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“No,” Eve declares, setting down the case file for the team, “absolutely not.”
It’s a curious assortment of people; she recognizes two of them, Dr. Banner and Tonya Stark, as the two women who’d been in the room with her when she’d woken up. Stark flies a robot suit. Banner works on some kind of bastardization of the super soldier serum. The others — Henriette Pym and Janet van Dyne, who the files casually inform her are in a homosexual relationship, — apparently possess the ability to change size at will. Eve recognizes them, too, remembers the giant hand coming down on her as she’d tried to escape the facility, remembers several eyefuls of tit.
“If you have religious objections, Captain Rogers—“ Fury starts, but she cuts him off.
“It’s not that. I don’t care what anyone does in the bedroom, as long as I don’t have to see it.” Eve feels a prickle of unease at her own answer, the discomfort of incomplete truth.
Fury stares her down. He’s only about an inch shorter than her, barely smaller in the shoulders. The scars around his eyepatch cut severely into the soft flesh of his cheeks. “Then what?”
“I’m not going to be in charge of some goddamn girl gang,” she says, “I led men in the war, and I did a damn fine job doing it. Sticking me here— it’s insulting.”
Fury stares at her, nonplussed. “Do you think my team is inferior,” he says flatly, “because of their gender?”
Eve scowls at him. “I think it’s one hell of a coincidence everyone else on your little PR team is a civilian gal with some kind of cutesy gimmick.”
“Well, Stark is hardly—“
“I saw what Stark is.” The image of the sharp red nails and a sharper sardonic smile swims in front of her vision unbidden, and she feels a wave of uncontrollable frustration with it. “Give me real work.”
For a moment she thinks she’s won. But Fury looks at her with distant, cold disappointment, and his tone is final.
“This is the work we have for you, Captain Rogers,” he says, “I hope you’re able to be more respectful to the team than you have been to me.”
She stares at him, hands balling into fists. Reflexively, he moves back half an inch, and she wonders how stable he thinks she is.
“One year,” he says, “if you’re still unhappy with the team after a year, we’ll relocate you.”
“Six months.” Eve counters.
He holds out his hand. She shakes it.
The team, as she’d expected, does very little the first few weeks except look pretty. Eve smiles uncomfortably through photo ops and allows Janet van Dyne to take her shopping.
The only thing she likes about the future, she decides after that excursion, is stretchy fabric. She wouldn’t wear leggings out in public — she’d not a whore — but they’re ridiculously comfortable when she works out alone in her apartment or hits the gym at three in the morning. She can find no other clothes that suit her — every cut feels unfamiliar and unflattering.
Van Dyne doesn’t seem to think so. She’s a tiny, bright-eyed woman, the kind of person a burlap sack would look good on, and, in Eve’s humble opinion, entirely unsuited to the cold realities of war.
“That looks good,” Janet keeps saying, and Eve keeps thinking you’d say that. But the other woman’s eyes don’t linger on her, stay politely on the fabrics, the magazines.
What’s wrong with me, Eve wonders, trying not to feel wounded, I’m not uglier than Pym.
“You don’t have to wear things like that, you know,” Janet says, gesturing over at the thirteenth plain khaki shirt Eve has picked out, “not here.”
Eve scowls, “What’s wrong with the shirt?”
“Well, nothing, it’s just…” She holds it up, lets it crumple out of her hands in all its doubtful glory. It’s a men’s XL, polo-style, with the symbol of a little horse or camel or something on the breast pocket. “I mean, Cap, I’ve read your file. You went to art school. You wore your hair in victory rolls. You won a prize for dress design in 1939. You can’t tell me—“
Eve cuts her off, “All that’s in my file?”
“Yeah, everyone’s shit is in their files,” Janet says, then frowns, “sorry I said shit.”
Eve squeezes the plastic coat hanger until it breaks. The shirt she’s holding — beige and formless— falls onto her feet. It’s less satisfying than she expects it to be.
“I fought with men,” she grinds out, “I led men. And at least they had the decency not to act like my sensibilities would be hurt by a couple cuss words.”
Jan has the decency to look cowed, which confirms Eve’s suspicions — fresh meat, civilian, not cut out for this.
“Sorry,” she says, “I just meant…”
“Drop it, Van Dyne,” Eve says, and storms out.
When she returns to buy the leggings — and the assortment of polo shirts and khakis, baggy enough to hide her already barely-there hips and breasts— she comes alone.
Five months, twenty-five days, and fourteen hours.
Not enticed by the task of team bonding — which she assumes is code for press photos of girl talk and braiding each other’s hair, Eve doesn’t spend much time with the Ultimates.
She does attend briefing lunches, during which she watches the team. Van Dyne and Pym always sit next to each other, though they snap at each other just as often as they joke around. Pym’s got a mean edge to her, a competitiveness Eve recognizes uncomfortably they share. Neither of them talk to Eve after the shopping incident, and she tells herself that suits her fine.
Stark, even more so than Eve, is an Ultimates cryptid. Eve’s never seen her in the SHIELD gym or rec room, and she misses two briefings for every one she attends. She’s full of herself. She’s flighty. She wears her black hair in a sharp, unfriendly bob so glossy and well-maintained it looks almost fake. Her nails are sharp and red and predatory, and the perfume she wears is laced with an under tinge of chemicals. She wears v-necks that go down to her belly button and blazers with nothing underneath. She touches people like she owns them, casually reaching into Eve’s pockets or running her hands over Eve’s buzzed hair.
Eve knows the exact shape of her thighs, the line of collarbones, the way her nipples poke through the fabric of her blouses. It’s impossible not to know these things, with how she dresses.
All in all, she’s a flighty show-off, and she’s fucking magnetic.
