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I wrote a thing
Last night we watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier. And so ... I wrote a snippet of a White Collar fusion. (WHAT.) This is not an actual fic, just a vignette, and it basically stops in the middle of a scene. I don't know if it's going to grow into the epic story it apparently wants to be, but I figured I'd toss it out there.
There are only the mildest of spoilers for the movie. If you know who the Winter Soldier is, you basically don't have to worry about being spoiled. If you aren't familiar with the Marvel universe, you can assume "generic spy shenanigans with bionic soldiers" and proceed accordingly.
--
They left the rhinestone-spangled New York skyline behind, flying across dark countryside mapped with a tracery of glittering highways. The helicopter was a military machine, sleek and black and fast, and Diana flew it like an extension of her body.
"No in-flight magazines?" Neal asked. "No snacks? Next time I'm flying first class."
"If you don't stop complaining," Diana said, "I'll put you in the cargo bay."
It took him all of five minutes to cautiously reach out towards the controls. Diana smacked his hand.
"I just wanted to see if I could turn the radio on."
"Hands off the helicopter unless you have a pilot's license."
Neal opened his mouth.
".... that actually involved going through flight school."
He closed his mouth again.
"If you're really good, I could sing to you," Diana said, the corner of her mouth quirking up.
"Pass."
They began to lose altitude, dropping until Neal began to hope Diana knew what she was doing; some of those telephone poles missed the helicopter's skids by inches. And then the last small town fell behind and they were skimming across a small lake, riffled with moonlight. On the far shore, a glittering string of lights marked their destination, and the banter dropped away. It was time to get serious.
"I'll draw their attention once you're in, and then pick you up on the roof," Diana said. She looked scary and competent, dressed all in black; her leather jacket was studded with pockets that Neal supposed were packed with spare ammo, knives and things of that nature. "You do what you do."
"Don't I get a pep talk, a 'break a leg' or something like that? On second thought," he added hastily, "forget 'break a leg'. That's terrible advice. Especially on a heist."
"This is a SHIELD-sponsored stealth operation, not a heist."
"Tomato, tomahto," Neal said.
"Here's some advice for you," Diana said, lowering the helicopter behind a concrete warehouse-like structure that shielded them to some extent from the bulk of the facility. "Don't get shot."
"That's very comforting." Neal did a quick equipment check of his own: lock picks, security-system hacking tools, special SHIELD extras for once he was inside, et cetera. Diana had insisted he carry a gun; it felt uncomfortably heavy at his hip.
She didn't touch down, just hovered. Neal opened his door and the rotors' downdraft whipped his hair. They were still some twenty feet off the ground. Neal hesitated instinctively -- it was still hard to convince himself that he could handle the shock of a landing like that.
"Oh, come on," Diana said, noticing his hesitation. "I've pushed you off higher things than that during training. People are going to start shooting at us if I stay here too long, so move."
Neal moved.
The wind caught him, and reflexes he was still learning to control straightened him out. His feet smacked into gravel, ankles and knees absorbed the impact like springs. He crouched and rolled just because he could and it made a cool entrance, coming up with his heart thumping and all his senses alert. There was no one to see him ... luckily.
"Be careful," Diana said over the radio. Now that he could no longer see her face, she sounded worried.
"I'm always careful."
He heard her laugh, and downdraft fluttered the shrubbery around him as the helicopter turned in midair. Somewhere not too far away, Neal heard a voice barking orders. Time to go.
There was no way to drop in on a top-secret HYDRA research facility without setting off some alarm bells. They were most likely expecting a commando team, though -- not a thief. Particularly a somewhat enhanced thief. Following the mental map of the facility's corridors that Diana had made him memorize, Neal dodged several security teams and at one point wriggled through a ventilation duct. (Why were the ducts always big enough for a burglar? He'd thought about recommending SHIELD add security cameras to their ducts, but then realized that, being SHIELD, they'd probably add lasers and spinning knives and twelve different kinds of machine gun instead, and he hardly wanted to be responsible for some poor schmoe being sliced in half.)
"How much longer?" Diana asked through his radio. She sounded tense.
