Infinity War: NO LONGER A GIRL


Note: I know what you're going to ask – how could Emma withstand the power of the Soul Stone? She was only human before Thanos put it in, and we all know that only a being of great celestial power can control an Infinity Stone. Even now, Emma only has a connection to and command over the Soul World, nothing more! Well this answers it – and beware!

More importantly, we have a guest appearance! Wait until you see who it is! (By the way, this character is an OC that I wrote for Shadowhunters ages ago for a friend (the story is not uploaded yet but if anyone wants to see it, just tell me) so you won't know who it is, sorry.


When you were here before
Couldn't look you in the eye
You're just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry

You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
And I wish I was special
You're so f****** special

But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here.

I don't care if it hurts
I want to have control

Creep, by Radiohead

I'm no longer a daughter

No longer a girl with dreams

No longer with hope

I'M A WEAPON


Emma felt the scream rising inside her.

She woke up.

Then the pain hit her like a rain of daggers, everywhere, all around her, pulsing from her broken bones and infecting every part of her.

"You deserve this, little girl. You deserve every bit of pain I went through."

Emma took a deep breath; she was past begging now. "I know, Wanda."

"You know? You would never understand -"

"But I do. Stop denying it, Wanda. I do understand. Ever since 1941, I've understood. We are who we are... but we are similar."

"You... you killed him, though. How can you say that when you killed him?"

"Wanda, listen to me. You have to accept it. That wasn't me. That was Medea, Medea all along. Try and kill her, and she'll take you down with her."

Emma felt like crying. "I don't know who I am anymore," she whispered. "It would be better – so much better – if I was dead."

She reached into her chest, finding the atoms of her heart in her mind.

The muscle seemed so fragile now, beating away, fluttering with each beat, keeping her treacherously, agonisingly alive.

She made it stop.


FRIDAY's screech sounded through the compound. The AI was no longer cool and calm, but purely terrified:

"EMMA'S GONE INTO CARDIAC ARREST!"

Coulson jumped up. Everybody piled into Emma's room, Rhodey lugging a defibrillator along as he ran.

Emma was lying on her back in her bed. She was very still.

A jolt ran through her body.

She did not move.

Another jolt of electricity.

She did not move.

One more.

"Come on, Emma," Coulson muttered, "Please..."

"Wait, let me!" The new woman, Carol, pulled the defibrillator paddles off Emma's skin and placed her hands on Emma's chest. Thump.

Emma gasped. She breathed.

"I'll get her down to the sickbay," Carol said. She gathered Emma in her arms and carried her out of the room. Bruce followed her, as he was the doctor.

"Coulson?" Nebula said.

"I'm fine," the S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent replied. "Just a few unhappy memories."

He followed Carol and Bruce, watching Emma as though she might break at any second, like she was a porcelain doll.

"It's all over now," Steve said. "We're with her till the end of the line."


Emma knows that she is dead.

She feels like she is sinking through still water, her limbs heavy and unresponsive, and her are lungs filled with something that is thicker and more cloying than air.

Then her vision blurs and she looks down.

Emma sees a girl with white-blonde hair and strange, silvery eyes chained to the ground, thick shackles fastened around her wrists and ankles. She's skinny and her eyes are sunk deep in their sockets. The girl is screaming, her voice full of pain and fear, with no coherent words, just a single ululation that fills the empty space around her.

Tears fill the girl's eyes, and she begins to beg with someone who isn't there – someone named Alec. It's pitiful to hear, sobbing and pleading, apologising over and over.

"Alec - I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Alec -" She's crying, her sobs echoing around the empty space. It feels as though there should be someone else there, watching, not helping her.

"Hey," Emma calls softly. "Can you hear me?"

She looks up, startled, maybe a little scared. Jerked out of whatever hallucination she's trapped in, she looks up.

"Wh-What?"

Emma drifts down, takes her hand, and pulls the girl to her feet like an angel descending from heaven. The girl looks shocked enough for Emma to be one.

"Who are you?" Emma asks, as the girl's now-phantom-like feet and hands pass right through the shackles, leaving her solid body limp on the floor.

"I-I'm Freya."

