"We could really use you," he'd said. "I know how you feel about… fighting. But –"
"Steve," she'd responded simply, throwing up a silencing hand. "Let's go to find the crazy killer robot."
What a mistake that was. It's not like she turned out to be particularly useful. Just like the others, she got mind-fucked by that science experiment in a dress. In fact, she was the first to go down after making the mistake of thinking that she could take the girl out on her own. In her defense, she probably could have if the other freak hadn't flown in at a million miles a minute and knocked her silly.
None of them were prepared. Not even a little bit.
And that… that… mind-fuck. What the fuck was that? Clint had called it mind control, but that didn't quite seem to fit. They weren't made to actually do anything. It's not as though she had turned them into her puppets. They were just… mentally incapacitated.
It felt a lot like when Professor X would reach into her mind to help settle her – only this, of course, was anything but settling. But the feeling was the same, an odd sort of tickle at the back of her skull, a push and a pull deep in her center. What she saw… it was a dream, but it was also reality. A vision? Sure, that's a better term, she supposed. But weren't visions supposed to tell you something? Weren't they supposed to warn you of something to come, or remind you of something you needed to remember? There was no portending… at least not for her. This vision just seemed to… hurt.
No one had said a word about what they experienced in their visions. Actually, most of them had said very few words at all since arriving at the safe house. And they all knew that it was only partially because an angry robot was hellbent on destroying the world.
"Hey," pulls her out of her reverie and she turns to see Steve looming beside her. "Are you gonna eat?" She looks confused for a moment, but when he sits down next to her on the porch – Clint Barton's porch, if you can believe that – she notices that he has a plate of sandwiches in his hand. He extends the platter out to her, and she shakes her head no.
"Get all that wood chopped?" she asks him with a put on grin.
He shrugs. "Most of it."
"Can you believe this is all Clint's?" she mutters, staring out into the open space in front of them. The sun was just beginning to set, the sky taking on a full array of pastel colors as it butted up against the trees in the distance.
"You knew about this, didn't you?"
She turns and sees him looking at her with a knowing smirk. "I knew he had a family. I never knew where."
Steve nods his head. "You didn't really seem too surprised when we got here. And Laura, she acted like she knew you."
She pulls her hair over her shoulder and begins picking at the edges of the long, thick braid. "We met once. Had dinner in Rome."
"Rome?"
"A second honeymoon," she says with a smile. "Laura always wanted to go." She lets out a long sigh. "I was in Milan. Clint set me up with a contract position with someone who worked in SHIELD's biomedical department. He said he wanted me to meet her. Laura, that is." She looks at him, squinting a bit at the setting sun behind him. "She's great, right?"
His lips quirk into a smile and he nods. Then they both turn to silently stare off into the distance. "Why did he tell you?" he asks after a few minutes.
"When we were in Minsk… he saw what I could do." She drops her head to frown down at her hands, begins pulling at her fingers, bending and working them in an uncomfortable way. "I begged him not to tell anyone. But I figured he would. SHIELD had starting keeping tabs on me as soon as I went into the system. Monitoring potential threats, they called it. Me, my family, my friends and classmates. All of us who were… different. We were all potential threats." She pulls her fingers apart and actually sits on her hands, knowing it's the only way to keep from messing with them. "Anyway, Clint pulled me aside and showed me a picture of his family… his wife and kids. And he said, We all have secrets, Doc."
Steve looks at her assessingly. "And you never told his."
"Of course not."
"And he never told yours."
She shrugs. "You think SHIELD would've trusted a mutant to do any kind of work for them? Think they would've asked one to treat Captain America?" she asks with a twinkle in her eye.
"But," Steve starts, suddenly confused. "Fury knows. He didn't know then?"
She shakes her head. "It wasn't until he asked me to come in to help you that they actually did a complete check – fingerprints, facial recognition, all that. That's when Nat found out too. Fury told her to keep an eye on me. When she told Clint, well, he almost blew a gasket. Told me that they knew. Told Fury that I was cool, I guess. Told Nat that he trusted me…" She sighs. "He felt bad… terrible. He was the one who recommended me to Fury."
"Clint was?" he asks, surprised.
She turns to him with a crooked smile. "Yeah. You didn't know that?" He shakes his head. "He knew I was interested in the effects of the serum – from a strictly research-oriented perspective, not, you know, to replicate or anything."
Steve laughs lightly. "Yeah, I know."
She looks off into the distance again, watches as the sky grows darker by the minute. "He told Fury that he trusted me. He thought that'd be enough. That's what he said… when he apologized." A small chuckle escapes her. "He looked so guilty. And Natasha… I remember her saying something like, I don't care if you turn out to be a shapeshifting polar bear. If Clint says you're good, you're good."
"A polar bear?"
