"I'm guessing all of you have already seen this," Tessa muses cynically as she plops down into the only remaining chair at the conference table. "Or most of it, anyway."

She glances around the room. Steve's seated directly across from her with Natasha by his side, both trying to look busy with other things in an obvious attempt to avoid her question. Tony, who's flanking the Captain's left, doesn't respond to her either, but he at least has the courtesy to make eye contact as he gives a clipped nod.

"I haven't seen anything," Clint states from the other end of the table as he impatiently twists and spins in his chair.

"Me either," Bruce mutters with a shrug as he pulls out a pen, readying himself to take notes. "I spent most of the morning going over the test data and lab reports Vision sent over. We'll have a lot to discuss after this."

"Tomorrow," Bucky interjects as he tightly folds his arms across his chest and leans back into the wall behind them. "Maybe."

Tessa rolls her eyes and turns to Wanda, takes in her tentative, anxious energy. "You?" she asks simply.

Wanda shakes her head. "And I really don't want to see it." She reaches out and lays a comforting hand atop Tessa's. "I'm just here for you."

She pulls in a long, steeling breath and looks to Vision at the head of the table. "Okay, then," she mutters with a sigh. "Let's see what's what."

The android's mouth falls slightly agape, his eyes pinging nervously over to Tony as if seeking permission. "Perhaps," he begins, drawing the word achingly slowly, "we should start with Dr. Banner's assessment of the extraction procedure."

Tessa's brows pull tightly together as she repeats, tone stiff and scornful, "Extraction procedure." The words echo in her mind, a spark of recognition threatening to ignite a blaze of deeply buried memories. "Extraction," she mutters softly, more to herself.

"Yes," Vision says with a slow nod. "I think, perhaps, it would be more… useful to simply learn about the procedure rather than to, well, see it."

"That hard to watch, huh?" Clint questions. There's smirk on his face, but it barely covers the vitriol smoldering in his eyes.

"Probably," Bruce muses blandly as he shoves his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and quickly digs through his files. Without looking away from his pile of paperwork and photos – dozens of lab reports, procedure protocols, and patient profiles making up the bulk of the intel before him – he begins his assessment. "From what I can gather, the procedure itself was pretty… rough." He whips out a couple of the papers he'd been digging for and reads aloud from one. "While the donor will be anesthetized prior to being brought into the extraction chamber – "

"Extraction chamber?" Clint bites out amid a bitter scoff. "Jesus."

Natasha leans forward, hands folded neatly together, and she calmly states, "We knew when we saw that room that it wasn't built for your standard wellness exam."

"Can I see the room?" Tessa asks quickly, brow still furrowed in thought as tiny shards of memories clink around inside her skull. Vision turns – wordlessly – to his right, his gaze once again seeking approval, first from Tony then from Steve. "Seriously?" she intones, watching him wait for the go-ahead. "I was there. It isn't something you need to hide from me."

"Let her see it," Steve orders, his face and voice both severe. The stern countenance only barely softens when he turns to Tessa. "Let us know if it triggers anything."

She cocks her head at him, confusion and trepidation both pooling in her gut as she takes in his austere expression, clipped words, and most of all, the nervous set to his shoulders. He looks as though he's at the very edge of battle, just waiting for the enemy to come into view.

Beside her, Wanda reaches out and snakes her fingers around her hand once again. "If you feel anything… If you need me…"

And all at once, Tessa understands. She nods slowly and returns her gaze to Steve. "You don't mean if anything triggers a memory. You mean if anything triggers me."

"Or a memory," Bruce states quickly, correcting the assertion before anyone else can. "With traumatic amnesia, things often start to come back together in pieces. You might not even fully realize that something's a memory until – "

"Yeah, Bruce," she interrupts with a huff. "I'm a doctor, same as you. I know how amnesia works. Now why don't you go on with your little speech about extraction while Vision shows me the damn chamber." Her hair flips wildly as she swings about to look at the giant television screen at the other end of the table, a somewhat grainy image of a small room with what almost looks to be an operating table at its center popping to life.

