#mxckingbirdsings

She’d left the window cracked. For him? It could have been for the breeze. Even on a sticky, thick New York August night, the rickety window AC units straining to keep up, you needed all the airflow you could get. His own apartment, barely bigger than a closet, had a shitty little fan on every available surface.

Still, he liked to think it was for him. She knew his MO by now--front doors were for chumps. Spider-Man would sneak through a window or down the roof access, or so help him.

So here Peter was, exhausted from patrol, crawling up the side of her building, slipping through the window, landing on her floor with in a quiet crouch. Slowly, he stood up, pulled off his mask, threw it on the ground, and ran his fingers through his hair. It was probably matted and sweaty from the night and the mask. Really attractive stuff.

“Hey, Bobbi,” he called. His voice was hoarse, tired, glad to be done for the night; he needed some water. As he walked towards the kitchen, he called for her again. “You home? You would not believe the shit these kids tried to pull on me tonight. If you see some TikToks going around? Don’t worry about it."

It wasn’t the first time Rictor had bitten off more than he could chew. If anything, biting off more than he could chew was an ageold habit Rictor boasted, something that had been with him for so long now that he really didn’t know who he’d be without it.

But usually, biting off more than he could chew didn’t involve ducking behind overturned pickup trucks with strangers to avoid gunfire. Usually.

The case was supposed to be an open and shut kind of thing. A kid worried about her friend who’d come to XFI when the police told her he’d probably just run off to piss off his parents no matter how much she insisted he’d never do that. Usually, it was the kind of thing Ric would solve in an afternoon by finding the missing person laying low at a shelter or community center. This time, it seemed, there was more to it than that.

Hydra was involved, somehow. Fucking Hydra. And now, there was a woman here who moved like SHIELD, ducking beside him behind aforementioned pickup truck which added a whole new complication to the mix. (Was he still wanted by SHIELD? It was hard to keep up.) Glancing over, Ric squinted his eyes and tilted his head to the side. “Uh, I’m not really much of a planner. If we’re being honest, I was gonna make a break for it and hope they’d focus their bullets on you. But if you’ve got ideas...” He trailed off, wincing as another bullet hit the truck behind him. “I mean, I’m all ears.”

@mxckingbirdsings​

This was - in Bobbis opinion - the best and only time to talk about their problems, in a training room where they could take out the anger on a punching bag or occasionally one another if they felt like it but that didn't stop her from judging this particular choice in Daisy's life. "I see the grey area Dais but cmon -" Another punch landed on the bag with a swift kick to follow and then a knee, she refused to rely on her enhancements to get by in the field, "- isn't the creep factor alone not a turn off?"

“Creep factor?” Daisy punched the bag one more time, letting her shoulders slump after she finished following through. Her eyes now solidly on Bobbi as she tried to explain what she was feeling. “I don’t even know where to start with that,” she said pointedly. The only thing that disappointed her about the situation was that she couldn’t rightfully say they were dating. They were just living together. With benefits. “People said the same thing about me,” Daisy finally said. “People said worse about me, actually. You just don’t know him like I do.” 

After a while, you got used to aliens. Like, they became commonplace. Boring, almost. And Simon never thought he’d get to a place where aliens were the kind of thing he considered ‘boring,’ but, well. He never thought a magic ring from outer space would break him out of Guantanamo Bay, either. Life, as it turned out, was full of surprises. 

Surprises like, for example, a woman with batons jumping in during a fight with commonplace, boring aliens that Simon normally would have clumsily handled on his own and told Hal he ‘totally nailed in a way that proved a promotion was definitely in order’ later. Most of the time, fighting aliens on Earth was accompanied with the soundtrack of people running away. But this woman...

“Hey,” Simon ducked a blast from the alien’s gun, making a face at it before turning back to the blonde. “You really shouldn’t be here. No offense. It’s just --- This is kind of, like, my job. That I... don’t get paid for. And that no one really tells me to do. And... Okay, maybe job isn’t the right word, but this isn’t-” He ducked another blast, groaning. “This is my thing, is what I’m trying to say!”