Warning: mentions being kidnapped.
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"Emma Shaw has been missing since February fourteenth. She's on the side of a milk carton for over a month and you're telling me that you found her in an undercover HYDRA facility in Germany?"
Her eyes fluttered open at the sound of her name. They tried to focus on her surroundings, but she couldn't make anything of it. To her right sat a woman with cherry red hair, her nose stuck in the device she was holding. When Emma moved to sit up, the woman shifted her eyes to look at her.
"Steve," she called over her shoulder. "Don't worry, you're not in any danger." The woman held her hands up to Emma to show that she wasn't holding any weapons.
The man, Steve, she recognized from earlier; the one with the shield. "How are you feeling?"
As her eyes adjusted to the light, she noticed that she was in a medical lab; one much cleaner than the one she was used to. Her body wore a white gown, and she was no longer covered in her own filth and dirt. The constant headache that she had experienced was gone, and for the first time, Emma seemed at ease.
"What happened?" She asked, ignoring his initial question. She felt better than she could ever remember feeling. "Who are you?"
Steve and the woman shared a glance before the woman mentioned something about human experimentation and memory loss, which only confused Emma that much more. "Ms. Shaw, you were kidnapped and taken hostage by a bad group of people. They did some very terrible things to you. You don't remember?"
Her mind traced through what little memories she had as if a new one would pop up. "I don't remember anything," she replied.
"But you do remember your name?" A man with perfectly trimmed facial hair and a glass of water walked into the room. He handed the water to Emma, which she took graciously. "Emma Shaw, born June 6, 1989. That's all we need to know."
A few seconds- and a few clicks of the device the man held in his hand- later, and a whirl of technology surrounded the troupe. A hundred different articles of what Emma assumed to be the life she had forgotten projected in the air. She saw her face, she saw pictures of herself with people she didn't recognize. Her eyes scanned each one, lingering on one face for too long.
"I know who this is," she told the others. Her fingers pointed to a young woman with long, sun-kissed, blonde hair. She was smiling with her arm dangling around Emma's shoulders. When she went to say what the woman's name was, her mind flushed. "I don't know."
"They'll come back," the red-head said with a reassuring smile. It made Emma feel hopeful. "The longer you're away from the electric chair, the more your brain will have time to heal. Your memories will come back, right Tony?"
The man gave her a simple smile, but it wasn't as genuine as the woman's. "Nat, take her down to the kitchen. She's probably starving."
As the red-headed Nat led her out of the medical lab, she could hear the two men talking in lowered voices. "She can't stay here, Cap. Not when we are on the very brink of finding Loki's scepter. I don't have time to baby sit, and neither do any other members of the team."
"We can't let her go, yet." She heard Steve's voice. "She was experimented on. We don't know if those experiments failed or not."
Emma stared down at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that Natasha had made for her. She wasn't sure if she liked peanut butter, or grape jelly. But her stomach lurched for the food. She could only remember slices of bread and cups of stale water. If she was lucky she'd get an apple or a peach.
In the short time they had spent together, she had been quickly updated on who her rescuers were; The Avengers. The world's greatest superheroes. With each story Natasha told her, she could practically feel her brain expanding with new information. She spoke with Jarvis- or the invisible man, as she liked to call him. She marveled over every new thing Natasha taught her; New York City's skyline and the Statue of Liberty, how a cell phone worked, milkshakes, candy.
It was as if she had been born all over again, but her new found friend had promised that eventually she would remember every single detail of the life she had forgotten. If anything, Natasha made sure to reiterate that.
"Can I become an Avenger?" She asked as she chewed on another sandwich, after deciding that she did in fact like peanut butter and grape jelly. Her question sounded a lot more childish than she had hoped.
"I don't think so, kid." She heard from over her shoulder. It was Tony. "We Avengers are really, super busy. And for you, it would take copious amounts of training to even maybe being considered."
"Tony," Natasha scolded.
"I think we need to chalk this up to what it actually is. When you're all better, when your brain isn't totally empty, we'll send you back to Queens and you can start fresh." He popped a candy in his mouth and flashed her a big smile.
"Until then I'm at least going to teach her some defense skills." Natasha piped up, wanting to help the already helpless young woman. "Every woman in New York should know how to defend themselves. If she had, she might not be in this situation."
"I think that's a great idea," Steve replied. He sat on the bar stool next to Emma, giving her a grin.
"Alright, but as soon as her memories come back her ass is in Queens, and we get this train back on it's rails. We got everybody out looking for the scepter, we are this close to finding it."
She wasn't sure why they decided to help her. Pity, maybe. She didn't deserve to be among them. These were the most elite human beings in the world. The smartest, strongest, and the richest. She was minuscule standing beside them, and yet they treated her just like anyone else.
Natasha trained with her for weeks. Each day was something new, and they trained until Emma remembered every single move. When Steve was around, Emma would try her new skill set out on him. When he wasn't she would use his friend, Sam, who usually over exaggerated just how much she was hurting him to make her feel stronger than she really was.
And each day, Tony's words rang through her mind as if they were the only words she had ever heard; "as soon as her memories come back, her ass is in Queens".
She was in the shower when she remembered for the first time. It wasn't much, but it played like a movie being projected right in front of her on the wall. It startled her, remembering her grandmother's house for the first time. She could smell the scent of baked apple pie in the oven as her tiny feet ran across the shiny hardwood floors, trying to find the older woman.
That was it, and the scene disappeared from her mind's eye. She could still recall the memory, the smells, the sights. And she played it over and over again until she was sure that she would never forget it again if she tried.
It took everything she had not to run to Natasha immediately and tell her what had just happened. She knew that if anyone found out that her mind was finally coming to, her experience here would end. Tony already assumed that her mind worked fine, and that she was lying to them, but Natasha assured him that he was wrong. Pleading her case to him most days that she could in fact join them after having shown extreme progress in the gym.