"Right," Bruce gripes, clearing his throat dramatically. "Where was I?" He peruses the page before him and finds his stopping point. "So, the patients were sedated before being moved into the… room. Which tracks with what we saw on the footage from your…"

She rolls her eyes, never removing her focus from the stilled image on the screen. "Seeing as how I'm the only person here who hasn't been allowed to see that footage either, why don't you tell me how that tracks?"

"Well…"

"They released some kind of gas," Bucky states from behind her, his likely being the only voice in the room that could get her to shift attention away from the screen. She turns a bit in her seat and twists her head around to look over at him. "Whatever it was knocked you out pretty quick," he tells her with a shrug.

She bites at the corner of her lip for a brief moment, still working to piece things together for herself. "And then they took me to that room?"

Another shrug. "We didn't know for sure then. But… yeah, looks like."

Her eyes flick back up to the still on the screen, a pronounced feeling of déjà vu washing over her. "There were restraints," she mutters softly, eyes narrowing as she tries to make out the thick leather binds that she knows were on that gurney.

"Yeah," Bruce stutters. "Yes. That's…" He dips his head and begins reading where he'd left off. "While they will be anesthetized… Each donor must be tightly bound using all restraints provided." He glances up, his glasses gradually slipping down his nose yet again. "So, yeah. There were restraints."

"Why did they need to be bound?" Steve asks, thick frown pulling at his face.

"Uh," he drones as he finds his place to begin reading once again. "These hormone-producing specimens are often violent and reactive, even when in a twilight state. Extraction may take several hours depending on the individual physiology of the donor, leading to a gradual abatement of sedation. In an effort to curb wasted time and resources, we will not attempt to tailor the type or dosage of medication to each donor. Therefore, it is not uncommon for a specimen to wake mid-procedure and to become alert and volatile." He looks up, eyes bouncing to each of the drawn and still faces in turn.

"Fuck," Clint drawls, the only one to break the heady silence.

Tessa shifts awkwardly in her seat, turning to Bruce, but still keeping the eerie image of the room in her periphery. "I was awake," she mutters, voice so soft he cannot discern if she's asking a question or making a statement.

Bucky fills in the blank with a harsh, "Yes," pulling her stare his way.

Bruce's gaze moves from Tessa's speculative face to Bucky's look of utter misery. "Uh," he starts, looking back to the papers before him. "I didn't really get a chance to look at just your file yet. There's a decent amount of it that's still encrypted. And I figured you'd want us to go over it together."

She's locked onto Bucky's stormy gray eyes when she says, affect almost serene, "Show me what they did."

Steve jumps in then, voice booming as he leans suddenly forward. "I don't think we all need to see that."

She spins on him, posture stiffening and eyes ablaze as she spits out, "You already saw it. I didn't get to see anything."

As he continues to peruse the file before him, Bruce shoots out a stilling hand in her direction. "Wait, just… hang on a sec." He shuffles a few papers about and then shoves some her way. "There," he says, tapping a harsh finger at the center of one of the papers. "That's the procedure. In a nutshell."

She pulls her fiery stare away from Steve's smug-set face to look down at the paper. Her eyes rapidly peruse the document, lips barely moving as she mumbles the words aloud. "Initial extraction to be done via lumbar puncture… then begin stimulating the hypothalamus and monitoring hormone production via internal sensors…" Her brow furrows, eyes narrow as they rise up to meet Bruce's.

He shifts the paper, revealing behind it a graph with a steadily increasing sine wave. "Tiny sensors, inserted endoscopically – transorbitally – were able to pick up even subtle shifts in the productivity of the hypothalamus." His finger runs the length of the giant bell curve on the page, Tessa's eyes closely following its path. "Once a certain induction rate was achieved, it was just a matter of waiting for the hormone to flood the patient's system. Then they could draw as much blood as possible – typically up to two pints during each extraction."

"They're lucky I didn't go into hypovolemic shock," she mutters to herself. Her eyes snap up to Bruce, a look of absolute horror – peppered with a hint of awe – blowing them wide. "Transorbital?"

He nods solemnly, gaze tracking to his right as Tony asks, "As in transorbital lobotomy?"

Steve's stern countenance breaks just the slightest bit, a perplexed look taking over his face. "What's that?"

