I woke up in a different room again, this one was like the first one-cold, dark and damp air. The lights were dim and I could barely make out the body figure lying in the middle of the room.
"Mom?" I croaked.
"Ion?" the figure replied back, they stood up and stumbled over to me. I looked up from my fallen position and saw my mother. "Ion!" she said more confidently. She fell down and hugged me, which she rarely did. It wasn't that she didn't love me; she just wasn't a huggy person. It was on rare that she even hugged my dad or at least not around other people. She pushed her head into my shoulder, she pulled me closer, I hugged her back, I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity. "Thank god you're alive." She breathed. She pulled back and looked at my face. "I didn't know after the explosion…" She patted the side of my face. "But you're my girl and I know you'd come out of it." She did one of her rare smiles.
"Mom?" I didn't want to spoil the moment but I needed to know why they took her, I needed to know what all this was or else I would go crazy.
"What?" her face returned to the almost never ending glare.
"Why did they take you? Was the Red Room really just a front?" I asked. She took a deep breath and paused. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw how terrible shape she was really in. Her right eye was completely swelled shut, and gashed sprinkled her cheeks. On her neck she had what looked to be like 4 big burns marks. On her legs were tiny cuts from my guess was the glass from the explosion. And finally on her wrists and ankles were scabs from where I guess they had her in shackles- they looked bloody and had what looked like rust and dirt.
"Ion, back when I was in Russia you understand about the fire right?" she asked first. I knew the story, it was about how my mother's family died in a fire when she was only 6 years old. She manage to escape and the people from the Red Room took her in and trained her to be the most feared assassin in Russia. That was until my dad found her.
"Yes," I whispered.
"Well, when they took me in, I was a child and didn't know much. They would trick me into things that I hope you never have to do," that didn't sound promising. "And sadly one of the things they made me do was steal research for this project. I ended up, killing," she paused at the word, like I would be ashamed of her, was I? Honestly I didn't know, I knew my mother had killed people but she had never had come out and said it. "A lot of people, and SHIELD had been tracking the research for a while, and when I interfered, well that's when your father was supposed to kill, and instead brought me in. They think I know information that I'm not supposed to."
"Do you?"
"No, like I said, it was long ago and I try to block everything out that happened during my time there, it's a part of me I want to wipe out." We sat there in silence for a while, listening to nothing but our own breathes?
"How are we going to get out of this one?" I broke the silence.
"We're Avengers, we always get out of sticky situations." She replied. Just as she finished the door opened and walked in Pavel with Nestor right behind him, not a good sign. My mom stood up and got in front of me only to be taken back my Nestor who was almost 3 times her size; she could have easily taken him down if she had all of her strength back. She attempted to take him down but he held her down by the shoulders.
"Maybe this will get you to talk," Pavel sneered. He came up and pressed his hand against my face, at first nothing happened. Then I felt what seemed like a thousand little ice cold needles going into my skin. It felt like all the warmth and lite was forced out of my body. My arms and legs wouldn't move, my lungs slowed my breathing, I started to chock on my own breath -I was being drained of my energy. I looked over at my mom but her eyes were closed, her chest feet upwind down in heavy breaths. Her face was tight like she was gritting her teeth, her face got red as if she was trying to hold in a scream of mercy- but both of us knew she wouldn't do it; but I wish we did. My body felt like it was being frozen from the inside out. My vision was getting drearier and my breathing slowed. I fell to the ground in a heap- I felt like I was going to sleep, but that would be too simple.
"Please," I whispered. I raise my hand up in an ill attempt to pry him off of me.
"Stop!" the sudden word rang off the walls. It was my mother who spoke, her face still as hard as rock. "Stop, she's not part of this."
"But she will be," Pavel laughed back. Right before my body gave out and I fell asleep.
I was woken up by my head being smashed against a table. "Rise and shine," hummed Pavel. He breathed in my face, his breath smelling of garlic and fish an odd and yet disgusting smell.