Freya still clings to Emma's arm, her face very pale. She looks younger than Emma, even though they are the same age.

"I'm Emma. Don't look so scared – I'm not here to hurt you."

Freya jerks away from her, as though she's scared of being touched by another person just as much as she clung to Emma a few seconds before.

"Are - are you sure?"

Emma smiles a little at her trembling voice. Freya seems a lot younger than her age. Too young for what is happening to her.

"I'm sure."

Freya pushes her white-blonde hair out of her eyes. She looks tired, and her cheeks are hollow, marking what she's been through.

"Emma... can you take me away from here?"

"I-I don't know." Emma pauses. "I'm technically dead, I guess." Emma can feel something creeping up on them – on Freya's solid body that is chained far below.

Then Emma feels a sharp jerk, a shock through her torso. Her heart, still and cold in her chest, jerks again, trying to beat, trying to bring her back. Something tugs at the edge of her vision, trying to drag her back to consciousness.

Emma grits her teeth and stays where she is. She will not go back.

"Emma? Emma, are you alright?"

But Freya is slipping away as well, as someone drags at her solid body on the ground, and her face goes even whiter. She cries out, words tumbling from her lips in a panicky river of syllables: "No! No, please! I-I can't! Emma, Emma, help me, please help -" Then her form fades, travelling back to solid body.

Emma can feel the fourth jerk of electricity, stronger than the last three, jerk her heart back into life. The world around her swirls and blurs, the slow, dreamlike feeling vanishing in the wave of sudden fear.

"Freya!" she screams, as she feels blankets under her, a woman's hands, pulsing with heat and electricity.

Then her world descends into darkness again.

Sleep, her mind murmurs, sleep and forget.

Emma feels memories torn away, sharp and hard, purposeful as a surgeon's scalpel, and she forgets Freya, forgets the other girl's pale face, white-blonde hair, and bright silvery eyes, her terrified screams, just like that.


"How is she?" Coulson asked.

Emma was lying on a hospital bed, hooked up to various machines, with plastic tubes trailing from her skin. There was an oxygen mask over her face and a heart monitor beeping regularly and reassuringly next to her.

"Still not conscious, poor kid," Bruce said, and looked at the readouts on the machines. "We don't know about residual trauma either. Or if she's going to wake up at all."

"I can help her," Wanda's voice made both men jump. "I can bring her back. She is in no pain and there is no... residual trauma. She is drifting. I... I think she is alone; I can't sense anyone else. So alone." Wanda's voice shivered.

Bruce looked reluctant. "Alright... but be careful."

"I will."

Coulson was looking down at Emma with something like pity, anger and hope in his eyes, blended together like colours.

"Do it," was all he said.

Wanda reached out with her mind towards the sleeping girl. She pulled the thoughts to the surface of the struggling, confused mass of dreams and fear.

Emma gasped, her eyes flying open.

And suddenly Bucky was there – or his voice was, at least. "Emma, it's me. Calm down, now. It's me. It's only me."

Emma's normal eye was wild and terrified, like a cornered wolf. She gripped the sides of the bed, and it began to disintegrate under her fingers. Her hand came up and wrenched off the oxygen mask.

Bruce looked at Coulson. "We might have to sedate her again."

Wanda and Bucky were still trying to calm Emma down.

"Emma, Emma, it's me. It's Bucky. You're alright."

Emma's breathing began to calm, and her heart rate (which had spiked the moment she'd woken up) became regular again.

Bruce looked at the readouts on the machines again. "Emma, goddammit, you gave us a scare just then. Don't ever do that again, okay?" Emma, now that she knew where she was, began to cry again. "Why did you bring me back?" she whispered. "Why? I was dead. The world was better."

Bruce stared at her as if she were speaking Martian. "We need you, Emma."

"That's all?"

"You're like..." Bruce paused. "A daughter. Our daughter. After we lost..." his voice trailed off, his eyes automatically sliding to the machine readouts.

"After she killed me." Peter said flatly.

"Yes." Bruce said. "After... you fell."

"No hard feelings, Emma." Peter's voice was light, casual, but with an undercurrent of sarcasm that was impossible to ignore.