"It's the procedure Stark's mom had done when she found out she was pregnant with him," Clint snipes with an amused smirk.

Tony's lip curls in disgust. "Hilarious," he scoffs before shifting in his seat to look at the Captain. "Not too long after you went in the ice people started getting their brains scrambled to keep them from feeling."

"That's awfully… simplistic," Bruce mumbles.

Ignoring him, Tony goes on. "They'd insert this rod through the patient's eye socket, bust through the bone, and poke holes in their gray matter." He holds up a pen and shakes it wildly about. "Scramble their brain."

Bruce shakes his head. "Very simplistic."

The look on Steve's face is one of out-and-out horror. "People… did that?"

Tony nods. "All the time. Very fashionable. JFK's sister had it done."

Tessa lets out a long, annoyed sigh from across the table before interrupting with, "It was designed to treat severe mental illness and the occasional neurological disorder of unknown origin… which, really, most neurological disorders were at that time. And it wasn't done all the time," she snipes, shooting Tony an irritated glare. "The procedure had very little scientific merit, at least, the way it was done." She shrugs, a contemplative expression flooding over her face as she begins to reflect. "They didn't have the imaging techniques we have today. They were going in blind. So results were all over the place. With a good deal of refinement, it could've been, well, refined." She shakes her head to loose herself of the myriad scientific theories now taking up residence in her brain. "Anyway, lobotomies went out of fashion once people realized you were just as likely to become a zombie as you were to no longer be suicidal. Probably more likely, really." Her eyes narrow suspiciously and she cocks her head toward Steve. "Didn't I make you watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?"

He nods slowly. "That's what they did to him? The main guy?"

"He probably got a pre-frontal as opposed to a transorbital," she muses with a shrug. "But, yeah."

"And that's what they did to you?" he asks, his voice almost breaking at the end.

He looks so disturbed, so frightened and disgusted both, that she very nearly breaks out in a bout of laughter. "No, Steve," she states, biting back the amused grin that threatens to spill over her face. "You would know if I had been lobotomized."

He relaxes back into his chair, face still contorted, attention turning to Bruce as the doctor says, "Transorbital just refers to the methodology. The sensors they used were inserted through her eye socket."

He visibly shudders. "Gross."

"You didn't see that?" she asks, brow furrowed. "In the footage?"

His eyes bat away. "Couldn't really make out what exactly they were doing. Just that it… hurt."

"Yeah," she breathes out, pensive look returning to her face as she turns back to the documents in front of her. "So they took what they could from my cerebrospinal fluid first. Then once they boosted production enough to flood the hormone, they pulled blood."

Bruce nods. "And bone marrow." Her eyes tick briefly up at him, a deep-seated sort of fatigue lacing the look. He shrugs evasively. "After the first few weeks, they also extracted fatty tissues and parts of the liver. At least, that's the process laid out in their procedural manual," he says disgustedly as he absently waves a handful of instructional documents through the air.

She looks back to the papers in front of her. "Because the excess hormones would get stored there over time."

He drops the documents and leans over to pull the bottom paper out from the small stack in front of her, places it on top, and taps at a highlighted section. "Over time, hormone production would begin to plateau. Then drop off entirely, even when the hypothalamus was being artificially stimulated. That's when they gave up on – to use a terrible metaphor – squeezing blood from a turnip. They'd remove the hypothalamus entirely and send it to the lab in Yukon. That's the bulk of what they were doing there. Extracting what MGH remained from removed organs and cadavers."

She studies that section closely for a long moment, then flips through the other pages with an air of impatience. "How'd they stimulate the hypothalamus? Is that in here?"

"No," Bruce responds, shaking his head sadly. "There are allusions to the procedure, but it seems like it was proprietary enough that whoever wrote these guidelines didn't want to publish how the stimulation occurred."

"There was much additional data sent to Dr. Banner," Vision chimes in. "I do believe that some of the answers you seek may be found there. Though, admittedly, I did not peruse all of the reports yet myself either."

"Well, that's next on my list," Bruce says. He looks back to Tessa. "After this, I'll break into the other stuff. I'll hold off on your personal file until you're ready to go over it with me. Although, I think we can at least assume that you never reached that plateau state. The way your hormone levels were when you first got here, it's pretty evident that your hypothalamus was still working over time."

