Chapter Six

The few days spent in Avengers Tower had blurred together in escorts to and from the lab, with her lodgings consisting of a containment cell made of some hybrid plastic Friya could not pronounce. Steve and Thor had taken up the responsibility of watching her without a word to anyone. She was restrained with vibranium wrist cuffs and guided barefoot wherever she was required. She had even been equipped with a strange, humming collar around her neck that zapped her whenever she attempted to use her light outside of the indestructible plastic bubble.

To be fair, she had only tried to fade out to use a bathroom during a brain scan that had already taken several hours.

She had ended up urinating on herself and the equipment, and Steve and Thor, both, had to carry her to a shower to get cleaned up. She had refused to leave her cell for the rest of the day, dressed in gray leggings and a stretchy top with thin straps - she could not remember what it was called, a noodle top? Whatever it was, there was a level of comfort that could not compare to it. She would wear nothing else if she could. So, Friya had magicked flexible ropes of sheer, stretchy fabric, and amused herself with her usual acrobatics, while Steve and Thor watched.

By late morning, on the day of some party or celebration, she woke to the sound of someone tapping on her cell. Stretching out on her piles of pillows, she cracked an eye to see the entire brigade stood behind Steve, all looking as if they had great expectations, or limited time.

"Rise and shine," Steve said, tapping in the security code to unlock the door to her cell. "Dr. Cho has your results, and we have some questions."

Friya stretched a bit more, before getting to her feet and offering her wrists, so Thor could cuff her with obvious mistrust. She was escorted up to the lab, where Dr. Cho and Dr. Banner were waiting, looking over her scans and blood work until everyone crowded in. She took her seat on the lab table, and waited.

Dr. Banner cleared his throat, and Dr. Cho typed in her records, before anyone broke the silence.

"Can we get started? Some of us have a party to get ready for," said Stark, crossing his arms and leaning against a shiny bit of machinery.

Banner looked at Dr. Cho, and Friya looked at them both expectantly, and the answer was less than anticlimactic.

"Inconclusive, across the board," stated Banner, rubbing his chin and projecting her lab results for everyone to see. "The closest DNA comparable is Thor, as an Asgardian, but there are significant deviations, and most of her cellular structure is collectively light particles. Basically, she's an unknown variable made of pure magic."

"And what of my brain?" Friya asked, indifferent to being an unknown variable, because, technically, she was born out of starlight and magic. "Did the scans discover anything?"

Dr. Cho displayed all the scans they had taken, and zoomed in on a specific part of Friya's brain that looked more solid, with a tangle of rapid sparks that moved nowhere. It was beautiful in motion, all the colors firing away and sputtering out quickly, like fireworks. She was in awe, aware that this was the first time she had ever seen the inner workings of her brain, and it was evident by the somber looks on both doctors' faces that what they all were looking at was not normal.

"You were right to assume you were not quite healed," said Dr. Cho, increasing the image and rotating it. She pointed at a spot in the center of all the activity, a microscopic device that looked like a grain of rice. "You possess a cluster of nerve-endings and synapses that no ordinary human being possesses. And this mechanism in the middle is blocking your ability to fully access whatever this cluster contains, or is utilized for, which is why the sparks are so short-lived. They have nowhere to travel."

Friya hopped down and stood in the center of the hologram to get a better look, twisting the image around, increasing and decreasing the size, until she figured out where the little grain of rice sat in her brain.

"Foresight, pre-existence… Freya," Friya muttered, scraping her nails over her bottom lip. "This is why I'm unstable, weak. They blocked me from Freya."

"From who?" Steve asked tentatively.

"My sister," she replied, pointing at the cluster of sparks with her cuffed hands. "We are halves of one whole being, and that is our link - everything we share is together. Foresight, power, memories. Without the link, I am less than her. I am not myself."

"Wait a minute," interjected Barton. "There are two of you?"

Friya ignored him and looked at the cluster again, "I'll have to remove it, otherwise I will only ever have half an explanation. I need all my memories. If someone could remove these precautions-"

"I don't think that would be a good idea," said Steve, apologetically. "It could be -"

The collar and cuffs unlocked and fell to the floor, and everyone looked to Tony Stark, the only person with the ability and access codes to do it. He looked innocent and yet also unrepentant, an achievement if there ever were one to be admired and respected for. She offered him an appreciative nod, while rotating her joints and stretching, relaxing control on her power and letting it roam in swirling tendrils through the lab, playing over the skin of everyone present. There was a mist blanketing the floor, spreading out from her feet, sparks of white electricity buzzing through it and a frigid chill to the air that was crisp, clean, and smelled of harsh winters and snowy mountain ranges, of alpine and fir trees, and pristine waters untouched by man and frosty breezes of the purest air.

