, moped around doing nothing when he couldn't. And money was tight enough that they hated every dollar of it they had to waste on the sick kid."

"They actually use the word 'waste'?" Steve asked mildly. "Or was that just you?"

"Them." Courtney answered knowingly. "Went on and on about how things were tight enough under normal circumstances, and how losing so much time from work taking me to the free clinic and the ER was only making it worse and why couldn't I just get in shape and stop being so lazy or something."

"That's not how it works." Steve moaned. "Which of course you knew that."

"No I didn't." Courtney shook her head. "Not back then. I mean, what the heck do little kids know except what their parents tell them?"

Steve hugged her a little more tightly and let her stop and find her own pace. "That when you started stealing? To try and help your family's ends meet?" he eventually asked sympathetically.

"No." Courtney shook her head, and then gave an embarrassed chuckle. "Would you believe that I actually went to Catholic school?"

Steve looked down at his girlfriend, particularly at her punk haircut and nose ring, and chuckled. "Only if I indulged in thinking about a very tacky stereotype."

Courtney snorted once. "Yeah, I know. Girl from traditional upbringing goes complete punk rebel after becoming disillusioned in childhood. That one's fresh off the typecasting stereotype platter." She looked downcast. "But no. Stealing was wrong, and if you worked hard and stayed honest then eventually it would all work out. Just like they taught in school and you saw in the movies."

"Except for you, it didn't." Steve acknowledged the obvious.

"I found out I had invisibility powers when I was fourteen." she continued. "And I didn't really use them for anything. I mean, I have to hold my breath to use them, and putting strain on my lungs was something I tried to avoid then. But, I did tell the few friends I had about them." She lookd downcast. "At least, I thought they were my friends."

"Weirded them out?" Steve probed gently.

"Freaked them out. Completely." she said. "From that moment on I was the neighborhood witch. In the historical sense, as in 'non-traditional female who was the superstitious community scapegoat for everything that went wrong'. House cat got lost? Blame the invisible girl. Can't find your wallet? Of course she stole it. Car wouldn't start? She must have sabotaged it. You name it and I caught the blame for it. Even if two dozen people had seen me in class while it was going on."

"From your setup I expected some pretty rough stuff, and I am still disappointed in those people." Steve declared firmly.

"So I just pulled into my shell and started avoiding people entirely. I had books and TV and movies, I had exams to study for… a college scholarship to try and earn… and a whole neighborhood to escape." she mourned. "I didn't get beat up in back alleys – girls do bullying differently than boys, and since they already knew I could turn invisible I could just use my powers to leave any conversation I didn't want to stay in. But it sucked." she breathed out explosively.

"Loneliness always does." Steve agreed. "Solitary confinement is used as a punishment in every human culture, no matter how different they are otherwise. And has been for all of known history."

"I know." Courtney agreed. "And finally I'm coming up on graduation, and I've busted my hump and gotten those straight A's… it's not like I had a vigorous social life to distract me from my studying… and then I get turned down in favor of the girl who's next in class. Because she could get a letter of recommendation from the school, you see, and I couldn't." She blinked away angry tears. "Not a single teacher would stand up for me, because all they'd heard for years was accusation after accusation and not a single person standing up for me. And you can't ever have that much smoke without a real fire, right?"

"That was really not very Christian of them." Steve said angrily.

"Catholic school was grade school, high school was the local PS." Courtney corrected him. "Anyway, that was it. I wasn't going to college, I couldn't hope to get even a job waiting tables anywhere in the neighborhood what with being the local pariah, and my folks were going to throw my 'freeloader' ass out on the street without a dime in my pocket. I'd done everything right, I'd played by the rules as hard as I could, and in the end I had nothing to show for it. Everybody agreed that I just had to be a thief and a liar and a backstabbing bitch even when I hadn't done any of that, just because of what my powers were."

"And suddenly everything you said to Robert that day makes a whole lot more sense." Steve realized.

"Yup." Courtney nodded. "So after that I was just fucking done with trying to be the good girl. If everybody wanted the invisible bitch so badly then they could fucking have her, and I'd ram it down all their throats and make 'em choke. Went right out and stole my first thing the day the guidance counselor told me I was getting bounced, and never looked back." She slumped. "And here's me with all this quitter talk after you had all the hard knocks growing up too, and went straight from zero to hero without a bump. You must be really fuckin' disappointed in me."