"Yeah," Tony interjects, drawing the word out endlessly. "About that…"

"About what?" Tessa asks. "About my hypothalamus?"

"About it being in overdrive," he corrects before to turning to Vision and giving him a surreptitious nod. "Bruce might've been a nice guy and decided to wait for you to delve into your file. But I wasn't. I didn't go through everything… who has the patience for that? But I did take a look at those sensor readings from your final extraction. They were, well… off the charts."

The screen at the end of the table comes to life, everyone pivoting to watch as the extraction chamber fills with people. Vision clicks a button to dim the lights in the room so that they can better see the activity erupting before them. Then he says, in a voice more hesitant than any robot has a right to be, "This is that session. We believe that the influx of MGH in your system on this day may have been responsible for… for what is to come…"

She turns to the screen, absently muttering, "That's me," as two men in white scrubs unceremoniously deposit the body of a woman with long, tangled, dark hair onto the gurney. The whole team watches as two other men come into view – one seeming to take charge and bark orders as the other begins the work of hooking her motionless body up to various monitors. Tessa raises a pointed finger at the man in charge. "Who is that?" she asks, confusion lacing her features. "I recognize him."

"He was in the room with you a lot," Steve says with a dark intonation. She glances over at him, realizing for the first time that he's seen far more than just this particular session they've chosen to show her.

"It's Matthew Fidderer," Bruce states suddenly as he narrows his eyes at the screen. He watches as they roll the still unconscious woman on the video over onto her side, the now easily recognizable Dr. Fidderer moving front and center to begin a spinal tap. His brows draw together, an angry snarl pulling at his face as he utters, "We interviewed him. Last year. He used to work at the NIH."

Tessa leans forward, eyes once again glued to the screen. "That's right. Tony didn't approve because he did his undergrad at ASU."

"And you thought he was a smug jerk."

"A vain prick," she corrects lightly, watching as their rejected candidate drains her body of cerebrospinal fluid. She lets out a strained huff and turns to Vision. "A lumbar puncture usually takes at least thirty minutes, so I'm guessing we can skip ahead here?"

"Yes, of course," he replies, jumping further ahead in the footage.

"Whoa, whoa, wait," she says after just a few seconds, throwing a stilling hand out towards him as her eyes work to follow the movements of the people on the screen. "What is that? What are they doing?" They all watch as one man in scrubs tightens down all of her restraints – the still-unmoving Tessa from weeks ago now flat on her back on the table, bound down to it – and another hovers over her head. His back is to the camera, wide shoulders concealing whatever it is he's doing to her. "Are there other cameras?" she asks, a frantic edge to her voice. "Other angles?"

Vision shakes his head. "I'm afraid not. There is evidence that Dr. Fidderer recorded sessions on his own, using his computer. But that footage was all somehow corrupted."

"Well, I can't see anything here," she complains, shifting in her seat as though it might somehow afford her a better view.

Bruce almost hums next to her, his attention so attuned, interest so piqued. "They're probably setting the sensors," he murmurs. "Transorbitally."

Wanda shudders. "Thank God we can't see that."

But Tessa's not at all relieved. Sure, it may seem as though watching herself being tested or extracted would be rather… harrowing. But the truth is, it all feels very clinical to her. She's watching this so that she can get a firm grasp on what was done to her, so that she can understand from a scientific, medical, clinical perspective. And how the hell is she supposed to glean anything from grainy overhead footage that can't even be zoomed in to see the monitors lining the far walls? How is she supposed to know what they're doing – what they did – when this fat-ass won't stop blocking the camera. How –

"The fuck was that?" Clint barks out when the woman's body on the screen suddenly lurches, pulling up against the restraints in a harsh, abrupt jolt and shudder as the attendant jumps back from her side.

Tessa's breath catches, an odd sort of shock firing into her core. Her hand flies to the center of her chest, fingers beginning to both tremble and tingle. "Electrical stimulation," Bruce announces, drawing her wide, startled eyes to him. His fascinated gaze is trained on the footage before them, Tessa's body still twitching slightly as Dr. Fidderer approaches and makes some adjustments to a machine next to her. "That's… what it looks like," he says, words ending on a note of confusion. "But… where are the electrodes?"