Her translucent skin grew more pale, more alabastine, as her veins glowed moonlight underneath. The metallic silver of her eyebrows frosted over, her eyes a cloudy gray, but none save for Thor moved to chain her once more.

As quickly as a shiver running down a spine, Friya pulled it all back into herself, leaving the lab with a warm breeze that tasted of spring.

She gasped, still cut off from all that exists, from the natural magic of every planet, from the sun, the stars, and the galaxies beyond. She was alone in the universe. She could not even feel her sister.

"What did you do?" demanded Thor, hammer at the ready, a large, thick hand lifting her off her feet by her throat. He paid no mind to the sadness in her eyes, the lone tear slipping down her cheek. He never trusted her, scared by his own assumptions about her, and she could feel it as a thunderstorm raging in her head. "What form of creature are you?"

Friya did not answer immediately, simply pressing the palm of her hand to the back of her head behind her ear, and releasing her magic to pull the miniscule device from her brain.

Thor watched in shock, clamping his hand more tightly around her throat, only to realize he could not bend her flesh to his will.

The device ripped through her brain and out through her flesh, just under her skull, caught in the concentrated web of power dancing around in the palm of her hand. It floated over to Banner and Stark, who both jumped back into action as the small piece of tech dropped into a sterile petri dish.

Thor refused to let her down, even as she sobbed. If she could not connect to the universe, she would slowly become mortal, as Steve for example. The light would wither and die out, deteriorating in Wanda and Pietro, driving them mad before killing them. She could not bear for that to happen. Their deaths would mean her death, as she had entwined her very essence within them, to protect them, as her creations - the closest to children she had ever experienced.

"I will only repeat myself once," growled Thor, slamming her down onto the lab table. "What are you?"

Everyone was attempting to pull him off of her, at the exact moment she unleashed her fragmented mind unto Thor.

The Avengers witnessed everything she could remember, in pieces of glass that shredded through her brain with ease. They witnessed the empty expanse of the universe, no planets to colonize, no burgeoning civilizations to conquer each other. There was only the Immortals, protected in the heart of shining stars, and the Celestials, waging war for the essence of life - the stones that their races worshipped. The stones that bore the universe from the womb of her own Queen Mother.

They followed her descent to Asgard, watching her sister leave through the Bifrost for Midgard, spending centuries alone in the mountains, surrounded by ice and snow, owls her only companions. They saw her arrival to Midgard, in the middle of a moor in Scotland, and her the tribes that came from all over to beg for her blessing, to learn her ways and abide by the natural law. They witnessed her travels, her tiredness of death, her climb to the highest mountains in the coldest fjord in Norway, and felt her sadness and woe as she buried herself in ice.

They discovered her wakening at the ripple of the first world war, the broken and bloodied soldiers in makeshift wards during the second, and the deplorable conditions as she pedaled through the poor streets of the east end to deliver babies - a strong desire to nurse new life, instead of approaching death.

They saw Zola's scientists surrounding her in Switzerland, he confusion she had felt not knowing how they grabbed her, how they discovered her, and experienced the pain as they succeeded in controlling her. There came the broken decades of devastation, the loneliness as she watched Winter and his lady love find each other again and again, the sorrow it brought when the two were separated and erased from each others' minds, torn apart and broken. She felt shame as Steve Rogers bore witness to her fragile mind, and the nights with his closest friend, ripping each other to pieces and entanglement of limbs as they sought refuge from their rage and resentment.

They all crumbled under the weight of her regret, as she obeyed HYDRA, and as she broke free in great part to the Captain. Every single one of them came to realize how deeply she could love, watching the year pass with Pietro and Wanda, and the indescribable visions that had begun to grow more intense with the sense of doom lingering on the horizon.

They experienced what had been, the universe in a glimpse as it was at that moment, and the endless possibilities of what could be in bits and pieces - the immense sorrow of every life passing or gone, forced to linger in a plain of waiting for eternity.

It was then that Thor managed to pull away with a roar, "Enough!"

Everyone else fell to the floor, clutching their heads, their hearts, their souls, trying to comprehend the magnitude of life she had lived. The weight of her existence squeezed the air from their lungs, for it was no strong feat for mere mortals to understand the birth of life and the responsibility of an entire universe that stretched out into the void of nothingness. Yet, they managed. They gasped and choked and sobbed, growling and whimpering, laying on the floor in the wake of what the God of Thunder had brought unto them.

In the wake of everything, it was Friya left splintered and reeling, her grasp on reality, yet again, slipping away.