"Something like that," she says with an amused grin.
"And you said they weren't your friends," he teases, bumping her with his shoulder.
She gives him a small smile. "Yeah, well… I still don't trust Fury," she says, tossing a glare over her shoulder and towards the farmhouse that the former director himself walked into less than an hour ago.
"Few people do," he counters. "Come on," he says, rising with a groan. "Let's go hear what the old man has to say."
She slowly rises to follow, wobbling when she gets to her feet. "Are you allowed to call people old?" she asks, leaning her hip against the porch railing for balance.
He reaches down and grabs a sandwich off the plate he'd been holding. "Eat," he orders as he hands her the sandwich and opens the screen door. "And technically, the man you're dating is four months older than me, so maybe you shouldn't age shame."
Three hours later and she can honestly say that she regrets eating that sandwich. Or maybe it was the two that followed. No one understands needing energy to function better than her – well, maybe understand isn't the right word, as there's so much about her odd mutation that truly perplexes her. But as a doctor, at the least, she gets that you need to eat to survive. But if the jet hits one more air pocket, she's going to hurl into her lap. "And Tony just had this suit cleaned," she murmurs to herself, rubbing lines into the leathery fabric on her thighs.
"What?" Bucky asks from across the aisle.
She looks up and sees him staring at her with a furrowed brow. He's been tense since Africa. Well, they've all been tense. But his shoulders have yet to relax, and on his face lay a seemingly permanent frown. "Nothing," she replies, shaking her head and dropping her gaze down. She takes a deep, steadying breath in through her nostrils, closes her eyes, and tries to think of anything other than the way her stomach feels. "I might throw up."
He moves seats so that he's next to her, runs his right hand in soothing circles along her back as she rests her elbows on her knees. "Probably shouldn't have gotten so drunk the other night," he mutters.
Was that only two day ago? "Probably not."
"And you haven't slept since then."
"No one has."
"And I bet almost everyone here feels like they might puke too." She turns to look at him and he offers a small, reassuring smile. He hand snakes up to the base of her neck and she leans back into his touch as he gently kneads the muscles there.
"I can't believe we just let Helen go back to Seoul," she breathes out.
"We were supposed to know what was going to happen?"
"No." She pauses, twisting her head to roll out the muscles he's massaging. "But she's not like us, you know? She hasn't been through things like this before."
"Things like the end of the world?"
She snorts out a laugh. "Yeah, things like the end of the world. Or killer robots. Or alien attacks. Or Hydra, or SHIELD, or anti-human mutant conspiracies. Or anti-mutant human conspiracies."
"Those last two are new to me too," he says with a grin.
She twists in her seat so that she can face him. "Did you see her face on Sunday morning? Before she left to go back home? She was terrified. Traumatized." She shakes her head a bit, still maintaining eye contact with him. "He's coming for her. For the cradle."
"When you say she's not like us, you mean she's just a person, right?" His hand drops from the back of her neck onto her shoulder. "She's what? Normal?" Tessa doesn't answer, she just drops her gaze as if in thought. He moves his fingers to her temple and plays with the loose curls that sprung up after escaping her tight braid. "She's smart," he tells her, voice deep and firm. "She might not have powers, but that doesn't mean she can't handle whatever it is that comes her way."
She shrugs. "Maybe."
He watches her closely, sees her forehead wrinkle, her brows scrunch together. "You gonna tell me what else is going on up here?" he asks with a small tap on her temple. She looks up, her eyes lost in confusion. "What are you thinking about?"
She twists around and then leans back into him. His right arm drapes around her and she takes his hand in hers and begins playing with his fingers. "It's the thing Bruce said… about Ultron. He wants us to evolve."
"Yeah?"
She scoots further back and he instinctively wraps his other arm around her, holding her close. She can feel his chin on her shoulder, his breath in her hair as she says, "We have evolved. Some of us." She stares down at Bucky's fingers, rubs firm lines into the calloused skin. "I think he's right. It's right." She shakes her head. "Does that make me an asshole?"
His chest rumbles with a soft chuckle. "No, I don't think it makes you an asshole."
"To be clear, I do not agree with his methods."
He laughs a bit more. "That's good."
She lets out a long sigh. "People… humanity… everyone's so afraid of change, of what bad things it might bring. They forget about the good. Instead of embracing the possibility of something better, they shun what's different, cling to what they know."
"Fear is a powerful motivator."
"And everyone's more afraid than ever. Especially since New York, since the invasion. Even Hydra and SHIELD… fear. That's what Project Insight was really about." She feels him tense at the mention of the project. "How much worse is that going to be now?"
He lets out a tight breath and nuzzles her hair. "I don't know, baby," he whispers to her.
"It's true, though," she says, folding his fingers into a fist. "He's right. If we don't evolve, we die."