Clint's lip curls distastefully. "You're saying this is like, what, electroshock therapy?"

He shakes his head slowly, still studying what little he can see from the terrible camera angle. "No," he says simply, the word slowly trailing off into nothing. "But it would make sense… that they'd get good results with electrical stimulation. It's just…messy."

The body on the screen jolts once again, the aftershock twitching more severe than the first time around. Natasha looks anxiously away. "Certainly doesn't look particularly clean from here."

Bruce's eyes narrow even further, as though he might actually be able to find what he's looking for if only he squints hard enough. "They should be implanted… the electrodes. They'd be placed around the hypothalamus. There'd be tiny holes drilled into her skull to allow the wire leads." He glances away from the screen, quickly looking over at Tessa. "I didn't miss holes in your head during your exam."

The sharp, pulsating buzz that had accumulated in her chest just a moment ago slowly drones and dissipates, leaving behind that terribly familiar hum whirring in her ears. She shakes her head wildly for a fraction of a moment, trying to clear the sound – and the residual charge still stirring deep within her. "That wouldn't have been," she starts, pulling a deep breath before going on. "That would've been pulses. Not… shocks." She looks back up at the screen, at the steadily twitching woman there. "How the hell many volts did they use?"

"We would've seen evidence," Bruce argues, almost to himself. "If they'd implanted electrodes, we would've seen…" He pauses and quirks his head to the side as he thinks. "Unless they have some unprecedented technology," he muses.

"Wouldn't be the first time we ran into something like that," Tony intones blithely.

Bruce turns back to Tessa. "We can get some more scans. I wish I could put you in an MRI…"

"I'd rather not have the metal in my leg sucked out by a giant magnet, thank you," she murmurs, eyes once again focused on the screen. She watches closely as her body begins to settle and still, just one barely noticeable movement taking place. On the screen, her hand begins to slowly fist and tug at the binding around her wrist. Then she arches – as much as she can with a thick restraint pinning her at the abdomen – and undoubtably screams, the men around her startling and shrinking when her eyes and mouth fly violently open.

"Jesus," Clint mutters, the others beside him – those who've clearly already seen this play out – simply sitting in solemn silence.

"I remember this," Tessa mutters softly, so softly that the sound barely seems to leave her lips. She watches closely as the scrubs-clad men all back away, leaving a clear view of her writhing body, fists tightly clenched, toes curling, back and neck arching, all in a terrible attempt to get away. But… it wasn't to get away from them. No, she recalls that now, as the shards of distant memories rapidly pull back together.

She was desperate to get away from herself, from that unbearable burn building in her core.

She feels a strong, cool hand drop to her shoulder, and she looks up to find Bucky by her side, his brow deeply furrowed as he looks down at her in the dimly lit room with concern-filled eyes. "You okay, baby?" he asks, voice barely above a whisper.

She pulls in a breath – only just now realizing how difficult it is to fill her lungs – and gives him a short nod. "Yeah," she huffs out – an obvious lie – before turning back to the screen. By now, the familiar blue light is shooting out of her fingertips, the furious energy going nowhere as her hands remain shackled to the bed.

On the screen, Tessa seems to panic, thrashing wildly against the restraints. She looks frightened, perhaps pained. But the Tessa who sits calmly at the conference table – in the here and now – knows exactly what that woman is really feeling. She gazes at the woman's face, a horrible, wounded replica of her own. "I'm on fire," she states simply.

Bucky's hand rises to the back of her neck, metal fingers slowly, softly beginning to knead at the tense muscles there. She closes her eyes and leans back into the perfectly icy touch. But the fire still spreads within her.

"I remember this," she says again, this time louder. When her eyes slowly blink open, they take in only her husband's face, his worried scowl. "I remember," she tells him, heat bubbling up inside her like a busted boiler. She feels the burn reach her eyes, sees his face gain a red sheen as the Phoenix erupts in a halo around her normally green irises.