"Nope." Steve shook his head. "Not a bit."

"I hate it when you do that, you know." Courtney looked up at him plaintively. "When you make excuses for me that you never would for yourself. That's just… reminding me that I'm not really a hero."

"Nonsense." Steve gave her a comforting squeeze. "Being easier on the people you care for than you are on yourself is called caring for people. It's just what you do for the people you- you're close to. It's what you're supposed to do, even if your folks never did." He sighed. "Is that why it says 'Courtney Jane Doe' on your personnel file?"

"You've read my file?" Courtney looked at him alarmedly.

"Just the public-facing parts that anybody in the office is allowed to." Steve reassured her.

"Yeah. It is." she admitted. "My genetic donors ditched me without a second thought. So screw them. I won't even take the family name from 'em, let alone anything else." She laughed once, bitterly. "Not that they ever gave me much else."

"I didn't have it as rough as you did." Steve said. "I had my mom. I had Bucky and his folks. I had other decent people in what was a pretty decent neighborhood… sure, we were as poor as church mice, but we were mostly traditional people. Old-fashioned community spirit, like they don't have as much of anymore."

"Damn sure didn't where I lived." Courtney admitted.

"Courtney, I don't look down on you for hitting the wall like you did." Steve reassured. "You had no support at all, and you were just a kid. If I'd grown up without a mom who cared about me, a brother in all but blood, other grown-ups who set good examples, then there's no guarantee that I'd still be me. I might've just ended up this bitter little punk with barely any good in him at all, assuming I wasn't dead." Steve exhaled heavily. "Chase believes that people are born good or bad, but that's nonsense. The hero team I was with during that alien invasion I mentioned once, the Avengers… yeah, we'd literally saved the world. But our members were a billionaire playboy who'd lived out every celebrity scandal you could think of before he finally turned his life around after surviving a terrorist attack and figuring out there was more to life than just money and girls and booze. A Norse god-"

"Seriously?" Courtney goggled.

"We work with a half-demon who actually commutes to Hell, or so she says, so don't judge." Steve poked affectionately at her. "A Norse god whose dad had actually had to exile him to Earth without his powers to learn humility, because he'd been apparently been an arrogant enough jackass back home he had to be kicked out of the house just to keep the peace... and who did learn his lesson, became one of the most honorable people I'd ever met, and got his powers back. A man who got cursed with a transformation into an uncontrollable monster and got nothing but hunted by the government for it as the entire world told him he was a monster… and who decided that he'd rather fight as hard as he could to teach the monster inside him how to help people, and who did. And two secret agents, one of whom was a defected assassin who had more kills than Coupe under uglier circumstances before she grew up enough to decide that wasn't the person she wanted to be and she'd spend the rest of her life trying to help people to make up for the lives she'd taken. And the other government assassin who'd originally been sent to kill her, and then decided that he was done with just killing people without maybe at least trying to save them first."

"You're shitting me." Courtney gaped. "Seriously, you're describing a dysfunction junction that makes the Z-Team sound normal."

"Did you never wonder why I could take anything around the SDN office in stride?" Steve smiled. "Oh yeah, and our team also had this dumb kid from Brooklyn who'd lost every fight in his life, until he got someone to give him a leg up so he could finally win one." Steve looked down at her lovingly. "Our whole team was made out of nothing but people who'd changed hugely from the folks they'd originally been into the people they wanted to be. You only stay a villain when you're like that Shroud guy and you don't want to change, or you're like Schmidt and you actually have physical brain problems on top of also being a Nazi war criminal. But that's not 'born' bad, that's 'went bad and stayed bad'. Even the Red Skull, because he didn't have to take a serum even its own creator was warning him would probably drive him crazier, and he definitely didn't have to grow up to join HYDRA." Steve kissed Courtney on the forehead. "So if I meet a lady who ended up stealing stuff because she spent her whole life as a kid being told she wasn't good for anything more by everybody she should have been able to count on but who all gaslit her repeatedly until she finally believed the nonsense they were selling… and who thinks that means she can't ever move on to being a good person who deserves good things… then I'm gonna tell her I think she's being an idiot."

"You have this unrealistically rosy picture of me that isn't me at all and that's just not healthy for a relationship." Courtney insisted. "Seriously, tell me one thing about me right now that you actually dislike."

"The nose ring." Steve replied immediately.

"What?" Courtney blinked.

