Rather an exposition-heavy chapter; hope I've managed to make enough sense.
Much thanks to my beta, ElessarII, for reviewing this chapter!
I understand the pace is a little slow for those who are Mass Effect fans, and it's gonna be a while before the ME universe even comes into the picture, but the build-up is just as important. Trust me, when Mass Effect actually rolls around the corner, we're all gonna have to hit the ground running.
Warnings: Descriptions of body horror involved, but nothing that hasn't already crossed MCU screens before, but nevertheless might be a trigger for someone. Please stay safe.
Also, some minor swearing. Again, nothing that hasn't been seen or heard before.
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
- The Tyger; William Blake
She drifts in and out of consciousness, glimpsing a different vision each time.
There's one where her bed is rocking violently, people are shouting around her, and she remembers seeing the stars.
Another one where a strong smell assaults her senses, and a bright light is shining on her face - but, that's not right - she isn't heading anywhere with a bright light; she's always known her final destination will be darkness and pain. She remembers muttering, " - don't let me sleep," over and over again, before finally succumbing into the nothingness.
She doesn't wake up again.
"I'd rather you give it to me straight, Agent Simmons," Pepper says.
The young agent sighs. "The bullets which didn't pass through were few but caused more damage than the ones that did. Her spinal cord is severely damaged, and we've operated as best we can, but… best case scenario, she'll be paralyzed from the neck down, even if she does wake up."
"Water heals her," Pepper points out through gritted teeth. Her eyes burn. "And you have plenty of that around here."
Simmons shrugs. "The adrenaline rush that prompted her body to undergo temporary cryogenic stasis also strained her auricular nerve to the point of non-function. She is, essentially, human."
"Can you do anything?" Rhodey murmurs from beside her. His posture is stiff, but Pepper has known him long enough to spot the faint tremors racking his body.
"We can keep her comfortable," she admits.
"I'm very sorry."
She dreams.
They're formless, her dreams, without any substance, just a swirl of sounds and shapes in a bare landscape drenched in bright orange. They make little sense.
In her dreams, she doesn't remember who she is, where she is, what she is. She just… is.
But some shapes, some sounds have more of an impact than others.
An all-too-familiar whine of something powerful, swiftly followed by a blinding blue triangle burning brightly against the tangerine terrain, that makes her hurt and hope in equal measures.
Words spilling into the multitude, half-formed memories released from their cage.
'… story is not yet finished.'
'... said I'm your namesake.'
'... not your darkness to breach.'
She understands nothing, and eventually, the words become meaningless, collapsing and drifting in the coral-tinted void that is her mind, and she once again loses herself in them.
"She is going to have questions," Phil murmurs. "And you're going to tell her everything."
Fury arches an eyebrow. "Everything?"
"Everything. She hasn't asked me, will never ask me, but she needs to know the truth. She should know if you're really doing this."
"She might not forgive you. Forgive us."
Phil shares a loaded look with his mentor. "That's a risk we're going to have to take."
"It didn't work when you tried it with him," Pepper whispers furiously. Her voice betrays her heartbreak, her desperate hope. "How can you be sure it'll work this time?"
There's an incomprehensible look on Fury's face. "I would've said that it has worked on an Inhuman before, with no side effects, but I've learned the hard way that we can't rely on precedence with this particular treatment. But what other choice do we have?" He sighs. "I have to believe that she's clinging to this life for a reason. Any other person would've given up by now."
"How long will it take?"
"If it's successful - minutes." She gives him a startled look, so he shrugs. "It's designed for someone like her, and my best scientists have spent the last few months working out the kinks. She'll be back on her feet in no time. Potts," he hesitates, then barrels on. "It's her last hope."
She looks at him for a long moment, then shudders.
"Do it."
Two instances would linger in her mind when she would wake up weeks later.
A brief instance when a familiar voice had pierced the orange veil of her dreams, assuring that he was safe, that he was secure, that he was shielded. She doesn't trust the voice fully for reasons she doesn't remember, but she trusts it in this and drifts off again.
The second is the memory of sensations, the brush of a kiss that had carried with it the warm scent of sunlight and a squeeze of her fingers, and they had made her ache so heavily that she had readily slipped into the oblivion when it finally came calling.