He never breaks eye contact, despite the dread that washes over him – which she can easily feel seep into her as well. "What do you remember?" he asks cautiously.

Her hands begin to sweat and she splays her open, burning palms atop the cool, wood table. "I… I…" she tries, blinking her eyes shut again. But the bright red light is still there – eyes open, eyes shut, it makes no difference. "I was on fire," she says again. "There was… it was… too much."

From somewhere so very far away, she hears Bruce's voice filter in. "This is when the hypothalamic activity went off the charts?"

"I was… burning," she states, the words meant for no one in particular.

"You're not burning now," she hears from her left in Wanda's sweet, familiar drawl. She feels the young woman take her left hand, wrap it safely up in her own. "You're here now, with us. You're safe."

"No," she mutters, dragging the word out. She jerks her hand away, folding it into a tight fist and shoving the heel up into the bridge of her nose as her still burning eyes snap tightly shut. "No, no, no…"

Steve spins to face Vision, "Turn it off," sounding in a harsh bark, the order echoing through the room.

"No," Bucky says, voice calm and deep. He turns to his wife and kneels down beside, peels her hand away from her face. She refuses to look at him, still pressing her lids firmly together. "No," he repeats – this time for her – as his grip tightens around her wrist. He leans in close – so close that he can feel the heat seeping from her skin – and he waits for her to open her eyes and gaze up at him. "You said you remember," he reminds her gently, soft blue eyes shining with the reflection from the screen. "What do you remember?"

She shakes her head. "It hurts."

And he responds with a gentle nod. "They hurt you," he states, tone tender but matter-of-fact. He tosses a glance across the table at Tony, just barely catches the continuing struggle of the woman on the screen as she rails against her restraints, tiny bright red lines beginning to break across her skin. "What session is this?"

Tony swallows thickly, his eyes glued to Tessa's crumbling form. "Forty five."

Bucky turns back to Tessa, butting his forehead against her temple, his breath hot in her ear as he says, "Forty-five times. They hurt you – like this – forty-five times."

She curls further into herself, further into him… further away from the mayhem playing out on the screen. "You don't know what I did," she whispers into his neck.

He brings his hands up to cup her too-hot face, his fingertips sliding on the beaded sweat at her temples. "I do know," he tells her simply, staring into her eyes. "And I'm telling you, they deserved it."

Her skin begins to cool – just slightly – as he presses his metal palm into her cheek, traces the pad of his cold thumb just beneath her eye. He watches closely as the red flicker around her irises slowly fizzles out, all the while maintaining fervid, piercing eye contact. She finally pulls in a breath – shaky, but deep – and gives a small nod. "They hurt me," she repeats, the words floating on the stiff air between them.

"And you hurt them back. And they deserved every bit of it," he tells her decisively. His eyes flick back up to the screen, to the chaos occurring just over her shoulder… and only a handful of weeks ago. "You should watch, baby," he says with a nod.

She slowly shifts in her chair, turning back to the television on the wall. Bucky rises and presses himself next to her, his left arm draped around her shoulder, hand splayed over her collarbone. She reaches up and clings to his metal fingers as she pulls in another deep, steadying breath. "I remember what happened there," she issues out slowly, looking up at the screen just in time to see her former self tear free of the restraints – a bright, burning, fiery glow surrounding her as she thrusts out a single hand.

The woman on the screen flicks her wrist, just barely, and suddenly the camera is splashed with thick, red blood, the men who had been shifting in and out of view never coming into the picture again. Then she casually leans forward and removes the remaining restraints, shakily climbing down from the table.

Tessa flinches, but doesn't avert her eyes. Her brow furrows as she thinks back, remembers back to what happened that day. "There was a hall," she murmurs lightly. "And more people… another room."

Tony flicks his head toward Vision, a wordless command, and a new video file is brought up over the top of the blood-soaked footage from the chamber. It shows a mostly empty control room, no more than four or five people onscreen, each moving frantically about, panicking – it seems – over something. "This is the room we found there," Clint says, sounding a bit surprised. "When we got there…"

"I didn't leave," Tessa murmurs softly. "I knew they wouldn't let me leave." Her eyes continue to remain focused on the footage before her, her tone light, almost dreamy as she goes on to say, "I killed more in the hall. And then I just… kept going." She watches closely, head cocking to the side as her former self – clad in nothing but a hospital gown and a bucket's-worth of blood enters the room and stills in the doorway. "I was looking for Lobe," she states, voice deepening, countenance darkening. "I wanted Lobe."

