Chapter Text
It was an ordinary Monday morning for DEO Agent Susan Vasquez: out of bed at five a.m., sit-ups, push-ups, chin-ups, and a two-mile run before the Nevada heat became unbearable. Then she was showering, throwing on her black tacticals, strapping her Glock to her thigh and riding her motorcycle to work in the underground bunker of a secret government black site.
Ordinary was relative, after all.
By seven (and it had taken her years to stop thinking in military time), she was seated in the command center with a USMC mug of crappy coffee. On her tablet, she had her notes about the escaped prisoners, but she'd need more intel on them before she could posit scenarios. Once more she sent a secure email to her informant in Metropolis, but she didn't expect much. She had gotten into obscure top-secret sites before through persuasion, guile and ninja-level stealth, but some sites were more obscure and more top secret than others.
"Agent Vasquez! Can I see you in my office?"
Director Hank Henshaw's deep voice had nuances in it. While the statement was not exactly a question, it also included... a certain curiosity, she thought. She strode into his office to find him wearing his "FBI" suit and tie, and looking very Black compared to the extreme paleness of the young woman sitting in front of his desk. As Vasquez eyed the woman, she couldn't decide if the pallor was more due to genetics or, perhaps, a hangover. She was dressed in tight black jeans and four-inch fuck-me heels. Her long black hair looked like she'd just crawled out of bed and her mascara was smeared under her eyes.
With a touch of annoyance, Vasquez said to the girl, "Rough night?"
Henshaw said, "Agent Vasquez, I'd like you to meet our new recruit, Alexandra Danvers."
Quiet and wincing, the woman said, "Just Alex is fine."
"We usually go by last names here," said Vasquez.
Danvers nodded glumly.
Vasquez cocked a questioning eyebrow at Henshaw.
"Agent Vasquez, you will be in charge of her training. With breaks for other... eventualities, of course."
Danvers looked confused.
"Alien attacks," Vasquez translated. "Have you ever interacted with aliens, Danvers?"
The woman's eyes went blank. "Not that I know of."
And that was a very interesting response, thought Vasquez. Most new recruits either went goggle-eyed and rushed to describe their close encounter or they looked bitter and showed the scars. Denial was uncommon enough to be astronomically impossible. In her head, Vasquez started a new file, labeled: Danvers, Alex. Risk Factor: ?
//
A lot of things could happen to a person to cause the DEO to recruit them. Usually it was a combination of an extraordinary education or skillset and a traumatic interaction with aliens. Vasquez had gained the former in her first tour in Iraq and the latter in her second. That's also where she got the scars on her thigh that looked unsurprisingly like clawmarks.
Good reason for that.
Director Henshaw had flown to the Landstuhl Military Hospital in Germany to talk to her between the surgeries about the possibility of using her training in combat and threat assessment to help protect the humans from alien attacks. At first she had said that she was done with predicting terror attacks, but then Henshaw had pointed out that predicting human behavior, particularly that based on human ideologies, was easy, that maybe Vasquez and her unit had been taken by surprise because they had been, well, not sloppy but jaded, preparing for what they had seen a thousand times rather than for what they were seeing in the moment. And he had shown her photographs of the evidence--tracks, spore, scat--that nothing human had made. And Vasquez hadn't looked, hadn't known to look.
"Can you teach me?" she'd asked him fiercely.
"Yes, I can."
//
On Tuesday, Vasquez had taken Danvers down to Rick in HR to get the paperwork done.
"How are they hangin', Rick?" Vasquez asked with a grin.
The balding old man snorted. "Great, not that you'd care, Sue." He pulled out forms in triplicate and handed them to Danvers with a ballpoint pen.
She stared at him. "Paper? Seriously? It's the twenty-first century."
Rick shook his head. "Paper can't be hacked."
Vasquez gestured to the paper calendar with rescue dogs on it and the first eight days crossed off with thick black marker. "How many days left?"
"Four hundred thirty-five, Susie."
"Call me Susie again, Rick, and you'll retire tomorrow in a wheelchair."
"Whatever you say, Agent Vasquez, Ma'am."
As they left his office, Danvers asked, "Where are we going? And you said everybody goes by last names."
"Field agents do, not administrative staff. And we're going to put you through a diagnostic."
The woman's hunched shoulders relaxed. "Oh, well, that's all right. I test well."
Vasquez smiled and led her into the combat room. "Welcome, Danvers, to the Green Octagon of Eternal Agony. You will be spending a lot of time here with me this year and you will, I promise you, learn to love it."