"I get that they're normal to wear in public now, but I'm still just not used to things like that. I'm sorry." Steve said embarrassedly.

"Okay then, I'll take it out." she agreed.

"You don't have to do that." Steve shook his head.

"Steve, single girls like to look good how they think they should look good. Girls with boyfriends like to look good for their boyfriend." Courtney smiled. "I only started wearing this thing as part of my bad attitude era anyway, so maybe I should have ditched it already. And if you think I'd look cuter without it then pffft, it's gone."

"Thank you." Steve agreed simply. "And for a more serious answer to your question… I think that rather than talk about what I don't like about you, I'd like to talk about why I do like you. Because you use the words 'pity project' a lot, and I want to make sure you know that it's not that."

"I use it because I can't imagine what you actually do like about me." Courtney admitted. "And you're… what do people like about each other in relationships, anyway? I've had hook-ups before, but you're my first guy I've actually dated."

"You've heard my dating history, I'm barely ahead of you there." Steve admitted. "So yeah, relationship-wise we're the blind leading the blind… which I think we'd already agreed on when we started out." He chuckled.

"Well, sexually we're not." Courtney admitted frankly. "Hook-ups, remember? If we ever get that far then that's really not the part I'm worried about because I will steer you right around those curves, don't worry. But emotionally? Yeah, we're really a work in progress there, aren't we?"

"Do you know when I first fell for you? The moment when I caught feels just beyond being your friend? Because please don't ever doubt that we were already friends even before the other thing started." Steve entreated her.

"That part I don't doubt." Courtney reassured him gently.

"It was the day you made the cut." Steve continued. "The moment you looked up at the leaderboard and saw your name move up. You didn't see your face then, but you just had this adorable little smile… this little quirk of your lips made out of pure happiness. And it wasn't just that you were smiling, but why you were smiling. You weren't happy that you were keeping your job, or that you'd beaten the person you were competing with, or even that you'd get to stay with your new friend. You were just happy about having finally made a difference. About having done a good thing and at long last being acknowledged for it." Steve smiled down at her gently, taking her hand softly between his. "And you were a feisty one as well." He grinned at her wickedly. "Pretty girl who can choke out a bad guy like nothing but who's got a good heart deep down… what can I say, I've got a type."

"I'm not gonna tell you what I like about you, your head is already swollen enough." Courtney poked at him gently. "But… thank you, Steve." She looked slightly wistful. "I… hope I don't ever disappoint you."

"I don't think you will. But even if you do… I've disappointed people before, and still kept them. I get that you didn't get remotely enough of that when you were growing up, but if people are worth anything then they'll understand when something's really not your fault." Steve affirmed.

"Problem is, the stuff I'm still scared to tell you about was my fault." Courtney fretted.

"Did anyone die?" Steve asked. "Because I just got through telling you that I had no problem working with reformed assassins."

"… someone almost did." Courtney muttered.

"Are they okay now?" Steve questioned.

"I don't know. I'm still waiting to find out." she said pensively.

"Okay then." Steve nodded. "All right. You're still waiting to find out, and I can wait to find out too. You'll talk when you're ready, and I'm fine with that."

"Thank you." Courtney smiled tearfully. "I- is it okay if we stop talking and I just kiss my boyfriend now?"

"Nothing would make me happier." Steve smiled, and he took Courtney into his arms.

Author's Note: I originally just wanted Steve and Courtney to check in emotionally and then I got an entire chapter out of one conversation. For once my muse did not torment me! Thank you, muse. And yes, those two dorks are finally kissing. Haven't gone further than that, though.

Canonically, Steve is slightly weirded out by piercings. He mentions that to Natasha during TWS.

'I'll steer you around the curves' is of course a reference to Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another one of my favorite emotionally troubled bad girls turned good. … huh, I seem to have a fictional type of my own.

'Courtney Jane Doe' was originally a suggestion from poster 'Nikas' back on SB. I have adopted it, because it fits here.

Steve actually did canonically increase War Bonds sales by a full five percent when he was on the tour, which is a legitimate achievement. Even when he was just a show pony, he was still not a useless show pony.

And no, none of Courtney's origin story here is canon. She doesn't have a canon origin story. So behold the latest voyage of the USS Make Shit Up, long may she sail. But yes, I like to try and imagine how the heck the Courtney we see could get in the particular messed-up headspace she had to begin with, and this is certainly a plausible route.

