Blackout | Matt Murdock

chapter eight | shield isn't dead and michaela isn't quite human

When Michaela abruptly jolts awake, she realizes, in a haze of panic, that she's not at home. This is not her bed. And that woman who spooks at her sudden reanimation is not someone she recognizes.

"You're awake!" she squeaks, unnecessarily.

Michaela ignores her for a second, scoping out the room she's in. Everything's high tech, monitors everywhere, medical equipment arranged neatly on tables. The harsh tang of chemicals, though, is strangely absent. Not a hospital, then, which is probably for the best. Michaela still doesn't have health insurance, which, as a superhero, is something of a fatal problem for her. At least she's beginning to understand that, not least because right now she certainly feels like she's on the verge of death.

That's when it comes back to her — the fight, Kim, Coulson and SHIELD—

"You're... SHIELD?" Michaela rasps, and the woman, decked out in a spiffy lab coat, crosses the relatively small room to stand at her bedside. She reaches out to the wall beside her and taps at a screen, bringing up what look to be medical records. Michaela's? Most likely.

"I'm an agent of SHIELD, yes," the woman confirms, frowning at the screen before smoothing out her expression into a kindly smile that she turns on Michaela. She's British, though that hardly registers for Michaela when weighed against literally every other thing that's going on. "Jemma Simmons, at your service."

Michaela subtly stretches herself out atop the bed, testing her range of movement. Ribs are more bruised than broken, she thinks; the roadburn on her arms has been bandaged and numbed with something; she's aching everything but not as intensely as she'd figured she would be. Heavy-duty painkillers, or... it could be something else, probably, who the fuck knows what SHIELD gets up to while not actually existing in any like, legal way. Unfortunately, while she isn't in nearly as much pain as she was bracing for, she's woozy as hell, and that typically doesn't lend itself to making a grand escape from one's possible captors.

Stifling a groan, Michaela shuffles back until she's propped up enough against the pillows that she's not flat on her back, which is when she (belatedly) realizes something else.

Her mask and goggles are gone, along with the rest of her costume.

"What the fuck," she hisses, her eyes darting to Simmons', who blinks, face blanking in confusion. "Does the concept of a secret identity mean nothing to you?"

Simmons blinks again, then laughs, which does not endear her to Michaela in the slightest. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to... I'm not laughing at you," she says, gentling her voice and subsequently pissing Michaela off even more, "it's just that... Well, you've been on SHIELD's radar ever since the attempted robbery at that store... Cody's, was it? It wasn't a difficult leap to connect you to the hero who saved the day."

"Right," Michaela says, dry as bone. It's a concern she'd had back then, that people would recognize something about her, or someone would have seen her sneaking into the alley, or that Emmett might've remembered a detail about that nailed her identity. But nothing like that had happened. Or, she'd thought it hadn't. "That guy. Coulson? He said you guys weren't Hydra. S'that why you're violating my privacy?"

"Oh, we're not—" Simmons falters, paling slightly at the mention of Hydra. Michaela raises a brow in response, unsympathetic. She'd agreed to meet with Coulson's team but she didn't agree to being stripped of her cover, and someone's going to answer for that, even if they apparently already knew. "I'm sorry, I am, it's a hazard of the work we do. Information is such a valuable commodity, and in the beginning we didn't know if you were a threat or not. You're in our systems but your information doesn't go beyond our database, I assure you."