The door opened. Thor, his ever-present axe swinging in his hand, walked inside. "This is the Midgardian that caused so much grief? She is a mere girl."

Emma snarled at him: "I'm not a girl. I've never been a girl, not since I was brought to Sokovia in 1941."
Thor spun his axe. Emma followed the movement, on edge now.

"You have been around for almost as long as I have, Lady Emma." Thor said, formal and polite as ever, but his tone joking.

"You're young, then."

"Not as young as my brother."

"You mean Loki."

Thor pulled up a hard plastic chair and sat down. His larger-than-life presence was incongruous next to the medical equipment, the trappings of normality that Bruce and the others clung to. "You knew him?"

"Proxima killed him, Thor. Don't you remember that I let you run? I was punished for that. My father... Thanos... likes punishment. Or at least, Maw does." Emma's voice wasn't accusing, just a little apologising. She feels the scar on her cheek where one spike pierced her mouth and forced her tongue down... Emma forced the memory away, shoving it to the back of her subconscious where the forgotten memory of Freya also nestles.

"I am sorry if I caused you pain." Thor actually looks sorrowful, but not only at the mention of his dead brother.

Emma inclined her head as well as she could while lying on her back. She sat up hurriedly so she could meet Thor's blue eyes.

"That's alright. Was Loki... good?"

"He was..." Thor paused, considering the question, "complicated. He has tried to kill me many times in the past, for example, when we were eight, but has saved my life so many times that I can't count. I... I can't believe that he is gone."

"If you kill one man, you are a murderer. If you kill millions of men, you are a conqueror. But if you kill them all... you are a god." Emma whispered. "A god..."

"You remind me of him. Your smile... the way we can never know for sure if we trust you..." Thor's voice was wondering.

Emma smiled. The Soul Stone pulsed, still retaining its angry red-gold glow. It pulsed like a separate heart. "That is a fantasy. I am human."

"Are you?" Wanda again.

"Genetically."

"And inside?"

"I am a monster."

"You are only a monster if you consider yourself one, Lady Emma," Thor said. "Do not think yourself a monster."

Emma looked at him, her normal eye perceiving everything. "But I am."

"Emma -"

"Don't butt in, Parker!" she snapped at him.

Lightning crackled along the edge of Thor's axe, tiny sparks of electricity like miniature stars. Emma was watching it, transfixed by the dancing points of light like a cat, both her normal and electronic eyes never still. Her hands were moving restlessly, flesh fingers sliding over metal ones. "I am the monster that parents tell their children about at night."


Steve came in to see her after Thor left, muttering about honing his axe. Emma suspected that he wanted some alone time. Emma remembered his brother – Loki – pierced by Proxima's spear, crumpling to the ground, blood spreading around him as he twitched once and was still. But Emma wasn't sure whether Loki was dead. Sure, she'd seen

Steve Rogers.

An odd figure by all accounts, but interesting. She had been taught about him, met him a few times (though Emma did not remember the meetings) but nice. Kind of fatherly.

He shouldn't be nice to her.

What was the point? She had disintegrated some of his best friends. And killed one of them.

Why did Steve not hate her?

"Emma? Are you listening to me?"

"Yes."

Steve looked at her, and his blue eyes were penetrating. Damn. He was doing his 'Captain America is Disappointed With You' look. "You weren't, were you?"

Emma bit her lip and looked down. "No."

"You need to see beyond your own fault, Emma. You can't keep dwelling on the past or you will never be able to separate yourself from it." He paused to wipe his eye – was he crying?

"Mr Rogers?"

"Steve?" Bucky said, at almost the same time. "Are you okay?"

"My God, Bucky, I've missed you." Steve said softly. "I used to see you every day, and now... it's hard. You've never spoken before. Why?"

"Emma was in trouble. I had to help her."

Steve looked at Emma. The heart monitor counted the seconds with each beat of Emma's heart – beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Emma, feeling the pain of her broken bones again, reached into the atoms and began healing them.

"They were angry," Emma explained. "So angry. Mr Quill... Wanda... others. They... It hurt, Mr Rogers..."

"Please, call me Steve," said Steve.