"You look so much like your father." He squished my cheeks for a second, I'd been told that I look like him, same freckled face, same eyes and jaw, but I had my mother's red hair, it made me look weird like the other kids. "Did I ever tell you what he did to me?" I kept my face tight and non-emotional. I guess he took that as an invitation to tell a story. He lifted the side of his shirt to show a long and wide jagged scar. "It was when he came to take your mother away, one of his special arrows and sadly I got in the way of that." I smiled in my head at the thought. "But when word got back here that they had a child, oh I knew you would be a little spit fire and boy was I right." I tried to move my arms and legs but I realized I was tied down by chains.
"What are saying? Some kind of speech?" I spat back.
"A victory speech actually, do you realize I have single handedly taken down the most famous team of superheroes in the world!?" he laughed. "Ah," he sighed. "It's just an amazing feeling." He was crazy; this wasn't just pure evil, something was really wrong up in his noggin. "Now, shall we?" he clapped his hands together. I suddenly took realization of the room we were in, like the others the walls were made of stone, but this one had lights that blinded me and a couple of sophisticated looking machines that I was hooked up to.
"Shall we what?" I honestly didn't want to find out what his mind was thinking. He picked up a syringe with a blue liquid and stabbed it into my neck and pushed it into me. I let out a little yelp to my displacement, at first again nothing but by this time I knew better. I waited for the ice, and then it happened. The icy pain ripped through my veins like a racecar. My lungs felt like I had just swallowed an ice cold glass of water. Then he did something that surprised me, he unchained me and helped me up, well stumbled up considering I couldn't feel my legs. The world suddenly looked like it was in HD. I could see every crack in the walls, every word on the machines, I always had my dad's eye for archery but this was weird.
"Common, I want everyone to see you." He grinned. I was his project, I was his prize that he wanted to show off. He lead my down the stone hallway again- except I could see it better even in the darkness. I could hear the water flowing in the pipes above us and banged on my ears like drums.
"Why, is… everything hurt?" I choked out.
"Just a little sight effect, not even the worse part." He said without even turning to me. Crap- I didn't know how much more my body could take. We entered the room where everyone was being held, the only thing different was that Cooper, my mother and Jane were there, her in a strait jacket with chains and her legs bound together, Cooper with his feet and hands bound together bolted to the wall with a gag in his mouth, he was finally awake but looked like he had gone 3 rounds with Thor, finally Jane, who I had not seen since we had been here- she looked a little better than the rest of them but still in no fighting condision. "Now everyone can see what you are." he threw me down into the room, I fell on the ground and scraped my whole side, but for some reason it didn't hurt as much as it should have. I could feel my body adjusting to the cold inside of it, but he said the worst was yet to come; then I felt it. I horrible pain in the center of my body, it felt like someone was literally dipping my heart in dry ice, which is a lot colder than regular ice, if you hold it for too long it would give you minor frost bite.
"Ion, can you hear me? Please hear me!" I heard Alv's voice from somewhere but didn't know. My whole head was filled with an annoying ringing, my eyes were seeing triple of everything. I coughed up blood, the metallic taste filling my mouth; I looked at what I could but- hold on a sec. The blood that I had spat on the floor was blue, a dark rich blue cover, so basically I freaked. I honestly preferred gashes and black eyes to this, when you have something physical on you, you can see it; take care of it. But when it's inside you, you can't see it you don't know what has to be done to stop it. I screamed at the thought of that. Now my whole body felt like it was being dipped naked in the Arctic Ocean, every pore felt cold, my heart was beating softer and softer. Is this what dying felt like? I heard everyone yelling but it was like they were behind glass. Then for a second everything stopped, my vision went black and my world disappeared. Then like a switch, it turned on. My body felt new, fresh; my vision and hearing even better than before. I looked around and saw everyone's shocked faces, they knew it and so did I. I was one of the Russian experiments now.