Poster 'NeutralWotan' in the SB thread donated some fanart of what Visi looks like without her nose ring.

Earth-Dispatch
Arrival: D Plus 36

"Good morning, everyone." Blonde Blazer greeted the assembled Z-Team at Monday morning roll call. "We're shuffling some assignments this week, so here's the new team roster. Sonar is now moved over to headquarters staff full-time-"

"Wait, we can get promoted?" Flambae interrupted. "When did that start?"

"It's not a promotion, it's just them deciding that the scary bat-headed guy with business experience would work better as admin instead of customer service." Sonar explained.

"If I might continue?" Blazer asked Flambae sweetly while crossing her arms at him and tapping her foot, and he silently acknowledged his mistake.

"And replacing him on the Z-Team's active call roster will be Waterboy." The hero in question nervously peered around the corner of the conference room door upon hearing his name.

"Uh, h-hello…" he tentatively waved at the group.

"You sure about this, boss lady?" Punch Up asked doubtfully.

"Be nice, guys." Invisigal said soothingly. "It's not like some of us weren't less than impressive our first few weeks out." She gave Waterboy an encouraging smile. "I used to be last on the leaderboard consistently, and now I'm almost halfway up. Don't worry if it takes you a little while to settle in."

"That man has been a horrible influence on you." Malevola whispered teasingly to Visi.

Blazer quirked a smile. "And given that we've cleared at least some of the immediate training backlog and have also been experiencing increased call volume, also returning to active rotation will be Captain America."

Cap stepped out into visibility from around the corner and behind Waterboy and gave Visi a proud smile at her recent encouraging moment, to which she immediately responded with a furious blush. The remainder of the meeting, including Blazer, indulged themselves in a brief chuckle.

"And now in more serious news." Blazer continued soberly. "Upon reviewing several incidents last week, we've determined a pattern. Robert?"

Cap and Waterboy both entered the room and took places around the conference table as Robert stepped up to the projector and tapped the controls. Images of several of the prior week's incidents came up on the screen. Highlighted photographs displayed similarities between all the events in question – specifically, the energy weapons used by the criminals in those incidents, as well as their red-glowing cybernetics.

"Furthermore, Royd's forensic analysis of the remains of the hacking device recovered in the incident involving Coupe revealed that the same person who'd manufactured it had also manufactured the cybernetics and energy weapons involved in these other incidents. Not only did they have certain design elements in common, but many of the individual components had been manufactured by the same chip fabricator. Which means that those components had all been procured as a single lot from a single source, meaning that the same villain had provided all this tech to Coupe and these hired goons." Robert explained. "So there's definitely a new gang in town – one with access to sophisticated technology and resources - and they are recruiting. Not just street muscle, but also superpowered lieutenants."

Robert fell grimly silent, and Blazer continued. "And given Toxic's connection to one of the incidents involving these new weapons – the underworld arms trading case several weeks ago, that Punch Up and Malevola ran into by accident while we were searching for Coupe's would-be assassins – we're almost entirely certain of who this new gang leader might be."

A picture of a hooded figure wearing a skull-faced gas mask colored an angry demonic red, with two glowing green pupils and a left eye surmounted by a cybernetic targeting monocole, filled the screen. "Shroud." Blazer said grimly. "His technology allows him to, among other things, cybernetically augment normal people into low-level superhuman combatants."

"There are also claims that superhumans implanted with his augments will have their powers boosted, but those are as yet unverified." Robert continued. Nobody noticed Visi's hands twitch slightly under the table at that statement.

"And that's in addition to Shroud's already-known and considerable capacities at tactics, organization, super-science, and hacking." Blazer said. "These are his known and identified superhuman lieutenants." Two images filled the screen… Toxic's and Coupe's. Punch Up winced and sighed at that latter one. "There were several more villains whose images were taken in the Mecha Man incident of several months ago, we don't have names for them yet and we're not certain if they are regular employees of Shroud or were just hired for the occasion." Robert continued as several more images appeared on the screen – a blue-and-white suited lightning controller, a muscular man in a white skull mask wielding two red-glowing energy khopeshes, and a dark pink living blob-man.

"Hey, that's the guy I fought in the loading dock robbery last week." Golem pointed at the blob-man.

Robert tapped a few keys and the blob-man's picture was moved over to the 'Known Lieutenants' column. "So yeah. These are the faces to keep an eye out for out there."

