text, un: hawkeye

[westcoasts]

so is pass and fail just a judgment on our performance, or do we reckon it's gonna come back and bite us in the ass in the future?

aurora said she missed us, by the way. ( those are not the words she used. ) she also said that she and eos are free to run their cities in whatever way works for the people under her care, as long as we're well-taken care of.

but, thing is, she gets to define that. says she gets to learn from her actions and inactions in relation to us.

which is something to keep in mind when we're acting as a group or not acting as a group and trying to get answers, or choosing which rules are okay to break and which rules are okay to stretch.

because between here and moorecroft, right now i'd say we've got the better end of the deal.

Comments

[decohere]

the assignment meant nothing beyond where i slept.

this is the easier way. one where i'm not foolishly reliant upon or accountable for the actions of anyone else. it's how i've always operated, and i get by just fine without the peer pressure.

[westcoasts]

is peer pressure just what we're calling company now, because i don't think that's the commonly accepted definition.

also, they say 'no man's an island' for a reason.

[decohere]

tends to be the source of it.

do i seem like the sort that cares what 'they' say? there's only one man whose opinion i respect, and he's not here.

[westcoasts]

yeah, yeah, you're very self-sufficient and neither deflecting nor over-compensating for anything. i get it.

[decohere]

and you're exactly why i prefer being alone.

[westcoasts]

i grow on people.

[decohere]

so do warts.

[westcoasts]

that was almost funny.

[decohere]

thanks. usually i save all my best insults for pym.

[westcoasts]

( ... )

you know hank?

[decohere]

[... oh wait, no, she very much doesn't like this.]

unfortunately.

[westcoasts]

the guy's made mistakes, but haven't we all? although if we're talking a different hank pym, i'm gonna claim ignorance on the nature of what those mistakes are.

how do you know him?

[decohere]

it's distressing to know there's more than one floating around out there, bothering those poor ants.

my father was a colleague of his at shield, but pym couldn't stand to be disagreed with and had him fired. set off a chain reaction that ruined my life. but we're fine now because his wife is actually quite lovely.

[and boy that's an oversimplification of the events.]

[westcoasts]

he's dead.

( or is he. )

and i have so many questions about shield in other universes.

( anyway.

skipping past the fact that there's no 'ex-' in front of that wife—. )

janet's amazing, you're not wrong.

[decohere]

[it's not quite guilt that has her backspacing out of 'good' as a response, she'll just leave that bit hanging.]

shield's dead. exposed as being infiltrated and run by hydra. global terrorists either way.

and janet's the only reason pym's not being scraped off the bottom of my boot

[as if she wasn't hours away from being atomically shredded out of existence, but whatever.]

[westcoasts]

no, it's just there's a whole lot of avengers who seem to have worked for shield. it's weird.

yeah, here's a tip i try and live by: don't trust anything, especially organizations, that's an acronym.

metaphorically or literally?

[decohere]

is it weird? mutually beneficial reinforcement of the american-centric power structure disguised as maintaining world safety, complete with merchandising deals. etc etc. but i never had any interest in being an avenger.

well maybe that advice would have been useful to me at age 6. but no i don't make a habit of trusting anything, especially not this entire set up.

yes.

[westcoasts]

little bit, yeah. never really been all that keen on their operating processes. kind of sits counter to what the avengers are supposed to be about.

and come on, most of the merchandise is cap and we all know that'd exist with or without the avengers.

great answer.

[decohere]

everyone was happy enough to surrender their privacy for a false sense of security, as long as they didn't have to know how the sausage was actually made.

and what are the avengers 'supposed' to be about, if not causing destruction resolving the problems that they caused in the first place? and lunch boxes.

bill always talked about what an irritatingly superior bastard pym was, but it didn't quite prepare me for finally meeting him.

1/2

[westcoasts]

"everyone", huh?

( but the rest of it earns a delay, a series of bubbles and dots appearing and disappearing before, finally, clint is TYPING— )

i don't think you're going to buy whatever answer i give you for that, but do you really think there'd be less problems without the avengers? it'd just be someone or something else, and i can promise you the grass is rarely greener. you don't like the avengers? that's fine, you don't have to. but if you didn't have them, maybe you'd have a bunch of guys running around being directed by norman osborn instead. or some asshole who thinks it's cool to wear a purple sock over his face.

the bad guys don't just go away if you get rid of the good guys.

[westcoasts]

but i don't know, maybe you ended up with a shit version of the avengers. every universe is different, right? and if you did, i'm sorry.

being let down sucks.

especially by people who are supposed to make a difference.

[decohere]

well fine no i didnt personally poll everyone given i didn't have a single outside contact, hard to get a gauge on public perception while confined to the basement labs of secret facilities. all i had was whatever twisted propaganda they were feeding me with to justify what was going on behind the scenes. and nobody seemed to care until it turned out it was the wrong guys doing it. that's the irritatingly hypocritical part.

turns out the avengers could barely stand each other, in the end. even they couldn't decide between them if what they were doing was right, or if they should have to be accountable to the rest of the world. fought about it at an airport they blew up, half of them got sent to the raft. they're all a bunch of incompetent petulant unprofessional self-centered reckless glory-obsessed idiots.

except scott. he's only half those things.

[westcoasts]

how was i supposed to know you were a prisoner?

no-one cares about propaganda until it's coming from the wrong people, that's just how it is. doesn't mean it's right, but... there's always something coming from somewhere, and no-one's gonna say that what they're selling is the same thing as the other guy just viewed from a different lens.

( "couldn't decide between them—". well, that's familiar, he thinks, before—.

"accountable".

it's not how it went down, not for them, but— )

wait

are you talking about the shra?

[decohere]

i wasn't. technically i could have walked away at any point.

[wasn't she? she's still not sure how much of it was by choice, and how much of it was not having much of an alternative as they made sure her survival was entirely dependent upon them. maybe she should have tried harder. been less naive believing that they actually intended to cure her.]

the what? no, the sokovian accords. named after the country the avengers destroyed after stark's failed robot experiment went rogue and decided to wipe out humanity. maybe it would have gotten along with whatever's running this place.

[westcoasts]

ultron wasn't stark

( typed, sent, wait—. "ultron was hank" probably isn't the response to have here. "wasn't it slorenia?" is probably also not great.

...nor, maybe, "I think that's more on the murderous robot than the avengers". )

we can probably chalk this one down to differences between universes.

sounds like yours got the short end of the stick.