“See something you like, darling?” Stark asks her once, when she catches Eve’s eyes on her during a briefing about Thor, who’s apparently some cuckoo hippie from Norway that’s refusing to join the team.
Eve finally peels her eyes away from Tonya’s plunging neckline. “No.”
“You sure about that?” Tonya asks, her hand casually taking hold of one side of her shirt. For one crazy second, Eve thinks she’s about to flash her. “Kinda looked like a whole lot of eyes-at-tit-level, there.”
Eve flushes. There’s something different about hearing the word tits out of the mouth of a woman, whatever she’d told Janet.
“I have no interest in your tits,” she forces out, staring Tonya dead in the eyes.
“Well, now you’re just hurting my tits’ feelings.” Tonya leers at her, pats her on the shoulder, and steps out of the room.
Five months, ten days, and twenty-two hours.
“Bet you ten dollars I could sleep with the president,” Tonya says, on the limo ride to the gala.
“No one bet with her,” Betsy Ross says, from the passenger seat, “last thing we need right now.”
“Ten thousand,” Tonya counters.
“That’s a lot of money,” Pym says, looking over at Van Dyne. Everyone except Eve and Fury wear dresses, and Eve tries to stop her eyes from catching on the sparkles around the hems of Tonya’s, just by her thighs, and the sheer lace on Janet’s neckline.
“Yeah, and it might win Thor over,” Tonya says, “she said fuck Bush, didn’t she? Had a big sign and everything.”
Five months, two days, nine hours.
Two weeks go by, and there’s nothing to fight.
Eve catches Dr. Banner in the rec room as she comes up to grab a protein shake after her work outs. Banner is picking at a salad, wilted salad leaves and squishy-looking tomatoes.
“How’s it going, Cap?” she asks.
“Eh,” Eve shrugs, opening the shake, and sits down next to her. She doesn’t mind Banner; she’s mousy and a little petty, but she’s easy. “The usual. How’s your— your serum thing? The Hulk?”
Banner grimaces.
“The usual,” she says, “she’s gone, it seems. Good riddance.”
She stabs hard at her tomato as she says it, sending it flopping out of the little plastic tray it sits in, leaving trails of ranch dressing behind it.
“You don’t sound happy about it,” Eve says.
“Well, at least with the Hulk I felt like somebody,” Banner says, “God knows what the hell else SHIELD’s gonna let me be.”
Eve scoffs, letting her disdain show on her face, and says nothing.
“What?” Banner demands.
“Cut the self pity, doc,” Eve says, standing, “you’ll never be anyone if you keep waiting for people to let you.”
She chugs her shake on the way out, heading home. This, she tells herself, is why she hadn’t wanted to work with touchy-feely civilians.
Four months, twenty-eight days, sixteen hours.
The Hulk attacks New York City.
In retrospect, Eve probably should have seen that one coming.
The team assembles in record time. Eve expects someone to chicken — her money is on Pym or Stark— but, to her surprise, they’re all there.
“We need to put together a plan,” Tonya’s voice is distorted by the suit’s speakers, but retains its recognizable flare.
“Couldn’t be simpler, Ms. Stark,” Eve says, pulling her red gloves up to her elbows, “we hit her until she drops.”
“It’s Dr. Stark, actually,” Tonya corrects her, and off they go.
She’s ready to have to deal with whatever strike force is able to provide her once the team drops or runs, but she doesn’t have to. Everyone stays, everyone lives, and everyone except Pym pulls her weight.
The Hulk breaks Eve’s nose, cracks her ribs, and snaps her arm straight out of its socket. It’s the first time she feels at home in months.
Afterwards, she helps the EMTs load Pym’s huge unconscious body onto the gurneys, helps Janet wipe down the ear wax she’s covered with, helps Tonya out of the suit.
Tonya looks disgusting. She’s covered in bright green flight gel, red imprints from the helmet visible on her face. Her wig — and it had been a wig all along, Eve realizes— had come off, revealing much sparser hair on top of her head.
Once the reporters are gone she clutches a telephone pole and throws up for several long minutes, coughing dark liquid Eve knows by smell is wine.
She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand and turns, notices Eve watching her.
“What’re you looking at, dollface?” She waggles her eyebrow and leers, mocking flirtation. “Want to me make you feel like the man you try to be so bad?”
“What, you’re a dyke too?”
Tonya’s eyes go wide, and she looks hurt, scandalized. “You didn’t have a problem with Giant-Woman and the Wasp! Fuck’s so wrong with me that you—“
Eve holds up a hand.
“No,” she says, “I’m asking if you’re serious.”
“Oh.” Tonya looks over herself, clearly surprised, frowns like she’s trying to figure out a riddle. “What, like this?”
Eve grunts, rolls her eyes. “You in or not?”
“What— fuck, yeah, I’m in.”
Three hours later she’s under Tonya’s silk bedsheets, still feeling the tingling on her skin where Tonya’s clever hands and lips had left their mark, still tasting rum and sex on her lips, that they talk about it.
“You still planning on transferring off the team?” Tonya asks.
“How do you know I was planning on transferring off the team?” For a moment, she considers the possibility she’d somehow let it slip during sex.
“I know everything,” Tonya says, “Fury’s ridiculously hackable. Stop deflecting.”
Eve yawns. Her jaw still hurts. It’ll be better, she knows, in a matter of days.
“No,” she says, “I guess not.”
Tonya laughs, letting her hand skin over Eve’s six pack. She’s insisted on wearing the wig to bed, and now she seems like she’s going to sleep in it. “Attagirl.”
“Shoulda remembered my roots,” Eve says, “half the girls in the WAC were butches anyhow. Only reason I joined in the first place.”