"Almost there," he whispered, and then had to slip back into the ducts to avoid another patrol. "What's the matter, can't find me?" The long-healed scar with the subcutaneous tracker under his skin itched, as it often did when he thought about it. Mozzie was working on cracking the tracker's security protocols, but in the meantime, an invisible leash connected Neal to SHIELD no matter where he went.
"Don't exactly have concentration to spare."
His feelings about SHIELD were one thing, but he really liked Diana, and he'd feel terrible if she got shot down because of him. "Gimme five minutes."
"You have four."
Aha -- he'd found what he needed: the server room. It was deserted and dark except for rack upon rack of servers with blinking red, yellow and green lights. Neal slipped inside. He was no hacking expert, but he'd been given detailed instructions, and he found the machine they'd described without any problem.
The minute he unplugged it, they'd know something was up, and all manner of security would converge on his location. Which meant he had to be ready. Neal fished in his belt pouch for the two items SHIELD had given him: a shielded case for the hard drive, and an object the size and approximate shape of half a grapefruit, which they'd told him would set off an EMP pulse in the server room when he detonated it.
Neal armed the EMP generator and set it on top of one of the servers. Then he murmured into the radio, "You there?"
"Here," Diana said. Her voice was a lifeline -- a reminder that he wasn't alone.
"I'm about to pull the hard drive. Once I do that, I'll be heading for the roof, fast."
"Copy that."
He cracked open the server's case to reveal the solid-state hard drive nestled in its ribbon cables. Then, taking a deep breath, he popped the plug out of the machine. Its lights died. Neal pulled the hard drive, dropped it into the case, and tucked the case back in his belt pouch, all in one continuous motion. Then he spun around and tapped the EMP detonator. A timer lit up; he gave it 20 seconds, not really wanting to be in the same room when it did whatever it was going to do.
Then he ran.
And nearly ran into a security patrol.
This time they saw him. Neal reversed direction with faster-than-human speed -- jumped -- caught a railing -- and vaulted over their heads while they were still drawing their guns.
Damn, he liked being able to do things like that.
Unfortunately, now he'd been made.
"Heading for the roof and coming in hot," he reported to Diana. He dodged into a stairwell and went up the stairs four at a time, not even breathing hard.
"Please don't try to use military slang. It's not as cool as you think it is."
A door burst open above him. He glimpsed someone pointing a gun down the stairwell, and flung himself over the railing to the level below, then barged out into the corridor, rearranging his mental map to find a new way up.
The lights flickered and went out. EMP generator, do your stuff, he thought smugly.
Unfortunately the supersoldier stuff didn't give him the ability to see in the dark, but he didn't have to; the emergency lights flickered back on a moment later. Neal raced down the corridor and went around the corner by kicking off the wall parkour-style.
"Nice job," Diana told him. "I'm watching from five hundred feet and the whole place just went dark. You good?"
"So far." The place was like a maze; the corridor that he'd thought would lead to another stairwell ended, instead, at an observation deck overlooking some kind of control room. Good to know it was here; not good to actually be here at the moment. Down below, the large space was lit mainly by the glow of monitors and the odd emergency light or flashlight. He'd definitely sown an adequate amount of chaos; now he just had to take advantage of it without getting shot.
There were a number of doors other than the one he'd come through. He tried one and found himself in a big room like a lounge. So far, so useless. Maybe he'd taken a left when he should have taken a right --
The door exploded inward, flew across the room and hit the far wall hard enough to leave a dent.
The guy who followed the door into the room was not normal security. Neal was barely able to dodge him, and the fist that missed his head hit the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Neal scored a single glancing punch and then got backhanded and flung some fifteen feet into a row of chairs. Falling, he'd already discovered, still hurt; he might be tougher but his nerve endings still worked just fine, and right now they were all saying Ow.
"Diana!" he gasped into his radio. He threw a chair at his assailant, who swatted it away and drew a gun about the size of a cannon.
"What's going on?"
