A Mind Divided

Timeless

May 2012.  The Avengers hit theaters and mowed me down.  The build-up to the movie took years with Ironman, Thor and Captain America all introduced in their own movies (multiple Hulk incarnations, too).  As a kid who learned to read with Marvel comics, I was primed to love them all.  And I did.  Thank you, Joss Whedon.

In the end, I had questions.  These are the ones that bugged me most:

1. How in the heck was Steve Rogers supposed to adjust to being thrust seventy years into the future?  He was a relatively innocent young man who was only just getting used to a sickly body completely transformed into a lean, mean fighting machine.  As Captain America, he already had enough psychological baggage to contend with, let alone the fast-paced, sexually open twenty-first century.

2. What was the genesis of Agent Phil Coulson’s hero-worship of Cap?  All little boys (and bigger boys, too) look up to mentors, role models and heroes, but Captain America would have been very old-fashioned and far removed from a young Phil Coulson’s everyday life.  What was the story there?  Who was this agent that commanded so much respect and affection from the rest of SHIELD?

I wanted to answer both these questions and thought it might be possible to weave them together in one story.  I also wrote this before Phil Coulson’s resurrection in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.  At the time and place of this story, the Avengers thought he was dead.  So did his family.  I think.

To read Chapter One: Timeless, click here.