Dust fills my mouth. Someone's coughing but it takes me a moment to realize it's me. My vision is clearing, things are coming into focus. Rubble lies everywhere. There are mountains of ruins, skeletons where buildings used to stand. For as far as I can see there is nothing but this great destruction, this horrible waste. My coughing echos. And echoes. And echoes. There is just me and my coughing and a terrible, never silence. That's when it strikes me that I might be entirely alone here is this desolation of wherever this used to be.

But then I hear something, not a shout, not a cry, not a whisper. To be honest I'm not sure how I know it's a person making the sound at all. But I know. From the very depths of my soul I know that someone is making that sound and they're in pain and that I am the only person in the universe who can save them.

So I stand up. Or at least I try to. But my legs are pinned, pinned by a large piece of marble that's heavier than anything made out of marble has a right to be. That's when I know where I am. The only place I know of that has a cast-iron dome covered in marble is the Capital Building. I'm back in DC, except this time I can't move, can't move, can't do anything. There's blood on my forehead, on the stones, on the ground. Somehow I manage to turn my head, just a little. Suddenly I can see one of the bodies, it's not faceless, it's not nameless. It's my father.

At first he looks like he could be asleep, his military uniform nicely ironed, his eyes closed, a peaceful smile on his face. But then he begins to change.

A red stain appears on his uniform, growing outward. The stain isn't passive. It's angry, hungry, consuming. It's made of harsh words and disagreements so old that nobody remembers how they started. It's blindly following orders and listening to others standards of morality. It's trying to do what is right but instead making everything worse. It's killing my father.

His eyes shoot open. Panicked. Terrified. He calls out to me. I can see him dying, see him suffering. This time though he's not thousands of miles away, not across an ocean, not in a warzone so so far from me that there's no way for me to help him. No, this time he's just inches from my face. Dying. And there's nothing I can do.

"Jocelyn," his voice cracks, his lips dry and dehydrated, his eyes pleading, "Jocelyn, please."

I try to stand, try to move, try to do anything to help him, to save him, to make sure he doesn't die alone. But I can't move. I can't scream, can't speak, can't whisper. I can't even blink. I'm frozen. He's dying and his only daughter is doing nothing to save him. This chunk of rock, the Capitol Buildings dome, America, is pinning me down. Stopping me from saving a man sworn to serve this country. A good man. A great man.

A dead man.

And suddenly I can move again. The stone is gone and I am free and my father is gone. A body. Cold, lifeless, dead for months, years, centuries. A body. Bones. Dust. Nothing. All in a matter of seconds.

This time I do scream. I scream and I scream and I scream over the place where my father was. The place where my father died. Again. My throat raw and sore, hands bleeding clawing the ground, trying to hold on to anything that's left of him. But he's gone for a second time and I still couldn't save him.

"Are you waiting for an invitation or something?" A gravelly voice says, changing the scene. DC is gone, replaced by a dim cell. The dream wrestles to keep me, but reality is too strange to ignore. And anything is better than where I was, although anything is better than where I am. Which seems kind of paradoxical, but in reality it just means that it sucks to be me.

Still, the voice definitely wasn't in the dream, which means I'm not alone. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. Actually, it's pretty bad because it was a male voice and I'm in prison, alone, with nobody to answer if I were to call for help. Good things don't happen to women in jail. So I look for the voices' owner.

For a second I don't recognize him without the blood and dust and pain on his face. But it's the same square jaw, same almost-but-not-quite receding hairline, same angry eyes. Even though I'm not sure where here is, I am sure here is a place he isn't supposed to be.

"Jack?" I ask, trying to shuffle into sitting position, "What are you doing here?"

"Repaying a favor," he states wearily. He glances at the now open door, not quite nervous not quite calm.

"Excuse me?" I phrase it as a casual question but I just want to scream 'till he stops talking in riddles and tells me what, exactly, is going on.

"I got you into this mess so I'm getting you out of it. You're welcome."

"What—" I start, but Jack cuts me off.

"Look are you coming with me or not because I went to quite a bit of trouble and would really rather not get thrown into some abandoned cell because you couldn't stop running your mouth."

"Come with you?" My voice squeaks, "Are you, you know, is this like, um, legal?"

"Yeah, I chatted with Nick Fury about everything and SHIELD has graciously agreed to drop all charges. No! Of course this isn't legal." He isn't quite shouting but he sort of is.

"So is this a, um, a prison break?"

"No, I was just breaking into one of the most secure locations in the country to say, 'Hi' real quick."

"Ok, I get it that I'm asking dumb questions, but believe it or not, prison breaks aren't normally on my agenda. So if you don't mind, what did you mean about 'getting me into this mess?'"

"I've recently become wanted by the government and since you helped me out, an overzealous Captain America decided to label you as an enemy of the people. So I say, 'I got you into this mess' but really, it was the Cap. Luckily enough for you I'm helping your sorry arse out anyways. That is, if you start moving." Jack motions for the door. I shouldn't follow him. I should stop and think of the consequences. Maybe if I'd just stopped to think, things would've ended differently. But I didn't stop, didn't think. One chance. One chance to escape. One chance to leave the hellscape that's become my life. So for better or for worse I follow Jack out the door into whatever lies beyond.