TIME: UNKNOWN
LOCATION: UNKNOWN
The consistent, annoying beeping wakes her up.
She blinks up at the ceiling, swallowing past the dryness in her throat. "Wh…" she licks her chapped lips. "Parker? "
A woman's face interrupts her vision, frowning. Isabelle squints against the whiteness of her overcoat. "The sedative wore off early," the stranger mutters to a small, blinking device. "Subject is becoming resistant almost too fast. Might have to chart a curve for the anomaly - observe if it links to Inhuman abilities."
Isabelle slowly blinks away the fog clouding her mind. Her stomach is churning unpleasantly.
A lot has changed over the years working with S.H.I.E.L.D., then HYDRA, then S.H.I.E.L.D. again. But there are some things that have remained constant - one of which is that it is never a good situation when an unknown doctor/scientist refers to you as a 'subject'.
"Where is Parker?" Her voice is stronger this time, but the stranger doesn't give her a second glance, let alone answer her.
Isabelle takes a moment to catalog her surroundings. One door. A shutter-controlled window. A couple of holographic interfaces on her right monitoring her status. There's an intravenous line to her arm, feeding her what looks like saline.
"Who are you? Where am I? What… what are you doing to me?"
The doctor frowns at her. "I suggest you relax, Agent Collins. This will go much more easily if you cooperate." And then she swipes a finger over the hologram decisively.
Isabelle's gaze snaps to the saline bag. As she watches, a dark blue liquid dissolves in the liquid and slowly trickles down the line.
She has seconds.
There's a bitter taste in her tongue, a taste she has experienced all too recently - adrenaline. It is sluggish to respond, but it's enough to shove away nausea and jolt her fully to consciousness. Her fingers wrap around the railing tightly and she rolls her ankles to get the blood flowing.
The woman pauses in the midst of fiddling with the controls beside her bed to peer at a screen. "Heart rate is spiking," she reports. "Subject is getting agitated."
"Yeah," Isabelle snarls. "She is." And then she swings out her legs, wraps her thighs around the doctor's neck, and yanks her towards herself.
It works almost too well. The doctor's forehead hits the bed frame hard and she slumps, unconscious.
Natasha Romanoff would have been proud.
She yanks out the catheter with a wince, then slides out of the bed. With a heave, she picks up the woman and deposits her on the bed, then restrains her arm with the IV line. The hit hadn't been hard enough to keep her down for long. She's just about to turn away when her eyes fall on the doctor's face.
Her skin is melting.
Or rather, it appears to be melting, but instead of spooling on the sheets, it bubbles inwards, to be replaced with green rubbery skin. Her chin is ridged with lines, her ears sharpen and point towards her hairless head, which is just as grooved.
Isabelle hesitates, then gently lays a finger on the woman's wrist. Then almost immediately snatches it back as her stomach roils. She presses her hand to her mouth to keep from retching.
Not an illusion, not an advanced nano mask.
Isabelle can't sense a drop of water beneath that… thing's skin.
There's a heavy feeling in her chest. The room swims in front of her eyes, and she stumbles a bit, her gaze locked onto the - alien, Isabelle forces herself to think the word.
She staggers towards the window and slams a hand on the interface. The shutter slides open silently to reveal glass that looks out into the darkness.
For a moment, she deludes herself into thinking that it is night in the facility's time zone, but then her gaze falls upon the huge blue-green, cloudy marble hanging in the darkness.
And the bottom drops out of her stomach.
She knows that sphere. She has seen photos of that sphere far too many times in her life not to immediately recognize it. And yet, everything in her screams that she was never supposed to be seeing it from this angle.
Earth.
They had taken her to space.
Her breathing speeds up and she backs away from the impossible image in front of her. She'd… she'd just been in Venice, she wasn't supposed to… no.
Space. Aliens.
Infinity Stones. Thanos.
No.
Unable to tear her eyes away from the vision, she backs up until she hears the door sliding open at her approach, then slips out.
She doesn't encounter another soul as she sprints.
The hallway she's in follows similar architectural lines to the one she'd observed in the room she'd escaped from - metallic panels, crisp geometrical shapes, holographic interfaces, and a clean, sterile atmosphere.