Rather than answering, Neal took a flying leap at his attacker's midsection and plowed into him, slamming him into the wall with all the strength of Neal's enhanced body. He was only trying to clear a path to the door, but it did absolutely nothing; the guy didn't even drop the gun. Falling back on Diana's self-defense lessons, Neal managed to block a blow aimed at his throat. It felt like hitting a Mack truck. The guy was bigger than him, stronger than him, and just as fast. The only other person he'd ever met who could move like that was Diana, who not coincidentally was the only other person who --
Shit. He was really in trouble.
A fist like a pile driver hit him in the side. Neal punched the guy in the face with both fists and then pulled another Diana move, dropping and sliding and coming back up out of reach. He slalomed out of the room and kicked out the glass over the control room as the other guy's hand cannon boomed behind him, narrowly missing him. While glass rained down three stories onto screaming techs, Neal flung himself over the edge and parkoured down a level, kicking open the first door that seemed likely to lead away.
"Neal!" Diana said. "What's going on?"
"What's going on is they sent the Terminator after me!" His side throbbed with every jarring step. He hoped he hadn't cracked a rib. He knew his bones could still break because Diana had accidentally broken his ankle once while teaching him a kickboxing move. She'd been very apologetic.
Right now she just sounded impatient. "Calm down and explain."
"Can't explain, running!" A gunshot tore past his ear and blew a hole in the door in front of him. Neal followed it and jumped over a railing, down two stories into some kind of parking garage. "Diana, he's big and fast and I think he's taken the serum, either that or he's some kind of genetic super-freak."
There was a brief, tense pause. "Neal," Diana said, "did he have a metal arm?"
"I don't know, I was too busy trying not to die!" Movement from the corner of his eye made him shy away just before a small object sailed over his head. By the time Neal's brain screamed GRENADE! he'd already flipped himself in the opposite direction and flung himself behind a large cargo truck. The explosion rocked the truck but didn't hurt him.
"Diana, help, he's throwing grenades at me!"
"Neal, listen to me," Diana said. Her voice was cool, in a forced-calm kind of way. "You have to get out of there immediately. The person after you is -- well, it's not important; he was a friend of mine once, but he's not anymore, and he's going to kill you if he catches you."
"Yes, I figured that out, the grenade was a clue!" He'd managed to lose Diana's "friend" temporarily in a maze of parking-garage levels, finally opening up into a cavernous dark space. When he paused, he could hear lapping water. He must be close to the lake. What he didn't hear was the sound of pursuit, which only meant that Terminator Guy was capable of being silent as well as blowing up trucks.
"Where are you?" Diana asked.
The only light came from a handful of emergency lights high on the walls. They gleamed off dark water and the hulls of boats. "Uh, some kind of loading bay," Neal whispered. "Looks like it opens onto the lake."
"Great," Diana said. "I'm looking at schematics now. Get outside and I'll pick you up."
"Simple," Neal muttered. He crept along the wall, wishing he could see better. He had a flashlight, but wasn't about to wave around a giant "I AM HERE" flag considering that he had someone lobbing grenades at him.
But he could see his target now, a slightly lighter patch in the darkness, spangled with stars -- that was the night sky, and if he could only get to it, he could get out. A breeze stirred his hair. He was almost there --
The attack came from his side. His reflexes were fast enough that he managed to move with the first blow -- not enough to avoid it entirely, but at least he managed keep from getting his skull crushed. That's a yes on the metal arm, then, Neal thought dazedly as steel fingers closed around his throat and lifted him off the ground.
Aside from being dressed all in black and looking like he hadn't slept in a week, his attacker was surprisingly ordinary-looking. Neal might have walked right past him on the street if he hadn't known who he was. There was neither anger nor hate on the assassin's face; his expression was just flat, like he was simply doing a job that he wasn't thinking about much.
And his fingers were slowly and inexorably crushing Neal's windpipe. Neal's vision began to telescope. There was a roaring in his ears. He tried to claw his assailant's fingers away, but even his strength was no match for that implacable metal hand.
All the while, the calm brown eyes watched him with no reaction.
The helicopter slid into Neal's field of view so gracefully that he thought its blinking lights were stars at first. Then the wind of its rotors washed over them both. The helicopter's gun arrays swiveled to lock onto them, and Diana's voice boomed over the loudspeaker.
