GOLDEN GIRL, STEVE ROGERS!

GOLDEN GIRL!

( Set before the events of THE AVENGERS )

INTRODUCTION.

CARMEN ESPINOSA had been a scientist at SHIELD since she was 22 years old. She graduated from college earlier than expected, as a star student with brains better than anyone else.

Her work was her pride and joy, everyday she bounced through the labs working on her projects. Hours on this, hours on that. Never had they presented her a task she wasn't eager to take on and soon to compete.

All her calculations were assisted by nothing but herself, as she had a small secret. Her brain condition.

Of course SHIELD knew she had synesthesia, a condition which confused her senses, and often meant that she associated the answers to her questions with foods. Last week she discovered that the answer to a particularly confusing question about radioactivity smelled like peanuts.

But what she had never told them was a small surprise she received just 3 months before they fired her. That she had a brain tumour, which was the most likely cause of her answers smelling much stronger than before.

It was also the reason she had began to visualise her calculations, rather than write them down. Words and numbers would dance before her and move themselves, a confusing thing but something that allowed her to work much faster.

Though each time she saw her words they came with headaches and sometimes migranes, so her doctor quickly provided her with some tablets to help with it.

Her fear of how she would be treated in work scared her, thinking they could stop her doing some of her research incase she made her condition much worse, meant she never told her bosses how ill she was. The condition she had since a baby was something she rarely told tales of anyway.

After months of crying alone at night, consistently answering polite questions with 'I'm fine', she was brought into her mandatory health check. It was required by all staff and here was where a few signs of irregular brain activity led to an MRI.

By the end of the week her boss had discovered all about her condition, and as her friend, forced her to leave SHIELD. He cared about her wellbeing, she had worked with him for 5 years and he didn't want to be the cause of her death. He already blamed himself for her tumour.

He looked into what could be done for her, but it was deemed untreatable. In a sad state Carmen was flew home by a SHIELD jet, accompanied by an agent headed to a new mission. She felt saddened by the fact her boss hadn't bothered to see her off himself.

It was a whirlwind, one day she was in her lab developing some new technologies and the next she was on a plane to Puerto Rico. She had been so consumed by work for the past half a decade she had no idea what she was to do back home.

Her family had supported her since she was a child, her parents happy that she was blossoming, though sad that she was always so far away from them. Though she visited them every year in the holidays.

A year passed before the stranger knocked on her door.