"We have no intel yet on what Shroud's plans are or what his next move may be. So everybody stay cautious out there; remember your training about not being ambushed, and if you have even a strong feeling that something's wrong then don't hesitate to call for backup." Blazer assured. "When we know more about what we're dealing with, we'll keep you informed. Until then, it's time to get to work."

"Good luck out there, everyone." Robert nodded to the team, and the meeting broke up as everyone headed out.

"Waterboy, for your first couple of days out there they decided it would be best if you partnered with me." Cap said as the two of them reached the parking lot and checked out an SDN car instead of Cap's usual motorcycle.

"Okay." Waterboy said tentatively, before he turned and looked wistfully out the window at the other departing heroes. "S-she's nice, isn't she?"

"Excuse me?" Cap asked politely.

"Invisigal." Waterboy looked down bashfully. "W-what she said, in the meeting…"

"Yes, that was very kind of her." Cap nodded amiably. "And she was telling the truth about having trouble getting off the bottom of the rankings for a while, but all she needed was some encouragement and a little self-confidence."

"Do- do you think she might…?" Waterboy kept looking out the window in the direction she'd driven off in.

Cap blinked in realization before smiling kindly. "I certainly agree that you've got good taste, but she already has a boyfriend."

"Oh." Waterboy slumped dejectedly. "I- she wouldn't possibly… change her mind?"

"People do change their minds sometimes, but I think her boyfriend would be very sad if that happened." Cap said as reassuringly as he could.

Waterboy suddenly looked over at Cap in realization. "Oh no."

"Relax." Cap replied. "You're entirely correct that girls who don't judge people based on superficial appearance are the best kind of girls, and I agree that they're hard to find. But she really isn't the only girl in the universe who's like that, so there's someone out there for you too. You just need to keep looking."

"I-if you say so." Waterboy sighed.

The day's shift passed largely without incident. There were almost no 911 calls beyond a couple of routine cases of street crime, but the non-emergency service calls ranged from a missing pets to industrial cleanup. Overall, it was just another tedious day making money for the SDN… until shortly before shift change.

Visi rubbed her aching eyes as she finished returning the unimaginatively named 'Mr. Cat' to their nervous owner. Ugh, are there any of those dumplings left? she texted Cap. I seriously need some comfort food after this shift.

Sorry. Leftovers don't usually survive very long around me. Cap texted back apologetically.

One of the reasons you should take one of those promotions is so that you can afford your grocery bill. Visi texted amusingly. Honestly, how did that metabolism survive on the front lines?

They had to issue me the ration packs normally intended for four-man recon teams operating away from base. Cap typed back.

I should've known. Visi texted back with a smile- until all the streetlights where she was parked flickered out, leaving her in the darkness. Her communicator went dead. Visi immediately went invisible and moved away from where she'd been standing.

Blackout. No comms! she texted furiously, thanking God that at least the cell phone towers had uninterruptible power supplies.

Same. Cap replied. RTB now.

OMW!

Visi mounted her cycle and drove off through the stalled evening traffic, cutting through back alleys as needed. A couple of minutes later, her radio clicked on.

"Everyone, this is Dispatch. The power's out through the entire city. SDN's running on the emergency generators." Robert said wearily. "Everybody spread out to the locations I'm putting on your screens, link up, and stand by. Flambae, you're the only flyer on shift so you get to bat cleanup a lot. Everybody else will be on the buddy system, and we're going to be working a lot of overtime tonight."

"All branch operatives, this is Blonde Blazer." she came in on circuit. "SDN is going to state of emergency Yellow. For those of you for whom this is your first time, that means no non-essential service calls and we unify our dispatch grid with the local 911 center. Hopefully the power will be up against almost immediately and we can stand down… but if it's out for any length of time, get ready for a lot of search-and-rescue calls and looting incidents."

"Shit." Visi swore as she arrived at the designated rendezvous. "Hey Punch Up." She greeted her diminutive teammate.

"Visi." He nodded back. "Damn it, I can barely see my nose in front of my face without the headlights on. You?"

"Got a flashlight." She pulled a four-cell Maglite out of her cycle's saddlebag and flicked it on and off. "Sure wish I had night vision powers, though."

"Aye." He agreed.

"Visi, Punch Up, Norden's Sporting Goods three blocks away from your location is reporting looting in progress." Robert said. "Flash mob."