"Drop him, Peter, or I will shoot you."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is the point where I realized that I have no idea what the plot actually is, which is why this is a vignette rather than an actual fic.
Anyway, I have a surprisingly complicated headcanon for this universe, which involves Diana being their Captain America analogue (not a frozen soldier, but a government agent/spy/something who volunteered for the experiment about 10-15 years ago). Neal was an accident, due to James Bennett being some kind of HYDRA operative. ~handwaves~ My initial idea had involved Neal being the captured/tortured/brainwashed one, but then I realized that Peter would make an absolutely terrifying Winter Soldier, especially as an antagonist for Neal, who isn't that much of a combat expert.
It took me awhile to figure out a good way to fit Elizabeth in, but I'm thinking that she was pretty much normal Elizabeth up until Peter got Winter Soldier'd, at which point she embarked on a quest to find a way to fix him using SCIENCE. So now she has a medical degree and a PhD in biochemistry. Peter and Diana are both about 10-15 years older than their apparent ages; Neal is about the age he looks (he just got serum'd recently); and Elizabeth is aging at the normal rate, so she's about 50 in this universe.
There are only the mildest of spoilers for the movie. If you know who the Winter Soldier is, you basically don't have to worry about being spoiled. If you aren't familiar with the Marvel universe, you can assume "generic spy shenanigans with bionic soldiers" and proceed accordingly.
--
They left the rhinestone-spangled New York skyline behind, flying across dark countryside mapped with a tracery of glittering highways. The helicopter was a military machine, sleek and black and fast, and Diana flew it like an extension of her body.
"No in-flight magazines?" Neal asked. "No snacks? Next time I'm flying first class."
"If you don't stop complaining," Diana said, "I'll put you in the cargo bay."
It took him all of five minutes to cautiously reach out towards the controls. Diana smacked his hand.
"I just wanted to see if I could turn the radio on."
"Hands off the helicopter unless you have a pilot's license."
Neal opened his mouth.
".... that actually involved going through flight school."
He closed his mouth again.
"If you're really good, I could sing to you," Diana said, the corner of her mouth quirking up.
"Pass."
They began to lose altitude, dropping until Neal began to hope Diana knew what she was doing; some of those telephone poles missed the helicopter's skids by inches. And then the last small town fell behind and they were skimming across a small lake, riffled with moonlight. On the far shore, a glittering string of lights marked their destination, and the banter dropped away. It was time to get serious.
"I'll draw their attention once you're in, and then pick you up on the roof," Diana said. She looked scary and competent, dressed all in black; her leather jacket was studded with pockets that Neal supposed were packed with spare ammo, knives and things of that nature. "You do what you do."
"Don't I get a pep talk, a 'break a leg' or something like that? On second thought," he added hastily, "forget 'break a leg'. That's terrible advice. Especially on a heist."
"This is a SHIELD-sponsored stealth operation, not a heist."
"Tomato, tomahto," Neal said.
"Here's some advice for you," Diana said, lowering the helicopter behind a concrete warehouse-like structure that shielded them to some extent from the bulk of the facility. "Don't get shot."
"That's very comforting." Neal did a quick equipment check of his own: lock picks, security-system hacking tools, special SHIELD extras for once he was inside, et cetera. Diana had insisted he carry a gun; it felt uncomfortably heavy at his hip.
She didn't touch down, just hovered. Neal opened his door and the rotors' downdraft whipped his hair. They were still some twenty feet off the ground. Neal hesitated instinctively -- it was still hard to convince himself that he could handle the shock of a landing like that.
"Oh, come on," Diana said, noticing his hesitation. "I've pushed you off higher things than that during training. People are going to start shooting at us if I stay here too long, so move."
Neal moved.
The wind caught him, and reflexes he was still learning to control straightened him out. His feet smacked into gravel, ankles and knees absorbed the impact like springs. He crouched and rolled just because he could and it made a cool entrance, coming up with his heart thumping and all his senses alert. There was no one to see him ... luckily.
