As a little kid, I had never been afraid of the dark like many other children my age at that point in time. In fact, I embraced the darkness, loving it for allowing my imagination to run wild. Of course there was always the fear of the unknown, but it was never the dark that brought that on. Some things were more frightening in broad daylight than hidden in the cover of darkness. The unknown was not something to be feared by me, but something to be explored. I was a dreamer, you could say. Dreams were a large part of me, always have been and always will be. I also happened to be a person who believed in getting things done, meaning that I was also a doer. Reality was also very important. The past, present, and future al created a big puzzle in the fabric of time for me, and I loved puzzles. I was one of those weird people that stocked a whole section of their bookshelves with WhoDunnit: Solve for Yourself Mysteries and things like that along with architecture, fantasy novels, and mythology. I was currently opening the cover of an old book on the Norse gods and goddesses, soft leather cover warm beneath my fingers. I was thirteen years old.
The gold and silver script of the title was written in the ancient tongue of the Vikings, thin pages fluttering past my fingertips like the wings of pale-hued butterflies. The musk of the book made my mind travel back to those times of cold sea-stained cliffs and when the wind was wilder than the wolf, the skies unexplored and full of wondrous mystery. Even the sunrises and sunsets were more colorful and full of life. Sure, everything in the book was painted in primary colors with bits of green and brown here and there, the pages seemed to breath with a hidden life, a deeper magic than this world knew. I was reading in my room, legs curled underneath me, dark green and navy blue blankets and my white linen sheets spread around my form like a small sea.
Every time that someone opens a new book, a new world is born. A new land conceived of the imagination and dreams of the reader, for them and them alone, their own personal kingdom to travel about. The beauty of the different lands varied, always slightly different from their brethren but all connected like roots of a great tree, together in unison for all eternity.
Looking back on it opening up that book didn't create a new world. It brought back an old one, a world where magic flowed in great rivers through nine separate realms of ice and snow, flame and darkness, life and death. In a way, books are also like portals. They open worlds.
It was the Sunday night of a full moon, and I sat in my bed beneath the window, gazing out at the stars, wondering what could be out there—who else could be out there. I smiled softly to myself, because it was only a foolish notion.
All around me were screams. Screams of fear, horror, confusion, agony, and chaos. Everything was black, so deep and dark that I felt like I was drowning in blood thinned with tears. The very fabric of space and time was caving in around me, raining fiery stars upon my brow. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't feel, couldn't think. Just before I felt like I would go mad, something pulled me away from the dark, from the screaming, from everything. Then there was pain, pain forever and ever, only pain.
I woke up with a gasp. I felt like I hadn't breathed in years. Maybe I hadn't. I tried to open my eyes, but the light of whatever indoor facility I was in was too bright. Whiteness scorched my lids. Blindly reaching out in front of myself, I shoved myself upwards into a seated position, hearing the muffled shouts of people in the back of my mind. Where was I?
There were mechanical whirs coming from all around, surrounding me, the whole world slowly coming into sharper and sharper focus until I came to the realization that my senses had been honed somewhat while I had been asleep. Had I been asleep? I must have been, or else I wouldn't have been in the soft bed with the linen sheets that smelled like fancy detergent and like a hospital lobby. A hospital. Memories came flying back at me like a computer downloading hundreds of files at once. My brain felt like it was about to overload and short circuit. My breathing became short and rapid.
I knew where I was.
I wasn't supposed to be here.
If I was where I thought that I was, then I was most certainly in some sort of trouble. There were tubes attached to fluid packets hooked up to my body all over, most of them hidden beneath the shapeless folds of a mint green hospital gown. It was as though I could see the tiny nearly microscopic fibers of the floppy gown, individual particles woven together, like my eyes were seeing in mazing high definition. I looked down at my legs. Around my thighs, shins, and ankles were wrapped links of chains. There was still that hospital smell in the air, but a closer look at my surroundings told me otherwise. The room that I was in was white, but not in the sense that this was some get-well facility.
The walls were blank, simply painted a brilliant stark pallor that burned the inside of my brain. Burning. That's the only thing that registered with me in the first few minutes of my awakening. Only the burning, the pain. Burning, burning, and burning.
I heard a voice, broken English, heavily accented.
"Do you know where you are?"
I couldn't speak. I just sat where I was, burning from the inside out.
Korea, I thought. Project Korea was over a month ago.
"Do you know where you are?" The voice was stronger, more forceful this time, but to me, it felt like it was shattering my eardrums. All I could do was groan through my teeth. I had not enough strength to properly scream.
"You don't know what we did to you, do you?"
I mustered up a growl, the sharpness of the voice burrowing through my skull. I could nearly feel the bone fracturing.
"You're different now," the voice explained, a bit quieter. Not to provide me relief, but because it had gone from being the loud and boisterous kind of anger to the soft and quiet kind that felt like frost creeping over skin. "And you know it, you can tell, just by me speaking that something has changed inside of you. Your senses are working differently now, as they have undergone metamorphosis. You are the beautiful butterfly that has escaped the chrysalis of your everyday boring shell of a body."
I could see the lapel of the man's white jacket as my vision slowly came back into focus. I groaned again, breath hissing through my teeth. There was a small insignia stitched onto the front pocket, but it was blurred, even if I squinted.
"Russia," I spat out. "I'm in Russia." I wheezed again, and coughed. Red splattered against my cheek.
"I am fortunate to have found such an intelligent and pretty girl for my collection, especially one that speaks such fluent English. I am most impressed. You are from around here, I presume?"
"Yes," I snarled, tasting the blood gathering in my mouth, warm liquid iron running over my tongue. "If I am where you think I am." I had adapted an accent to match the man's as soon as I heard him speak. Definitely Russian.
