Resurgam
The light sears Jane's aching, dust-encrusted eyelids as she laboriously levers them open, wincing as every muscle in her body seems to shriek in agony when she tries to move. With a groan, she pushes herself over onto her front, trying to get herself upright.
Nausea washes over her with a sickening, insidious intensity, as she stops and heaves, but her stomach is empty. She coughs, her forehead cold against hard cobbles.
Is that sirens she can hear? Screaming? Shouting? She can't understand what anyone's saying…
Sucking in a deep breath, the air strangely tainted by some metallic taste in Jane's mouth, she forces her head upright, her airways still wracked with dust-coated spasms. Her eyes open to the devastation before her eyes.
She had been taking a shortcut home, through an alley. It had been a shortcut she has taken a thousand times, without incident. Not this time…
Jane's eyes search frantically, futilely, for the other person in the alley when…what? What had happened? She can't remember.
She can't remember what caused the gaping crater she is now kneeling on all fours in, smoking as if freshly hit by some missile, the concrete broken and pitted, while around her the brick walls of the surrounding houses are crumbling, their edges blackened and scorched as if by flames.
Her heart is pounding, throbbing with fear and urgency, and black, black despair. There is something there, in her head, something else, whispering, whispering away. Death, destruction, rage, darkness, beauty, such beauty…
No. It can't be. It can't be.
As Jane stumbles from the crater, her blood pulsing scarlet red with ancient power, she dazedly realises the full extent of the chaos. A full city block nearly obliterated, buildings collapsing, glass shattered like broken diamonds on the pitted pavement. It looks like a war zone.
Jane ignores the shouts, the helping hands. She just pushes them away and runs.
She should have known that she couldn't outrun them. As she paces her flat, eyes scanning the bleary London sky for some sign, for some growing whirlpool of cloud and rainbow-hued light, they come for her.
Not SHIELD. SHIELD is dead. At this point, Jane would almost welcome the familiar sight of Agent Coulson and his too-bland smile and wrinkled suit. She doesn't recognise these agents. They say they're from the UN.
She warns them to stay back, to keep away. That she's dangerous and she doesn't know what's wrong with her. It's a lie, she knows. She just wishes she wasn't right.
They're cautious, of course they are. She can see the tranquilliser dart guns in their hands instead of regular handguns, but they don't comfort her. She doesn't want to get dragged off to some lab, far from daylight, to be poked and prodded by scientists that see her more as a thing than a human. She doesn't want to be locked away until some government suit finds a use for her. She doesn't want to die and be buried in some unmarked grave because she's a threat. And she is, Jane knows she is. She's seen for herself what the Aether can do.
And now she's a murderer. There is blood on her hands. She's a killer.
Jane knows it's selfish, that she should go with them. That she's a threat to everyone else. But she's selfish and she's terrified, and she really doesn't want to go with these faceless, smooth-voiced goons.
She's scared, so scared. She cowers into the corner of her living room, between the TV and the window, arms outstretched, a vain attempt to keep them all away. She sees one turn his head to speak in his mike. Another nods, and her fingers tightens on the trigger of her tranq gun.
Terror spikes in Jane's blood. The Aether gleefully rises to the call.
"NO!" Jane screams. She sees it this time, sees the scarlet energy spew forth from her very pores, unfurling outward until everything is consumed in a burning, smoking hurricane of destruction.
The energy is too much for her to handle. She falls unconscious, her eyes closed on carnage and hellfire as it consumes everything. She is a killer a second time, dozens of times over now.
The Aether swirls and pulses in her blood, sated. For now.
When she wakes, her head pounds. She is groggy and barely able to form a coherent thought. All around her stand men and women in hazmat suits, beady eyes peering down at her. Gloved hands hold the latest Stark tech tablets, while other check the machines Jane is hooked up to, recording all her vital data.
They tell her she has caused devastation in central London. They accuse her of being a terrorist, an enhanced human who knowingly concealed her abilities. They accuse her of being an Inhuman. Jane doesn't know what any of those words mean. She can barely recall her own name at this point.
They say they're going to run some tests on her. They just need to start with a little blood.
Fear once more breaks through, tearing apart the floating haze in Jane's brain, and she protests weakly. No.
They don't listen. The Aether strikes them down, although this time it is not so destructive as whatever happened in that London alleyway, and her flat. Only one is thrown back, his spine crushed by the impact with the wall.
After that, they try many different methods to experiment on her, to try and uncover what she is, and how she does what she can do. Jane tries to answer their questions, but she does not understand it herself. No matter how hard she tries, she can't keep away the fear and the Aether lashes out in reply. People, robots, all go flying. It defends her, asleep or awake, even when they try to sedate her with tranq darts fired from a sniper rifle.
