Six Months Ago - The Coral Ridge Mall
| Six Months Ago - The Coral Ridge Mall | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 09 May 2021 |
| Location: | Coral Ridge Mall, IA |
| Synopsis: | Dottie doesn't fit in smalltown America |
| Cast of Characters: | Dottie Underwood |
Dorothy Underwood, from Iowa, isn't a dancer anymore. She did go to New York City right after hight school, but only managed a couple of regional tours as a chorus member before packing up that dream and heading back to her hometown. She taught in her old studio for a while.
Now she takes yoga classes in the mall. She goes to bookclub Thursday night. She drinks too much white wine the girls. A 'Live Laugh Love' sign hangs unironically on her living room wall.
Her headboard does not bear the telltale scuffs of handcuffs worn every night. That was a different life, one with a different childhood. That life has been taken from her, forgotten. Erased.
Leaving yoga one afternoon, mat held in a tight roll under her arm, she is greeted by a tragedy. A woman is dead, shot. Blood seeps from her wounds, soaking into her clothes, staining her kiosk. There is a man with a gun in his hand, arm outstretched. He is flushed with victory, anger and power roiling in the pulsing arteries of his throat. He swings his arm wide, the arc of the weapon taking in the exodus. The yoga mat falls to the ground.
The body remembers: motions drilled since childhood, as reflexive as breathing. Grab the wrist. Twist the arm. Lock the shoulder. Break the elbow.
A gun clatters to her feet. She kicks it away. It skids across the floor, careening into a cluster of large planters. The man before her is pathetic -- a whimpering ball of agony, where just moments ago he was a posturing fool.
Then the noise comes back, the deafening roar of blood pulsing though her veins, the pounding rush of boots on tile, the terrified clamor of the crowd. The mall food court swims out of focus. Dottie Underwood loses consciousness and collapses gently onto the floor.
That night sleep does not come easy. She longs for the old comfort of cold metal. She wears a silver bracelet to bed. It isn't the same.
Instead of dreams, there are memories: the weight of a body falling limp in her arms as fragments of vertebrae sever the spinal column; hot blood covering her hands, spilling from the fatal wound as she retrieves her knife; the cold blank infinitude of zero matter swallowing her screams; a man's body floating face down in a hotel swimming pool; the lingering scent of gunpowder; the metallic taste of ozone as electricity rewires her brain, again, and again; another series of cold voids, bright freezing stoppages of time; and interwoven throughout it all, *Peggy Carter*.
She recalls the bargain struck -- one last rewriting of her personal history. She could have a life, friends, companionship. She just had to give up herself. There hadn't been much left of that anyway. So she became Dorothy Underwood, from Iowa, for good this time, she thought.
But all of that is gone now. A life of comforting banalities washed away in blood. How could she have been contented with this insipid facsimile? She was not made with happiness in mind.
Dottie plans her escape from small town Middle America. SHIELD must have some surveillance protocols in place. HYDRA might attempt to recall her as their asset eventually. So she must appear to be as she was last remade.
She goes back to yoga classes. She reads her new copy of 'All the Light We Cannot See'. She tells the girls she's thinking of taking a little trip; she wants to see The Waitress on Broadway -- do they think Moulin Rouge will be sold out? She buys tickets, books a hotel.
Dorothy Underwood boards a plane to New York City. And disappears.