"You are going to do some work for us, pretty girl."
"No, I honestly think that I am not."
"Would you like me to tell you what has been done to your body?"
"I pray nothing inappropriate or a form of harassment."
"No, no pretty girl, nothing of the sort. You see, now you have the full capability for becoming one of our most capable agents."
"Who do you work—argh!—for?"
"Oh hush, let me finish. Our scientists devised a way to give humans nearly animalistic attributes, not features, but instincts and senses. Your eyesight will be that of a hawk's, reflexes those of the agile wildcats, hearing sharper than a wolf on a clear moonlit night. You are no longer human, pretty girl."
I smiled, so weakly, pushing my limits as I tugged my lips into a grimacing grin. "Clint, 'Tasha, this really isn't funny," I grumbled, hissing as the chains around my legs dug into my flesh, metal abrasions raking across the skin of my thighs, riddling them with red lash marks. I hoped that this was all just another intense training session. That when the man in the dead of night had crept up behind me, in the middle of a SHIELD command center, so there was no place for him to hid, and introduced me to the blackness of unconsciousness.
There was no memory from that point on.
The only reason that anyone might have had for taking me was that flash drive. The harmless little flash drive. And this guy seemed to have no clue who I was.
It had been such an average night at the command center. I had been the last one to head up to my quarters, having enjoyed watching another few episodes of NCIS and a Sherlock with Natasha, who although kept to herself seemed to open up a bit around me, and loosen up enough to enjoy a few hours out of the day that didn't involve tracking national criminals. Not that tracking international criminals wasn't fun. It was probably the most fun part of the mission. The execution of the mission was exhilarating, but certainly not fun. No one called it fun. Not even the previous assassins—or more like reformed assassins. There was the thrill of the chase, but the capture was always a relief. We didn't track your everyday shoplifters or wild gunmen or the cads that starting shootings at elementary schools. We tracked people that did everything that they could to stay off of the grid. Our grid. We would always find them, but the objective was not just to find them, but find them before as little more damage could be done as possible.
I almost wanted to laugh. I guess I just found one of those idiots, I thought to myself. But the pain in my chest was still too much for laughter, stressing my lungs and my chest cavity. So I coughed instead, and one of the monitors next to me began beeping wildly, erratically. It was probably gauging my breathing patterns. As I coughed, my torso rose in quick and short spasmodic movements, flexing beneath the bonds that had strapped me to the chair. The chains around my chest cut once again into skin, and a groan ripped up my throat.
"Stop that, you must lay still!" the doctor barked in that heavily accented voice of his. As he tinkered with the machinery behind me, muttering explicates in Russian under his breath with ferocity, blackness blossomed behind my eyelids. My ears started ringing. The doctor's curses began slipping into English. The machinery let out another loud string of disgruntled electronic whirs and clicks. "Son of a—!"
The rest of whatever he said was drowned out by a circuit frying, and one of the machines billowing smog of a most unpleasant colour into the air. Alarms began to ring. Fire, fire, fire, they seemed to say.
A pair of large hands, rough around the edges and covered in calluses at the tips thrust themselves beneath my back, cuffing my wrists. Apparently the doctor was less brilliant than I had been willing to give him credit for. But no matter. My ears were still ringing, some awful pressure building up ready to release. My vision was still fuzzy, clear enough though to see the doctor, foolishly unlatching my legs, and then my neck, and then my waist.
Vulnerable. That was something that I had sworn that I would never feel when in the hands of an assailant. Vulnerability was deadly. Helplessness meant that you had no sway, no influence in a situation. All you could do was stand by and watch. If you were vulnerable in the field, you were as good as dead. Every day at SHIELD, that was what I trained for. I learned how to shape compromising situations and bend them to my needs. Being helpless was something that we trained for as well. I hated training for those things that should never happen. Unfortunately, "should" and "could" blend like oil and water. We were trained to tackle the possible and the impossible. The impossible had become possible several times. And there comes another one of the Agent's jobs. Covering all of that stuff up.
That doctor had done something to me. This was no super-soldier serum or radioactive juice that would cause cell growth to accelerate dramatically on command of a specific feeling or emotion. This was foreign. Alien. Whatever had been put into my bloodstream was not human. I remembered what the doctor had said to me, that I was no longer human. Oh, joy.
It then occurred to me that the doctor was not the man that I need be worried about. He was only the puppet. He was transmitting that alien substance into my veins, but on someone else's orders. Puppets could be just as deadly as their masters. Only when the strings were cut, though. I gave a quick once-over of the doctor, taking in his features, his clothing, everything from his greyed hair and ruddy beaked nose to the shoes on his feet.
He was not like most doctors that one would expect. He had boots on, warm boots that made me jealous over how much more comfortable this man was then I, the little lab rat freshly unshackled from the examination table. Instead of a white lab coat that matched the sterile atmosphere in the room, he wore a heavy leather jacket with woolen lining. He was not tall at all. In fact, he was only an inch or two taller than me. Bringing my hands up to my throat to rub at the chafed and thin, delicate flesh, I pulled away quickly when my fingertips came back slightly damp and red. The doctor was no doctor. Just a puppet, I told myself again. A puppet whose master knows me better than I would have thought. What had been on that flash drive? I didn't have the level of access clearance for debriefing on the information that it held. And now, that flimsy puppet was just that. I had no fear of him any longer. He was a puppet with strings, strings that I was about to tangle.
Smoke was pouring from the machinery, and the puppet cursed again as something that sounded critical when it fell clanked and clunked. He had to turn his back to me for a second. A second...that was all that I needed. All anyone who knew how to properly assess a situation would know. It was in those few vital moments that I gathered my wits, grunting against the pain of the abrasions on my shivering body beneath the airy and shapeless hospital gown, and struck.