"You gotta tell me," she said one day after they had finished training. "How's your memory, really?"
Emma looked down at her shoes as the two waited for the elevator. "I don't want to go back to Queens, Nat." Her expression was sullen, having fully remembered everything that had happened in her first few weeks in the city. "Please, don't tell Stark."
Natasha shook her head, signaling that she wouldn't. The elevator's doors swung open, and the duo stepped inside. "What have you remembered?"
"I had neighbors," she replied. "I think they had something to do with my kidnapping. I remember my grandmother, the smell of apple pie. I know that I was born in Washington D.C, and that my parents dropped me off on my grandmother's doorstep when I was six, and they never came back. I had a best friend, Hannah. I know that when I left Luray, she hated me for leaving and I never apologized."
Once again, the doors slid open. Nat was the first to step out, her arm reaching back around to the number pad on the side. She pressed the button for the twelfth floor and gave Emma a sad smile. "You should talk to Tony," was all she said before letting the doors close.
Emma had never been in the lab before. As she stepped out of the elevator and further into the gadget filled room, she was terrified that she'd trip and break everything. Everything seemed so fragile, but knowing Tony, it was all unbreakable.
He had his back turned to her, hands fidgeting with some mechanics. "You here to plead your case?" He asked, continuing what he was doing. "I'm all ears, kid."
"I think I remember everything." She said firmly. "I know who I am. I know why I moved to New York. I know what happened to me. And more than anything, I know that I don't want to leave."
Tony sat whatever he was working on down, spinning around in his chair to look at her.
"I know that I can do this." She continued, her hands motioning to the space around her. "And the only way you're going to know is if you give me a chance." His lips pursed together, but he remained silent. Emma felt defeated. "I remember telling my best friend when I decided to move to New York, that everything happens for a reason. A month later I was kidnapped, and I was experimented on, and I felt the worse pain I had ever felt in my life. But then you found me, and you brought me here."
"You're trying to tell me that you being here is meant to be?"
Emma sighed hard, her eyes looking up to the ceiling. "I'm trying to tell you- ask you- to please, let me stay. I will do everything I possibly can to prove to you that I deserve to be here."
"Fine." He replied curtly.
"Fine?" She asked, not sure if she heard him correctly.
Tony shrugged his shoulders. "Why not?" A breath escaped her lips, making her sound like his words had offended her in some way. But nonetheless, she ran to him, wrapping her arms around his neck; thanking him nearly a thousand times before she finally let go. "You've got a lot of homework to do."
"Anything you need me to do, Mr. Stark. I'm not going to disappoint you!"
The next months were filled with learning everything she possibly could. It was as if she was at school, with actual classes; how to handle a weapon, target practice, how to injure someone without killing them, self defense, hand-to-hand combat, combat with a weapon. And when she wasn't learning something from one of her mentors, or when they were out of a mission and she was stuck in the tower, she was doing nothing but studying the material they had given her.
Many nights, when she couldn't sleep, she even enlisted Jarvis as her teacher. Partly because she was lonely, partly because she didn't want to disrupt the others, and partly because Jarvis would talk for hours; spilling every detail of information he was able to about everything she wanted to know.
One thing in particular stuck out to her, or rather- one person.
After searching the entirety of Stark's archives, she finally found what she was looking for. One morning- as he sat at the island in the kitchen, eating his oatmeal- she dropped the file in front of Steve, making him jump slightly at the surprise. His eyes furrowed as he glanced at through the pages that he was already so familiar with.
"What about him?" He asked, and for the first time since she had met him, his voice was cold.
"I know him." She replied.
Steve's eyes snapped up at the young woman. "What? How?"
"The day you found me," she began. "He found me first. I thought he was going to kill me, like he killed everyone else, but he told me that I was safe and that 'they'd be there soon' and 'they'd find me'. I didn't know who he was talking about, but then you were there and you found me."
"Did he tell you where he was going?" Steve sounded desperate.
Emma shook her head, sorry to disappoint the Captain. "He just left."
The man pulled his phone from his pocket and quickly dialed a series of numbers. "Sam," he said as he stood up from the table and walked off in the other direction. "He's going after undercover HYDRA bases. Yeah, I'm sure. Because he was the one in Brotterode, where we found Emma-"
His voice trailed off as he walked further away from her. She looked back down at the vanilla folder of files on the table, her mind skimming back to the baseball cap wearing man that saved her life.
"Where's Rogers?" Tony asked, pulling Emma from her thoughts. He stormed into the kitchen desperate to find his fellow teammate. Natasha wasn't far behind, followed by Dr. Banner.
"He went that way," she replied as she tucked the file under her arm. "On the phone with Sam."
"You feel like travelling?" He asked.
"As in going on a mission?"
"This one's big," he replied. Her mouth salivated in excitement, and she almost jumped out of her chair. "It's gonna require the whole team and that includes you, but I'm not going to take you if you aren't ready."
Natasha gave her a wink and a smile, knowing that her protege was ready for whatever Tony Stark was about to throw at her. She had worked more than hard to get to where she was now, and she wasn't about to back down.
"Where are we going?" She asked confidently.
"Sokovia," he replied. "Pack your bags."
This is the last Pietro-less chapter! And also, the rest of the story will line up with Age Of Ultron; just adding Emma into the mix. I just want to say that I am on a roll! So the next chapter should be up tomorrow! I'd love to write it tonight, but I HAVE to sleep. My head feels like someone's trying to shove a brick in through my ear. Yikes!
Musical inspiration is as follows:
1. Follow You - Bring Me The Horizon
2. Crossfire - Stephen
As always, reviews are appreciated and encouraged. Thank you!