"Shite." Punch Up swore as the two heroes headed over there. "Sporting goods store means they're going for the guns. We don't get there quick and put this down hard, it's gonna be an armed mob."

"We go straight in and swinging hard, got it." Visi agreed.

Several miles away, Flambae was busy airlifting out a medical emergency case that had been stranded in freeway traffic, while Malevola and Golem were busy trying to stop looters in a shopping mall. Cap and Waterboy were already hip deep in trying to stop a gang fight between some drug dealers and the competitors who'd decided to use the blackout as an opportunity to rip them off, and similar chaos was erupting all over town.

Almost forty minutes later the blackout was still continuing, and half the Z-Team as well as Blazer herself was busy backing up multiple responding units at a three-alarm fire in a retirement complex. Prompt action by the heroes had prevented any deaths, but serious injuries and close calls were in profusion.

"Great job, Waterboy." Cap reassured the aqua-powered hero as he finished hosing down yet another section of the complex. "Take a break, you're about ready to drop."

"I-I can do a little more." The young man insisted.

"Break. Now." Cap pushed gently. "You work yourself into a collapse right now, that's just more fires that don't get fought because you're on the bench longer than you need to be. We'll go get some food."

"Hey Captain." Punch Up greeted him, still covered with soot and ash from where he'd gone directly into burning sections of the building to clear wreckage and open up routes. "Damn long night." Punch Up turned grave. "Visi caught some smoke. It's not serious," he rushed to reassure the man immediately, "but she's over by the ambulances while they're havin' a look."

"Can you show Waterboy where the nearest place to grab something to eat is?" Cap asked him. "I've got to go check on her."

"'Course you do. Come on lad, over this way." Punch Up said.

"Visi?" Cap asked worriedly as he came up on where the young woman was sitting on the sidewalk near the Fire Department emergency trucks, where a casualty collection point had been setup. She looked up from where she was busy breathing steadily into an oxygen mask from one of the fire department's portable oxygen bottles and gave him a thumbs-up.

"Bad night?" Cap asked, sitting down next to her.

"My inhaler ran out." she admitted embarrassedly, her voice muffled by the mask. "I knew I should've checked it this morning." Cap's immediately reaching into his pocket was met with a head-shake. "No, it's good, I bummed a new one off the medics. Just…"

"They should put a notation in your file not to send you to fires." Cap fumed.

"They did. Volunteered anyway." Visi admitted sheepishly.

"… please stop taking chances like that." Cap sighed as he put an arm around her comfortingly. "You don't have to prove anything that badly, to me or anyone else."

Visi's face scrunched up in what Cap would never admit out loud to her was an extremely cute display of stubbornness, and she visibly gathered herself for a rebuttal- when an alert broadcast sounded from every SDN communicator in the area.

"All heroes, all heroes, major supervillain attack in progress at MDC Los Angeles Southwest. All available heroes respond immediately."

"Not you." Cap firmly held out his hand as Visi shot to her feet. "Not until they clear you." He pointed at the paramedics.

"Rrrrgh." she growled in frustration but knew better to argue. Visi sat there frustratedly, watching as every other hero mounted up in their vehicles or used their own mobility powers, if any, to travel ahead.


"Hey babe!" Toxic sneered as his acid barrage splattered off of Blazer's aura. "You're a little behind schedule tonight, we expected you earlier!"

Blazer's furious punch was met by Morphus' absorbing the force of the blow with his gelatin-like body, as he attempted to wrap around and suffocate her. Fighting against the restraining fluid Blazer used her full strength to clap her hands together several times, sending massive shockwaves rippling through the villain's amorphous body and stunning him temporarily.

As she fought free of the gelatin Khopesh slashed open the street beneath her with red scythes of cutting energy flung from the tips of his eponymous weapons. Blazer caught herself before she fell more than several feet, but that was enough of an opportunity for White Lightning's electrical beams to arc furiously off her aura, before being joined by Toxic's corrosive blasts. The combined firepower forced her to retreat temporarily as minor traces of damage began to leak through her invulnerability, but her attempt to fly away and then swoop back for a flank attack was met by an armored SWAT van being telekinetically tossed through the air by the psychic supervillainess that Flambae and Malevola had captured earlier this week, and that had just been freed from the Municipal Detention Center by the squad of villains that Shroud had sent to force a jailbreak. Blazer swatted the armored van aside as if it were a fly, but she'd been delayed just long enough for Toxic to dodge her rush.

