It All Started In A McDonald's...

I promise that's the chapter title and not the name of an Author's Note where I'm gonna tell you I'm moving on. I may not be as active but I sure as hell ain't leaving this place.

Damn.

Fuck off, you. You're the one that'll never leave ME.

Heheh. I shall always corrupt your thoughts and infect every piece of literature you ever write. Whether you like it or not.

Shut up. Anyway - so Homecoming is finished, the movie, that is, and now Jamie gets to move on to her next adventure. But before she gets to the next big movie in her journey, she has more normal people things to do.

If normal people were friends with gods and shit.

Yes, quite.

---

One month later

Something crazy happened on the humble day of Thursday June 30th, 2016.

Oh, but Jamie, the voices in my head say, because I'm insane and have hundreds of those chorusing at me at once, something crazy happens to you every day now that you're an Avenger and a pigeon hunter.

Well, to be honest, I'm getting used to that bit of my life, but usually nothing ever happens to me during summer holidays. I've never been to a summer camp (duh, we're broke as fuck) and I've never had a summer job either. Mr Zhao had offered me a job at the karate place each summer since I was fourteen but I would feel bad about accepting since the business was just as broke as me.

So June was usually one of the worst months of the year for me. Not only was it starting to get hotter (I hate hot weather) but nothing ever happened. Like, yeah, no school. No work except summer homework which I never did because I didn't feel like it when the stupid weather was stupid. I'd honestly be dead if I lived any further south of the country.

It hadn't been too bad, I thought, as I wandered through my apartment at ten a.m., glass of orange juice in hand, and checking my phone, which I had open on Instagram. Bit boring to begin with, and training wasn't going as well as I'd hoped when I first heard I'd be training with the whole team. New Compound, new everything, it seemed, since everyone in the team had been given entirely new unique schedules (mine and Loki's were the only two which were identical) which changed every other week, so fitting in their training times with mine was much more difficult.

Plus... only Maximoff and Barton seemed content with the whole 'helping me train' thing. Barnes appeared indifferent to everything, but since he still had patrol duties during the morning I didn't see him all that much anyway. Peter obviously didn't come anymore, though we occasionally did an informal sort of patrol round where we lived (don't tell anyone, I'm not meant to be doing that).

Most of the time I got shoved in the simulation room. See, Rogers had given me tasks I needed to complete for me (and Loki) to be allowed back out to do Avenger-y patrol-y stuff again, and one of these was to earn a 90% success rate on the various scenarios in the Sim Room, which seemed simple enough at first, and I was really excited for it at first, since I'd never been allowed in the one in the Tower. I'd hoped that would be the easiest task.

I've done twenty three scenarios, and my current success rate is a mind boggling: 0%.

I sighed as I thought about that to myself, taking a sip of my juice, leaning against the kitchen counter as I refreshed the feed on my phone. It was hopeless now. I remember Loki telling me after I'd failed my fifth mission that it meant I needed forty five successes. When it was ten, it was ninety.