Just A Normal Kid

Chapter 33

Rosie had been really happy when she'd gotten a message from Shuri that Jake was almost well enough to come back home. She'd said that he was responding well to the treatment the Wakandan doctors were providing and the tech that Rosie had helped make before she left was proving quite helpful.

She grinned proudly, remembering the device she had come up with, which hacked into a person's hippocampus to help clear traumatic memories. It was an idea she'd been trying to make a reality for a long time, but it was too expensive to try and manufacture in America. Shuri had managed to modify it, combining it with the medical and technological advancements of Wakanda to make a cheaper, more practical version of it.

Shuri had also forwarded the data and scenes they had managed to recover from Jake's memory, with a note saying that they were obtained painlessly without Jake having to relive the painful moments of them.

She had immediately jumped at the new intel and had found quite a few agents that were still at large, many of them working in governments all over the world. Rosie had run facial-recognition on many of the people visible in Jake's memories and once she got their names, hacked into databases and personal records to find dirt on them.

After that, she forwarded everything she had found on the agents to their higher-ups in the government who she knew were not HYDRA. Within days of the team being gone on their big mission, she had managed to expose and get a number of HYDRA agents arrested.

Rosie cackled evilly when she read the next name. 'Thaddeus Ross, Secretary of State, USA.' Ross was going to pay for what he had done to Bruce and dozens of other mutants. Yes, she had heard about the Raft Prison, and dug up files on it, horrified by the measures put in place there to keep mutants 'under control'. Shock collars, manacles, straitjackets, temperature control, drugs in their food. It was horrifying.

Incensed, she began collecting every scrap of data she could find on Ross, during which she found out that he had been spotted in the same vicinity as one Helmut Zemo, also HYDRA. There was no footage or proof that they had met, but the two men being in the same city at the same time was enough to raise her suspicions. Neither was dumb enough to meet where cameras could see them, but her gut told her that they were plotting something.

It was only after sighting Zemo in Lagos where the team's latest mission had gone awry, that she managed to realise what the two were planning.

"Hey Maria? I've got some disturbing news."

CLINT BARTON'S POV:

Clint was close to dozing off in his seat during the debriefing, having had close to no rest at all for the last few days. Their mission in Nigeria had gone south and had ended up in a chase through the streets of Lagos. At the end, one of the weapon smugglers had set off a bomb in the middle of a street. Wanda had immediately used her powers to contain the blast and was in the process of levitating it high enough for the explosion to not affect anyone when another smuggler somehow shot her.

A bullet had hit her shoulder, another one tearing through her calf and she had collapsed, her hold on the bomb disappearing. It had exploded about thirty feet in the air, demolishing most of a nearby office building. Wanda had been taken to a hospital, while the rest of the team helped in search and rescue at the downed building. They had been helping pull people and bodies out of the rubble for the last three days and Clint was utterly exhausted. Everyone had gathered in the debriefing room in S.H.I.E.L.D, covered in ash, dust and blood, barely able to stand.

The only ones doing the actual talking were Steve and another Level 11 agent who was in charge of the S.H.I.E.L.D teams doing cleanup, which Clint was thankful for. The memories from the aftermath of the mission were haunting him and his head was so cloudy that he had no way of differentiating between his nightmares and reality. He gratefully followed an agent who showed him to the Medbay and Clint happily collapsed on a bed, falling asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, ignoring the doctors coming to patch him up.