Aliens. In what is most likely a spaceship, parked so close to the Earth as to be easily spotted by F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s satellites, and yet it hadn't been. Or it had been, and she has been asleep for far too long and they have already…
No, she's not going to go there. She doesn't even know who 'they' are, except that they're aliens who can choose to look like humans if they want to and are aware of and not averse to experimenting on her kind.
There's a door at the far end of the corridor. As she approaches, it automatically hisses open.
The vast space is immediately recognizable as a command center, framed by glass that looks out into the void of space, interrupted by a few billion pinpricks of light. As she watches, an asteroid zooms by, far too close to the facility, but is then deflected by a force field that shimmers to visibility for a brief second before disappearing again.
Cloaking tech.
S.H.I.E.L.D. cloaking tech.
That's when the migraine hits her.
Isabelle's had them before, but the onset is usually slow, not like this - this sudden, incessant pounding headache that forces her to scrunch her eyes shut and press her lips together against the bile that comes rushing up to her throat.
Her feet skid on too-slick floors, which split off into oblong-shaped alcoves occupied by recliners and drinks. She rounds a corner, which is when she spots them.
Dozens of green aliens in uniforms - walking about, manipulating holograms, shouting into comms. They seem unaware of her or haven't noticed her yet, which is a good thing, because her migraine is pulsing as though something inside her skull wants out, and she bites down a groan and doubles over.
Her body feels hot with the adrenaline that had allowed her to escape the med bay burning through her veins. Her thoughts race to try and make sense of whatever it is that is causing the reaction. A delayed reaction of some sort?
"You're not supposed to be here," a voice mutters, far too loudly, and far too close.
An alien is looming over her, scowling furiously. Its eyes are coal-black, with no visible differentiation of the sclera and the pupils. Its hand is on a holstered gun, while its other fingers clamp down on her shoulder.
Isabelle has never moved so fast. In the span between moments, she's disarmed the alien and is now holding it at gunpoint with its own weapon.
It's on the ground, eyes carefully tracking her fingers that tremble with the effort to keep it steady. It's too bright here, too loud, and she's made enough noise that other aliens come running, and soon, she's surrounded by scores of hostiles, all aiming at her.
Some distant part of her mind is analyzing the make-up of the gun, which looks remarkably similar to an Earth pistol, and yet has been undeniably made by aliens, possibly the same ones who built this ship. Not all the weapons are guns, though; some have what look like batons with strange purple crystals on top, glowing dimly.
"Put the gun down," a familiar voice says, and Isabelle looks up to see the crowd parting for two figures she really shouldn't have been surprised to see here.
Nick Fury walks towards her, his trench coat billowing behind him in an invisible wind. Maria Hill follows closely behind.
Her headache, somehow, impossibly, doubles. Hill approaches her, concerned, wary - but a deeply buried instinct forces her to raise an icy fist, halting the other agent in her tracks.
Fog floats down her knuckles, and Hill eyes them for a moment, before raising her hands. "Collins, you're still recovering. Put the gun down and let me take you back to the med bay."
She shakes her head, her stomach heaving. Something is wrong, something is very wrong, and she doesn't know what it is - all she knows is that she needs to get out... but out where - and now there's a hand on her shoulder, steadying her, and she tries to breathe, tells herself to calm down - and for a second, she actually believes everything is going to be fine - but then fingers curl around her tight, trembling grip on the alien weapon.
It slips from her slack grip and clatters to the ground.
The skin-to-skin contact is the final straw. Her mind blanks out, the migraine sharpening to a single crystalline thought - that's not Maria Hill.
Her fingers are around Hill's throat and she's lifted and slammed her into the ground even before she realizes that she has moved. Hill scrabbles at her hand, gasping, her eyes wide and bulging, then when her fingers move towards the gun at her holster, Isabelle snarls, pins her wrist to the wall, and freezes until she yells and kicks out.
Her foot connects with Isabelle's shin, but it doesn't hurt, nothing hurts, pain doesn't matter, the only thing that does is rip and hunt and destroy. A long, deadly ice claw erupts out of her drawn fist and is just about to drive it into Hill's carotid when a familiar voice rings through space.