"Be careful," Diana said over the radio. Now that he could no longer see her face, she sounded worried.
"I'm always careful."
He heard her laugh, and downdraft fluttered the shrubbery around him as the helicopter turned in midair. Somewhere not too far away, Neal heard a voice barking orders. Time to go.
There was no way to drop in on a top-secret HYDRA research facility without setting off some alarm bells. They were most likely expecting a commando team, though -- not a thief. Particularly a somewhat enhanced thief. Following the mental map of the facility's corridors that Diana had made him memorize, Neal dodged several security teams and at one point wriggled through a ventilation duct. (Why were the ducts always big enough for a burglar? He'd thought about recommending SHIELD add security cameras to their ducts, but then realized that, being SHIELD, they'd probably add lasers and spinning knives and twelve different kinds of machine gun instead, and he hardly wanted to be responsible for some poor schmoe being sliced in half.)
"How much longer?" Diana asked through his radio. She sounded tense.
"Almost there," he whispered, and then had to slip back into the ducts to avoid another patrol. "What's the matter, can't find me?" The long-healed scar with the subcutaneous tracker under his skin itched, as it often did when he thought about it. Mozzie was working on cracking the tracker's security protocols, but in the meantime, an invisible leash connected Neal to SHIELD no matter where he went.
"Don't exactly have concentration to spare."
His feelings about SHIELD were one thing, but he really liked Diana, and he'd feel terrible if she got shot down because of him. "Gimme five minutes."
"You have four."
Aha -- he'd found what he needed: the server room. It was deserted and dark except for rack upon rack of servers with blinking red, yellow and green lights. Neal slipped inside. He was no hacking expert, but he'd been given detailed instructions, and he found the machine they'd described without any problem.
The minute he unplugged it, they'd know something was up, and all manner of security would converge on his location. Which meant he had to be ready. Neal fished in his belt pouch for the two items SHIELD had given him: a shielded case for the hard drive, and an object the size and approximate shape of half a grapefruit, which they'd told him would set off an EMP pulse in the server room when he detonated it.
Neal armed the EMP generator and set it on top of one of the servers. Then he murmured into the radio, "You there?"
"Here," Diana said. Her voice was a lifeline -- a reminder that he wasn't alone.
"I'm about to pull the hard drive. Once I do that, I'll be heading for the roof, fast."
"Copy that."
He cracked open the server's case to reveal the solid-state hard drive nestled in its ribbon cables. Then, taking a deep breath, he popped the plug out of the machine. Its lights died. Neal pulled the hard drive, dropped it into the case, and tucked the case back in his belt pouch, all in one continuous motion. Then he spun around and tapped the EMP detonator. A timer lit up; he gave it 20 seconds, not really wanting to be in the same room when it did whatever it was going to do.
Then he ran.
And nearly ran into a security patrol.
This time they saw him. Neal reversed direction with faster-than-human speed -- jumped -- caught a railing -- and vaulted over their heads while they were still drawing their guns.
Damn, he liked being able to do things like that.
Unfortunately, now he'd been made.
"Heading for the roof and coming in hot," he reported to Diana. He dodged into a stairwell and went up the stairs four at a time, not even breathing hard.
"Please don't try to use military slang. It's not as cool as you think it is."
A door burst open above him. He glimpsed someone pointing a gun down the stairwell, and flung himself over the railing to the level below, then barged out into the corridor, rearranging his mental map to find a new way up.
The lights flickered and went out. EMP generator, do your stuff, he thought smugly.
Unfortunately the supersoldier stuff didn't give him the ability to see in the dark, but he didn't have to; the emergency lights flickered back on a moment later. Neal raced down the corridor and went around the corner by kicking off the wall parkour-style.
"Nice job," Diana told him. "I'm watching from five hundred feet and the whole place just went dark. You good?"
"So far." The place was like a maze; the corridor that he'd thought would lead to another stairwell ended, instead, at an observation deck overlooking some kind of control room. Good to know it was here; not good to actually be here at the moment. Down below, the large space was lit mainly by the glow of monitors and the odd emergency light or flashlight. He'd definitely sown an adequate amount of chaos; now he just had to take advantage of it without getting shot.