Emma looked like she was going to cry. Her voice kept stalling, pausing and then continuing, trying to speak. "... Steve. It... they broke... It hurt..."

"Don't tell him, Emma," Bucky warned. "He has enough bad memories to be dealing with at the moment."

"I know. I am sorry about Mr Wilson."

Steve remembered Sam – the man's jokes, his constant smile except on a mission, the sun reflecting off the red-tinted goggles, his incredible skill at cooking, his equal talents at flying with the carbon-fibre wings.

The blood on those same wings, as stiff and unmoving as Sam's body.

Sam wouldn't be coming back from Wakanda. The Avengers – with Emma's help – had buried him outside the compound as soon as they had returned from Wakanda. Emma had used her ability to move the earth and Sam's body easily, and to create a gravestone.

"Are you sure he's not in there with the rest?"

"Yes." Emma tried her best to sound sad. It did not work. She simply sounded emotionless.

"Can you – Can you bring them back?"

"I don't know."

Steve looked at her, his eyes full of sudden anger. "Emma, if you're pretending – if you can bring them back -"

"Why would I pretend?" Emma said, genuinely surprised. "Why would I not have brought Bucky back by now, if I could? He -" Her voice became choked with tears towards the end of the sentence. Despite all Bucky had done to her in the past, he was like a father to her, always willing to listen.

"Emma, Emma, don't cry, it's not your fault -" Bucky tried to comfort her, clumsily using the phrases Clint used whenever his kids – Lila, Cooper and little Nathaniel – came to visit the compound. Bucky wasn't good with children.

"IT IS!" Emma screamed. "My fault, my fault, my fault, my -"

"Emma!" Steve yelled. "For God's sake, this was not your fault!"

"It is, it is, it is..." Emma was sitting up, hugging her knees and rocking back and forth on the hospital bed. "It is, is, is, is..."

"It was Thanos." Bucky said calmly. "Stop blaming yourself."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I never meant..."

"I know, Emma." Steve smiled, though his eyes were full of tears. He was recalling Peggy, and the lost future they might have had, if not for HYDRA. He felt equal waves of anger, fear, and affection surging in his mind. "I know."


"You are one person. One person out of many people. Emma, Medea, the little girl who lived in 1941, and Thanos's pet. You are..."

"Yes." Emma felt her ability trembling at the tips of her fingers. "I am me."

"You might call us sisters," Wanda said. "We are very much alike."

"You can help me through this, can't you, Wanda?"

Wanda paused. "Without you, Emma, we would have lost everything. We still have, but at least we have gained a little as well."

"A little. And what I've lost... is everything I ever loved."

"Emma," Wanda whispered, "I'm so, so sorry. I was so angry, so full of hate, I just wanted someone to take it out on, and, conveniently, you were there."

Emma looked into the thin air that Wanda's voice seemed to occupy. "I forgive you."

"Mr Quill may be a little harder to forgive," Wanda muttered darkly. "I doubt he will ever forgive you, at any rate."

"I don't know about him." Emma's bones were nearly healed now, broken again last night, when Quill and the other vengeful people in the Soul World had given them another beating, another round of shouted abuse and pain and broken bones. Another night of endless pain, eternal screaming. Emma knew that soon the pain and Quill will kill her. She tried to put it into words, but she could only manage a few sentences. "But I'm falling apart at the seams, Wanda. If pain was art... then I'd be a masterpiece."

She paused. The few seconds seemed to last a lifetime.

"I haven't got much time left, Wanda."

Then a brand-new voice – one Emma had never heard before – filled the air. She could sense a new presence in the Soul World.

"We understand each other, Emma."

Wanda seemed to flee. She ran to some far-off reach of the Soul World, hiding.

"Wh-Who are you?" Emma managed, trying to keep her voice level.

"You don't know me? What a surprise. I've been watching you, Emma. I've seen you at your most vulnerable and at your strongest. I've been here throughout your pain and love, your rage and fear... you're so like me. I've been with you all your life, Emma. The woman you killed in 1941? She was not your mother...

But the voice was male. How could this be?

"I am."


Oooh! Guess who it is! (Clue: Anyone who knows their Norse mythology should get this immediately) Please review! Katie Trillion xx