"And our special new guests are right on schedule!" Toxic cheered as he saw the escaping prisoners began to fan out through where they'd breached the compound walls. "Okay, team two? Blow it now!"

A series of explosions sounded distantly from a nearby building. "What have you done?!?" Blazer cried in alarm.

"Oh don't worry, nobody's dead… yet." Toxic sneered. "But those demo charges did just weaken the interior support beams a little, so given how weakened the structure is over there I'd say there's maybe… oh, two minutes before the top floor over there decides it would rather move to the basement? And oh yeah, that's the hospital wing, so somebody really should go over there and help support their local jail before that happens."

"You… how dare you risk-?" Blazer gaped in shock.

"Calculated risk, if you please." Toxic laughed. "Give us credit where credit's due!"

Blonde Blazer glared furiously at Toxic, but then had to fly off to the hospital wing before it collapsed and help support the weakened structure until the rooms in danger could be evacuated.

"Okay! Lightning, take charge of the evac." Toxic ordered as she flew away. "Matchstick boy's incoming right now and I've got to fly up there and head him off. But we've got at least five minutes before the nearest ground-bound heroes make it here, so all you've got to worry about is crashing through that police barricade over there."

"No problem." The electric villainess laughed mockingly. "Normal SWAT cops versus us? Our only danger will be boredom."

"Just don't dawdle. You know how tight the timing is on these things." Toxic reminded her, and shot skyward to intercept the incoming Flambae.

"As it turns out, you didn't miss anything." Cap reassured Visi as they met back up at the SDN Torrance branch building to clock out. "By the time we got there, the jailbreak was already over."

"Yes." Blonde Blazer fumed. "I was pinned in place and couldn't pursue, Flambae couldn't get past Toxic's interference, and nobody else could keep up with the escaping prisoner convoy without immediately getting hammered by the firepower they had available. And given that Toxic had been leading the villain squad, and I saw almost all of the known and suspected lieutenants making up the rest of that squad, it's pretty obvious who arranged for all of this."

"Shroud." Cap said gravely.

"You said almost all?" Punch Up asked.

"Coupe wasn't there." Blazer shook her head. "Shroud's apparently not rushing to put her on missions where she can be expected to run into us."

"Plus, she's a stealth expert." Cap said. "Be a waste to put her on the big smash-and-grab jobs when she could be used elsewhere. Which makes me wonder what else Shroud was doing tonight that we haven't found out about yet."

"The power failure wasn't a coincidence, was it?" Flambae nodded.

"Nah." Royd contributed. "Preliminary analysis indicate dat de hack yesterday at de ISP snuck a virus in lots of de 'smart' electrical meters all through town. Dis whole 'Internet of Things' concept have a security bug or two dey goan need to fix."

"How does messing with the electrical meters in a bunch of houses cause a power failure?" Malevola asked.

"When the safety features in the meters are falsely reporting short circuits and overvoltages in thousands of residences all over town, and that makes the power-management algorithms in the electric company's grid control computer start hallucinating that the entire power grid is on fire." Robert answered. "Every time they tried to reboot the grid, a fresh wave of trouble signals through the Internet from all those hotwired meters shut it back down immediately. Took them over half an hour to trace what the fault even was – it was not something anyone had ever seen before - and then they had to figure out how to disconnect the monitoring system entirely."

"Shroud crashes the power, waits for SDN's emergency drill to deploy us all over town, waits until all the heroes are exhausted from having chased looters and fought fires all night-" Cap analyzed.

"Yeah, and the retirement complex fire was deliberately set." Visi broke in. "Picked that up from the fire marshal at the scene after you left, while I was stuck there twiddling my thumbs."

"The whole thing was set up to get us out of position, exhausted, and too far away to respond in time, so that the detention center would be wide open for a jailbreak." Blazer sighed.

"Recruiting drive." Chase glowered. "The supervillains we'd spent the last week catchin', they're all back out now and with a new boss to be grateful too. Plus all the normal criminals got sprung likewise."

"Plus he just made a big splash on the local villain scene and got his name out in a big way." Prism said.

"Yeah." Visi agreed. "There's several other gangs in town just got served notice they got competition now. And all the independents and street-corner hustlers out there, they see Shroud's big intro splash and maybe they're a little impressed, and maybe are a little slower to back the incumbents."

"So what are we doing about it?" Sonar asked.