In the end, she is left in her cold, concrete box. Jane counts in her head the time between when the lurid fluorescent lights flicker on, and when they shut off. Twelve hours, precisely. Her meals are delivered via a hatch in the door. Her only clothes are a blue jumpsuit with a strange layer of wiring. Jane wonders if it carries some kind of charge, to shock the wearer into unconsciousness.
Jane imagines she could use the Aether to escape. As the days pass, her memory of what happened in London sharpens, and she recalls the way she obliterated the alleyway and her walls of her flat. And the ceiling. And the floor. She doesn't try to escape after they tell she destroyed the entire block of flats. Her mum's flat. Her notebook, full of her scribblings. Gone. Dozens dead. Even more killed in the alleyway incident.
She's a monster, a threat. She won't risk letting the Aether back into the world after that. She deserves this, the guilt like a cold emptiness eating away at her, always niggling at the edges of her consciousness when she thinks of Darcy, Ian and Erik. She's a monster. She doesn't deserve them.
She is in a place called the Raft. It's a prison for enhanced people, he tells her. Clint Barton and Wanda Maximoff are just a few illustrious names to grace the short but impressive guestlist, the guard tells her. He seems to like her, always exchanges a few words with her when he brings her breakfast, lunch and dinner. Jane clings to it, even though she doesn't deserve it. He keeps her sane, though she doesn't know his name.
He tells her it's been three months since she was taken. Three months feels like a lifetime. Jane wonders if they will execute her, somehow. Eject her cell into the ocean, let her drown so the Aether will drown with her. She wouldn't blame them.
There are no sharp objects in her cell to finish the job herself. She doesn't think the Aether would let her. She doesn't have a blanket to use as a rope.
She tries to stop eating instead. She grows thin and pale, weak and listless. They try to force-feed her, but the Aether stops them coming near her. She can't control it, no matter how hard she tries. But she doesn't die. She should have died when she stopped drinking. She should have died two weeks ago when she reached the three week point in her hunger strike. She doesn't. Her belly gnaws away at her resolve, but she doesn't have the energy anymore to stand up and grab the tray of food by her cell door.
She lies on her mattress, and closes her eyes. She feels the eyes of her guard on her, but doesn't stir when he pushes the tray of food through her door. She's too tired to feel anything anymore, even fear.
She hears men arguing, raised voices protesting loudly. One she vaguely recognises, though she's not sure where from. Her brain feels too fogged to work.
Her cell door opens, and a men steps into her box. Short, for a man, loafers Jane guesses are expensive, though she never had much of a head for high fashion; a well-tailored grey suit, expertly knotted tie. Trimmed black beard and hair. Piercing eyes blazing with intellect, and at this moment, pain and pity. A dismissive voice, an elegant riposte thrown over his shoulder at the man stood behind him, aging, greying, with cold, empty eyes and the posture of a soldier. She recognises him from the news. Ross. He had a weird first name she can't quite remember.
The other one, the one who's walking deeper into her cell. She recognises him too. Stark. Tony Stark. The Iron Man.
He tells her she's going to be okay now, that he wants to help her. He's going to take her away from here, and someone else is going to take care of her. A doctor. Doctor Stephen Strange.
Jane doesn't feel any fear as Stark reaches out a hand to her arm, gently touching her despite Ross's warnings. The Aether stays dormant. Jane isn't scared.
Stark picks her up and takes her out of that cell. She sees her guard for the first time as more than a voice, a pair of warm brown eyes and a hand. He smiles and nods his head, and she manages a weak one back. She wonders in a daze if he was the one to tell Stark about her.
Stark takes her to a helicopter. She drifts off to sleep, lulled by the motion of flight and soft, comforting words of Tony Stark.
When she wakes up, she's in a small, mahogany-panelled room. Beside her bed is a window, and she can hear voices, sirens and car horns. Someone is selling hot dogs.
Beside her bed sit two men. One she recognises as Tony Stark, this time dressed in old jeans and an ACDC t-shirt beneath his sports jacket. The other is esoteric in appearance, if felinely handsome. There's grey at his temples, and his eyes watch her ceaselessly. He's dressed in a roughspun woollen blue tunic, a red cloak draped over his shoulders. His hands are covered by gloves.
"Good morning, Doctor Foster," he says, his voice deep and musical. He has hetereochromia, she notices. "How are you feeling?"
Her mind feels clearer, even if her limbs still feel weak. Her voice is raspy and quiet from disuse she tells them so.
"That'll be the drugs," Stark admitted. "They couldn't get near you to sedate you, so they put in your food. And well, the self-induced starvation probably wasn't helping either."
"We're going to help you, Doctor Foster," Doctor Strange told her kindly. "You're safe now."
Jane was sceptical. "How?" she asks, refusing to let hope rise inside her.
Doctor Strange smiled. "Have you ever heard of the mystic arts?"