There were a number of doors other than the one he'd come through. He tried one and found himself in a big room like a lounge. So far, so useless. Maybe he'd taken a left when he should have taken a right --
The door exploded inward, flew across the room and hit the far wall hard enough to leave a dent.
The guy who followed the door into the room was not normal security. Neal was barely able to dodge him, and the fist that missed his head hit the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Neal scored a single glancing punch and then got backhanded and flung some fifteen feet into a row of chairs. Falling, he'd already discovered, still hurt; he might be tougher but his nerve endings still worked just fine, and right now they were all saying Ow.
"Diana!" he gasped into his radio. He threw a chair at his assailant, who swatted it away and drew a gun about the size of a cannon.
"What's going on?"
Rather than answering, Neal took a flying leap at his attacker's midsection and plowed into him, slamming him into the wall with all the strength of Neal's enhanced body. He was only trying to clear a path to the door, but it did absolutely nothing; the guy didn't even drop the gun. Falling back on Diana's self-defense lessons, Neal managed to block a blow aimed at his throat. It felt like hitting a Mack truck. The guy was bigger than him, stronger than him, and just as fast. The only other person he'd ever met who could move like that was Diana, who not coincidentally was the only other person who --
Shit. He was really in trouble.
A fist like a pile driver hit him in the side. Neal punched the guy in the face with both fists and then pulled another Diana move, dropping and sliding and coming back up out of reach. He slalomed out of the room and kicked out the glass over the control room as the other guy's hand cannon boomed behind him, narrowly missing him. While glass rained down three stories onto screaming techs, Neal flung himself over the edge and parkoured down a level, kicking open the first door that seemed likely to lead away.
"Neal!" Diana said. "What's going on?"
"What's going on is they sent the Terminator after me!" His side throbbed with every jarring step. He hoped he hadn't cracked a rib. He knew his bones could still break because Diana had accidentally broken his ankle once while teaching him a kickboxing move. She'd been very apologetic.
Right now she just sounded impatient. "Calm down and explain."
"Can't explain, running!" A gunshot tore past his ear and blew a hole in the door in front of him. Neal followed it and jumped over a railing, down two stories into some kind of parking garage. "Diana, he's big and fast and I think he's taken the serum, either that or he's some kind of genetic super-freak."
There was a brief, tense pause. "Neal," Diana said, "did he have a metal arm?"
"I don't know, I was too busy trying not to die!" Movement from the corner of his eye made him shy away just before a small object sailed over his head. By the time Neal's brain screamed GRENADE! he'd already flipped himself in the opposite direction and flung himself behind a large cargo truck. The explosion rocked the truck but didn't hurt him.
"Diana, help, he's throwing grenades at me!"
"Neal, listen to me," Diana said. Her voice was cool, in a forced-calm kind of way. "You have to get out of there immediately. The person after you is -- well, it's not important; he was a friend of mine once, but he's not anymore, and he's going to kill you if he catches you."
"Yes, I figured that out, the grenade was a clue!" He'd managed to lose Diana's "friend" temporarily in a maze of parking-garage levels, finally opening up into a cavernous dark space. When he paused, he could hear lapping water. He must be close to the lake. What he didn't hear was the sound of pursuit, which only meant that Terminator Guy was capable of being silent as well as blowing up trucks.
"Where are you?" Diana asked.
The only light came from a handful of emergency lights high on the walls. They gleamed off dark water and the hulls of boats. "Uh, some kind of loading bay," Neal whispered. "Looks like it opens onto the lake."
"Great," Diana said. "I'm looking at schematics now. Get outside and I'll pick you up."
"Simple," Neal muttered. He crept along the wall, wishing he could see better. He had a flashlight, but wasn't about to wave around a giant "I AM HERE" flag considering that he had someone lobbing grenades at him.
