Mother Nature

Vacation's Over

Chapter One

Fury had called her in. So here she was. On a helicarrier, waiting for orders.

She couldn't believe it. Clint was compromised. Clint Barton. Hawkeye. That's all Fury had told her when he called her back from her small vacation time.

She was sitting at the table just behind Fury's viewing station, her eyes closed. She must look pretty odd, considering she wasn't wearing her usual suit. Everyone had seen her in her tight green cat suit, not too similar to her best friend's suit, Black Widow.

Alexandra was different to everyone else. She had powers. Her codename was 'Mother Nature', because she could control the elements. Fire, Earth, Water, Air...all under her control. Yet that wasn't all she could do. She had super strength, increased intelligence, increased speed, and the ability to fly and heal surface wounds faster than the human race, not to mention immortality.

She wasn't created, an accident borne of gamma radiation, like the Hulk or the Abomination. 

No. 

She was a demi-goddess of Olympia.

Alexandra had been born of Zeus, the father of Gods and Men, and Leda, the mortal wife of Spartan King Tyndareus. Back then she had been given the name Helen. She chose the guise of Alexandra in the First World War when she had worked as a nurse on the front line. The name meant 'Defender of Mankind' in Greek, so she thought it was fitting.

Along with Howard Stark, Colonel Philips and Peggy Carter, Alex had created the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, a secret organisation that dealt with the things that the regular government had no hope of handling. 

Things like what they were dealing with now; gods and monsters and powers that no mortal had ever seen before.

Alex's fingers tapped impatiently against the table, earning herself an eye roll from an already irate Agent Hill, who the scientist ignored. 

She was done waiting for Fury to properly catch her up on what was going on. The information that Hill had given her was limited at best, just that the Tesseract, a cube of incredible power, had been taken by a space-hopping Asgardian prince named Loki, who had used a scepter to brainwash several of SHIELD's agents, as well as Agent Barton.

That was the one that stung the most.

She and Barton had always been close, since the moment she had recruited him, and over the years that they had fought side by side, soon joined by their favorite Russian stray that they had brought back to the US, their relationship had moved into murky waters. They weren't in a relationship. Both of them were too broken for that (or so they had both said), but they also weren't dating other people. Yet she knew what it was she felt for him, and it went far beyond sexual attraction. 

There was real love there.

And it terrified her.

Alexandra had loved a prince in the early years of her existence. He was very handsome, and their love was beautiful, but, as it turned out, deadly to all around them. She had been married to the King of Sparta, Menelaus, and she had despised him beyond all belief. So when she fell in love with Paris of Troy, she let him steal her away. Zeus had been furious at her for being the cause of a war, when she had been conceived to protect the Earth, but he had understood when she told him how terrible Menelaus had been to her. The Trojans had ended up losing the war, and their home, but Paris had made sure that she had escaped the city along with the rest of the royals. Paris was murdered by Agamemnon, the brother of Alexandra's husband. Alexandra was heartbroken, but she was forced to live on without him, as per the instructions of her father.