"LAPD is out of ideas. Sheriff's department is out of ideas. I'm out of ideas. Does our military advisor have anything?" she asked hopefully.

"If we just keep chasing after them, they'll just keep outrunning us." Cap said. "We need to get inside their decision loop… but that's kinda hard when we don't know their mission goal, don't have any locations on their bases or staging areas, don't have any inroads to their communications, and don't have anyone to interrogate who actually knows anything."

"Shroud's goal seems pretty clear-cut. Build a gang, recruit an army." Robert said.

"Yeah. But you mobilize an army not as an end, but a means to an end. So the question is 'who's he going to be fighting?'" Cap wondered.

"For the near future, the other gangs in town." Blazer said. "But after he's suitably pushed aside his rivals – assuming he does – then once he's solidly established himself, what does his gang do next?"

"Shroud's takedown of Mecha Man several months ago was for the purpose of capturing the Astral Pulse from him, but it was lost – almost certainly destroyed - in the fighting." Robert said slowly. "So he's gotten his revenge… destroyed his old enemy's legacy… lost the prize he was hoping to steal… where does he go from there?"

The silent conference room was his only answer.

"We have had a successful beginning." Shroud orated tonelessly from the catwalk suspended over the warehouse. "Our enemies have been left grasping at straws. Our ranks have been swollen by those we have liberated. Our war chest is full, our armory well-stocked, our capabilities have been demonstrated. But this is only step one."

"So don't start pricing those retirement condos just yet, guys!' Toxic's voice mocked the assembly from where he stood at Shroud's right hand. "Because now the real work begins! Those of you who haven't seen the doctor yet, we're gonna have to cycle you through and get you your augments. And once we're all jacked up and ready to go… well then! It'll be time for you to get back out there and go revisit your old friends!"

"Correct." Shroud resumed speaking right on cue. "We have bloodied the noses of the heroes… but now it is time to withdraw and leave them floundering, with nowhere to apply their strength. And in that interim we shall turn our strength elsewhere, to those who believe that they control the crime of Los Angeles."

"Uh, they do control the crime." A large hulking thug with outsized cybernetic arms said. "Like, they're all over-" The dimwitted muscle finally clued in on the expressions he was drawing from the two men on the balcony above. "-shutting up now, sir."

"Armstrong, we're really gonna have to talk later about appropriate timing." Toxic said menacingly.

"As our intellectually unimpressive compatriot has just demonstrated, there is a belief among many that they are the ones who truly control the crime in Los Angeles." Shroud chuckled menacingly. "A belief that we shall disillusion harshly. The syndicates and gangs who believe that the city is theirs will be swept aside, one by one. Those with the wisdom to choose the winning side will be rewarded. And those who do not will be punished. And for those of you here, who will have been with us from the beginning, the rewards will be the greatest."

"For we are the Red Ring. And in the fullness of time, this city will be ours."

Author's Note: Poor Waterboy. Crushes on the first girl to speak nicely to him in a long while, then immediately finds out his training officer is her boyfriend. But at least he didn't have time to torture himself with a hopeless crush for days and days, he can start accepting things right away.

No, Steve is not going to show him the 'Skinny Steve' picture. Think about it. It's not really comforting to tell Waterboy 'I got a miraculous glow-up that got me out of looking like you, but you already have superpowers and so that's just something else you can't hope for'. But Cap really will sympathize with the poor guy for obvious reasons.

And yes, that was very uncharacteristically kind for canon Visi. Of course, after like a month of being Steve's girlfriend she's not canon Visi any more. And even in-game, Visi becomes notably softer on her hero route, once you finally get her past the catharsis and acceptance of her confession to Robert in episode 7. Steve's just gotten her to most of that character development earlier, even if she still has that particular big hurdle on her path to clear.

The 'power failure event' in episode 5 is just a power failure. I'm rolling with it a little re: a non-canon jailbreak and such. And yeah, Blazer's ability to be anywhere on the map almost immediately and her being a one-woman army means that if your plan involves any kind of major alert scenario, you need a line item called 'How to delay her long enough to finish up and leave'.

I really feel bad about being so hard on Visi's lungs, but honestly. Asthmatic people should not be firefighting, and setting fires is a useful tactic Shroud keeps repeating because it works.

And yes, Shroud's plan so far actually is 'build up power'. Remember, at this point in time he's not expecting the Proto-Pulse experiments to actually deliver any useful results. If things change later on, then he'll adapt.