fight the hurricane

dried sage, rosemary, terracotta pots blossoming with fat, flat leaves of basil and the tiny star-like sprouts of Thyme. He sees the way a sunburst of marigold brightens a pot painted sea-glass blue and he touches the golden orange petals gently. "Good for healing," he murmurs thoughtfully, hand dropping back to his side.

"-- Ale, right. Sorry, got a little sidetracked." Raleigh grins, looking at Thor through the fall of thick blonde hair that never seems to stay pushed back from his brow.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. — Hamlet, Act III Scene I

back in those days, he’d been a king.  

now, he sits at a plastic table that wobbles under the weight of his elbow. vinyl creaks with rocking hips.  soft cotton rolls up to his bicep. it’s been slimmed down by years of fatherhood and a different kind of lifestyle than he used to lead.  he no longer has a hundred press-ups to pump blood out from his heart every morning.  

his left sleeve pins up near his shoulder.  

today, the prosthetic rubbed his skin too pink, twisted just a little too sensitive.  

today, instead of dog tags with a pink bead for wife and daughter each, a blue bead for his son, he wears his wedding ring looped through a simple chain that bounces against his sternum when he walks.  

he sits across the table at the v.a., a pamphlet tapping beneath his fingertip, and looks back at the young soldier with crow’s feet crinkling the corners of his eyes. 

The desert sun still shows on his face, a mix of tanned skin and scattered freckles, and in his hair, a sandy yellow that look washed out beneath the faintly buzzing fluorescent lights. He's still cleaning sand out of his luggage, shaking it out of his clothes.

Raleigh had been sent home in a hurry, a confusing mess of grief and paperwork and red-eye flights that had landed him in a city that was now strange and strangely empty.

Coming home? He hadn't come home any more than Yancy had.

Once, the Beckets were a fearsome pair of Jaegar copilots. More than just good fighters, they were halves of a whole, and when they took on a Kaiju, they always came back victorious. 

Until they didn’t.           Until neither came back at all.

They have an audience, a ring of people eager to see what she could do (--trained and disciplined in a way Raleigh had never been, even in his prime. Natasha was a tempered force of nature, Raleigh was a storm spread out over barren stretches of earth, stretched too thin--). He could feel their eyes on him as well, judging and evaluating, just as she was.

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. — Hamlet, Act III Scene I

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. — Hamlet, Act III Scene I

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. — Hamlet, Act III Scene I

                             indie LEO FITZ from MARVEL’S AGENTS OF SHIELD