"And he wasn't there?" Clint asks, narrowing his eyes in a vain and fruitless search for the man, hoping that perhaps he'd pop out from behind a desk or a hidden corner, only to be eviscerated by a quick flick of Tessa's fingers.

Her jaw tightens as she watches the grotesque woman on the screen raise a hand high, causing everyone in the small control room to freeze before her. "No," she bites out through gritted teeth, blinking her eyes shut just as a terrible force cracks from the woman's hand and blows the stilled people apart.

Wanda gasps beside her. "How," she starts, tone painfully hesitant. "How did you… do that?"

She turns to her friend, face oddly placid as she says, "I used their energy against them." She gives a short shrug. "I pulled it all out. And I forced it back in."

Tony leans forward, his fingers clasped tightly together, brow furrowed. "You did that?" he asks, earning him a taken-aback stare. "I mean," he sputters a bit, pulling himself upright and pointing at the screen while continuing to look Tessa in the eye. "That wasn't the Phoenix?"

The confusion falls from her face as a slow sigh drops from her lips. She shakes her head no. "I told you," she breathes out, an utterly penitent look taking over. "The Phoenix Force – part of it, at least – it's just… in me. It's a part of me." She too points up at the screen, nothing playing now but footage of an empty, ravaged room. "That was me."

The room falls silent for a long moment, nothing but short, stilted breaths resounding as everyone sits awkwardly, most with heads bowed, dejected gazes directed off towards nothing. Finally, Vision turns off the footage and brings the lights back up. He's the only one who seems capable of speech… perhaps it's his inhuman side allowing him to recover faster than the others. "But the Phoenix did help," he says, the words slipping from his lips almost as a question.

Tessa looks over at him, spinning slightly in her chair. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you fled that compound in nothing but a gown," he states. "No clothes. No shoes."

"There was at least a foot of snow there," Steve says cautiously, contemplatively. "The windchill was twenty below." He looks over at her. "How did you survive? How could you survive?"

She glances over at her right hand, palm still pressed into the dark wood of the table, just as it had been for several long, laborious minutes as her worst memories played out in vivid detail for her loved ones to witness. Slowly she lifts it, craning her head to peer underneath. A deep, black scorch mark – the size and shape of her hand – remains on the tabletop as she pulls her hand away. "I was… on fire," she mutters, clenching her fingers into a tight fist.

Vision nods, his intrigued gaze bouncing up from the table to Tessa's disoriented face. "And that," he says, tone deliberate, words ringing with ah-ha! "Is how it helped." He cocks his head towards her and smiles – actually smiles in a seemingly genuine way, not in the well-rehearsed robotic manner he'd been working on for years. "It wasn't something they did that… set you on fire. That fire… that is the Phoenix Force. And it burned inside of you long enough for you to travel the nearly forty miles to that town in Manitoba."

She stares at him for a long moment, his words slowly spinning in her head before coming to rest in a single, practical, cohesive thought. "It kept me alive."

From across the table there's a sudden, loud scoff. The wheels of Tony's chair squeak violently as he pushes back and rises in a flurry. "Well," he issues out in a huff, brows raised high as he glares down at the marred wood surface in front of Tessa. "I hope it has five grand for a new conference table."

A quick snippet from the chapter to come, because I know so many of you are aching for it:

Clint nods absently, releasing a long, rough sigh before connecting with Bucky's eyes. "I would want to know," he says decisively. "I would want the chance to… do what I think should be done. If I were you."

"What the hell are you talking about?" he asks, the tension traveling through his body almost too much to bear. "This is about Tessa?"

He pulls out his phone and brings up an audio file. "I don't know if he was just paranoid or what, but Scofield recorded a shit ton of conversations with people. And this morning, I found this one."

He holds up the phone and hits play, a bit of static ringing in the background as slightly muffled voices sound over the top...