But he could see his target now, a slightly lighter patch in the darkness, spangled with stars -- that was the night sky, and if he could only get to it, he could get out. A breeze stirred his hair. He was almost there --
The attack came from his side. His reflexes were fast enough that he managed to move with the first blow -- not enough to avoid it entirely, but at least he managed keep from getting his skull crushed. That's a yes on the metal arm, then, Neal thought dazedly as steel fingers closed around his throat and lifted him off the ground.
Aside from being dressed all in black and looking like he hadn't slept in a week, his attacker was surprisingly ordinary-looking. Neal might have walked right past him on the street if he hadn't known who he was. There was neither anger nor hate on the assassin's face; his expression was just flat, like he was simply doing a job that he wasn't thinking about much.
And his fingers were slowly and inexorably crushing Neal's windpipe. Neal's vision began to telescope. There was a roaring in his ears. He tried to claw his assailant's fingers away, but even his strength was no match for that implacable metal hand.
All the while, the calm brown eyes watched him with no reaction.
The helicopter slid into Neal's field of view so gracefully that he thought its blinking lights were stars at first. Then the wind of its rotors washed over them both. The helicopter's gun arrays swiveled to lock onto them, and Diana's voice boomed over the loudspeaker.
"Drop him, Peter, or I will shoot you."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is the point where I realized that I have no idea what the plot actually is, which is why this is a vignette rather than an actual fic.
Anyway, I have a surprisingly complicated headcanon for this universe, which involves Diana being their Captain America analogue (not a frozen soldier, but a government agent/spy/something who volunteered for the experiment about 10-15 years ago). Neal was an accident, due to James Bennett being some kind of HYDRA operative. ~handwaves~ My initial idea had involved Neal being the captured/tortured/brainwashed one, but then I realized that Peter would make an absolutely terrifying Winter Soldier, especially as an antagonist for Neal, who isn't that much of a combat expert.
It took me awhile to figure out a good way to fit Elizabeth in, but I'm thinking that she was pretty much normal Elizabeth up until Peter got Winter Soldier'd, at which point she embarked on a quest to find a way to fix him using SCIENCE. So now she has a medical degree and a PhD in biochemistry. Peter and Diana are both about 10-15 years older than their apparent ages; Neal is about the age he looks (he just got serum'd recently); and Elizabeth is aging at the normal rate, so she's about 50 in this universe.
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Which was completely awesome, btw.
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Now I'm trying to cast everybody. Hughes as Fury? Bancroft as Fury? Am I a terrible person for wanting to cast Kramer as Pierce? (I know it's not a one for one fusion, but still.) At first I wanted to make Sara a Black Widow type, but that sort of role heavily involves using femininity/looks/sexuality, which Sara is terrible at, so.
I just can't see Mozzie working for an organization like SHIELD.* However, it occurs to me that he could be a member of the Rising Tide who's infiltrated SHIELD. (And, the Mozzie in my head smugly informs me, he'd do it right.)
*Oh man, this AU takes my "the FBI is kind of skeevy" White Collar feelings and my "SHIELD is super skeevy" MCU feelings and crashes them together.
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.... and yeah, the show just doesn't really have a good Fury analog. I was thinking about maybe going even darker and casting one of the true baddies in that role. It's not entirely fair to canon!Fury, but this isn't really meant to replicate the Marvelverse exactly, and it might be fun to play up the scary/evil aspects of SHIELD even more than canon already did. Kramer, Keller, Wilkes ... maybe Rebecca -- she was a former intelligence agent in canon, wasn't she?
I kinda agree about Mozzie, although if he has a different background in this universe, it might influence how government-shy he ended up being. (.... although yeah, wow, Mozzie as a mole within SHIELD -- I could totally see that!)
I had kicked around the idea of casting Sara in the Falcon role. It more naturally ought to go to Jones (he's ex-military in canon, and is friends with Diana, our Cap insert) but Sara would absolutely love having wings.
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Sara with wings would be fantastic! I see what you mean about Jones being a more natural fit, but I love the idea of giving it to Sara. I could also see Sara as a Maria Hill type figure, though not if this makes her evil.
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I wasn't planning on getting involved in another long story so soon after finishing my Reverse Bang! Noooooo!
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Love Diana and Neal in this fusion, and Peter woukd be suoer scary in this role,
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