The Jotun's Daughter

Chapter 2

        I sipped my coffee as I pretended to be on my phone. Just a normal eighteen-year-old girl on her cellular device, in a restaurant that happened to be conveniently located across the street from a cyber-hub. Nothing to see here.

        A man in a formal suit walked by, a woman jogged across the sidewalk with a stroller, and a homeless man was snoring by a trash can in an alley by the cyber-hut. Not unusual, except fifty minutes ago, the business man had been in an orange jump suit working on a concrete construction site down the road, the woman running had been chatting eagerly with a large group of women in eight-inch heels, and the homeless man had rotated exactly 180 degrees, filming the street with a camera hidden inside his fisherman's hat. 

        I took another drink of coffee. 

        Then I straightened slightly.; a couple was walking down the sidewalk, side-by-side across the street. The woman was Asian, with shoulder-length black hair, wearing a form-fitting green dress. The man was in a plain suit and tie, with regular light brown hair cropped just short enough it wasn't unkempt but just long enough to cover a growing bald spot. I watched them for a moment, and then stood and paid while tracking them out of the corner of my eye and listening through the coms units hidden in my earrings. The units were a 'gift' I had found in mother's bag, one of her 'tools'.

        "Darling, you look a bit cold, would you like your scarf?"

        Ah, yes, she looked a bit cold in 23 degree weather, wearing nothing but a short dress, and black heels.

        "Thank you dear, that would be lovely."

        As the man retrieved the agent's sweater from where it rested on his left arm, and draped it around her shoulders carefully, I raced out the door and ran a red light, just barely making it to the curb of their sidewalk before a car rushed past me. I let my foot snag on the curb, and flew forward, falling nearly flat on my face as my phone flew out of my hands and onto the ground before the couple.

        Oops, clumsy me.

        "Oh my! Are you alright?" The woman helped me up the best she could in her heels as the man chased after my phone; it had flown a considerable distance away from me. 

        "Y-yes, thank you," I stuttered, brushing myself off. The man was about to hand me my phone when he caught sight of the back of it.

        "I like your phone case," He told me, watching as I dusted off the S.H.E.I.L.D. logo I had drawn on with a sharpie earlier. I straightened, looking at them. 

        "Thanks," I told the man, looking him straight in the eye, "I got it in T.A.H.I.T.I."

The reaction was instant, if you knew what to look for. The woman's jaw clenched, and the man smiled slightly.

"Tahiti? Really?" He asked, as if he hadn't heard me. Someone spoke in the coms, telling him that I was the person to meet.

"Come with us." The woman wasn't sweet and nice anymore. She looked like she had a mission to complete, and I was the final piece to the puzzle.

I followed them silently through the streets and away from the city eyes. When the woman suddenly turned and motioned for me to follow her instead of Agent Coulson, I said nothing. When she pressed her hand against something I couldn't see, when the plane's reflection shields flipped inward revealing the invisible plane itself, I kept my mouth shut. When she motioned for me to do the same, and the censor scanned my fingerprints, I remained silent so I could hear the sharp intake of breath she made when all the databases in the world couldn't find me. The corner of my mouth twitched. 

We walked up the ramp of the jet and passed a small lab room, and I looked through the glass to see a young woman staring at me in shock; my face remained blank. I marched up the small spiral staircase, down the hall, and into a padded interrogation room. I did my best to memorize the layout of the plane's floor plan, from what I could see.

I sat in the chair provided for me, and quietly watched as Agent May closed the cell door behind her and turned towards me. She studied me, leaning against the far wall as if I was a specimen to be experimented on, and I needed to be scrutinized before the test. I stared back, unflinching. Finally, the door opened again, and Agent Coulson walked in and turned to her.

"You can go now. We need to leave. Simmons is waiting," was all that he said.

Agent May looked at me one last time-a warning look, but I just waved as she walked out. Coulson turned back to me, scanned me over, and took his seat. He put this elbows on the table and leaned forward.

"How do you know about T.A.H.I.T.I.?" he asked immediately. I blinked, and reached into my pocket and pulled out the letter my mother had wrote me, handing it to him. While he was reading it, I pulled the case files out from where they had rested safely inside a hidden pocket in the back of my coat, and laid them before him. He looked from the note to the files, and then back to me.

"You don't seem very sad for someone whose mother just died," he commented. I glanced at the items on the table. I raised an eyebrow. I never said she was dead. 

"She may have been my mother, but she was also someone else in her entirety. You didn't know her."

"Actually," He straightened in his chair. "I did."

I looked at him, cocking my head to the side.

"You mean you were chasing her."

"No, I mean I knew her. On a first-name bases. I worked beside your mother for three years of her life. She was a good agent-one of the best undercover operatives S.H.I.E.L.D. has ever known...which is why I find this very hard to believe."

I studied him. He was telling a story that I found very hard to believe, but he wasn't flinching, and there had been to tells to give way that he was lying to me.

"My mother never worked for S.H.I.E.L.D.," I murmured.

"Did she tell you that?" He asked calmly. Coulson tilted his head as a woman with a British accent told him through the coms what I already knew-there was no record of me in the database. I was a ghost, a nobody, and it shouldn't have been possible for them to find nothing on me with how big of a reach they had and how many people they kept track of. SHIELD had such a large database, in theory, there shouldn't have been a soul on planet Earth that they couldn't pull records on, and yet I knew they hadn't found so much as a birth certificate.  A smile crept along my lips.

Coulson glared at me and said, "Remove your earrings."

I did just that, placing them on the table in front of him.

"How did you know who we were?" He asked.

"Well, the three agents you placed around the cyber-café were pretty obvious, if you know what to look for."

"And you did." He leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms.

I shrugged. "Mom taught me to be observant."

He was silent for a moment, and then spoke again. "I suppose you were eventually going to notice the agents. But how did you know that me and-" he cut off suddenly, remembering that I wasn't supposed to know the agent he had been working beside.

"Agent May?" I supplied.

"How did you know that?"

I raise my eyebrow, tilting my head. For an agent who is as high in the organization as he is, Coulson is surprisingly slow at catching on to things.

"So..." he continued slowly. "How did you know that me and... Agent May were S.H.E.I.L.D. agents?"

"Well, one," I pointed to the earrings. "And two, I was watching when that burst of static came across the frequency." I drummed my fingers on the metal table between us.

"You flinched."

Agent Coulson's eyes narrowed. Suddenly, the same woman I had seen in the lab burst through the door.

"Coulson!" Her eyes flicked between myself and the agent, "We're under attack."