"Izzy! "
It's not the shout that breaks through the haze of insensible rage, it's the webbing that yanks her fist back. She follows the sticky substance to its wide-eyed owner, who has his own fist pointed towards her, index and pinky finger extended.
"Parker," she breathes, her icy fist dissolving into olive skin. A wave of relief washes away the adrenaline, which is why she doesn't notice the purple glow until it's too late.
The blast of energy sends her flying into a wall. She falls in a loose heap, convulsing uncontrollably as the strange energy crawls through her veins. There's a ringing in her ears.
Parker skids next to her, dropping to his knees and checking her pulse, then her eyelids. Fury and Hill loom behind him, an alien baton sparking in the former's hands.
"Did you really have to do that?" Hill asks, massaging her neck. Her voice sounds strange to Isabelle's dwindling consciousness.
Fury turns to her indignantly. It's not a good look on him. "She completely lost it, almost killed you!"
"How did you even know that the Baton would work?"
He pats the weapon lightly. "It knocked off Vers. Besides, these beauties were built to take things like her down."
Hill sighs, straightens her uniform. "He isn't going to be happy about this."
It's the last thing Isabelle hears before giving in to the darkness.
August 14th, 2024
THE PEAK VII, S.W.O.R.D. HQ
LOCATION: EARTH'S ORBIT
"Three weeks of peace and quiet, and the first thing you do when you wake up is attack your doctor," a voice says as she emerges from the fog. "Why am I not surprised?"
She is launching out of bed even before she's fully awake, but she doesn't make it too far before something yanks her back into the mattress.
The med-bay is dark, but the starlight from the open window is enough to make out the manacles restraining her to the railing. She twists her hands, but the cuffs are solid - there's no way she's getting out of these.
"You done making a fool of yourself?" Nick Fury calls from beside the window. He isn't looking at her, his eyes intent on the vision of Earth beyond the glass.
She glares at him. "You shot me," she spits.
He shakes his head. "Try again."
She breathes out the rage. "Your alien doppelgänger shot me."
He hums in confirmation.
She casts her senses out, but there's something wrong, something's blocking her, and she feels a searing electric pain down her spinal cord, forcing her to loosen the reins on her powers. "What the hell was that?"
"The cuffs also serve as Inhuman inhibitors. Use pain conditioning to prevent you from tapping into the auricular nerve - which, according to Doctor Goodman, is primarily responsible for sending Inhuman signals to and from the brain." He shrugs when she snarls wordlessly. "Don't look at me like that; you were the one who attacked them."
"They were experimenting on me."
"Goodman brought you back from the brink of death, actually. I'll be the first to admit Skrulls don't have a great bedside manner, but she was trying to keep you healthy and calm."
She stares at his profile. "Are you one of them?"
His dark eyes bore into hers. "What do you think?"
"I think you've been keeping too many secrets, and it's time for you to spill."
He nods slowly, as though he'd been expecting this. "You should know - the only reason you're here right now, confronting me, is because Coulson kept up his end of the deal you made with him. He insisted I explain everything to you when you woke up."
She remembers the bargain they'd made in the Lighthouse. Coulson had wanted Spider-Man in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, and Isabelle has asked for just a small favor - Nick Fury's last known location. "Where's Parker?"
"Safe," he assures her. "He'll be by shortly after you and I have had our little chat. As for his fugitive status, Potts is working on his case and - from what I've heard - is raking J. Jonah Jameson over the coals."
He doesn't seem in any way inclined to remove the cuffs, so she slumps back into the pillow, making herself as comfortable as she can while still keeping him in her sights. "Skrulls?"
"A race of multi-morphous life forms from the Andromeda Galaxy. Non-carbon based species - completely different biology. You really don't want to drink what they drink."
She takes a deep breath. That's what she'd sensed from the Skrulls she'd had physical contact with - an absence of water in their systems. "What are they doing here?"
"Working for me. I have a small force here - soldiers, scientists. The rest of their people are on a distant planet whose location is classified."
"And where is 'here'? This… spaceship?"
He sighs. "Space station. It's called the Peak." The words sound like they're being dragged out of his mouth. "Serves as HQ for the organization I'm spearheading now - Surveillance of World and Orbit for Rapid Deployment."
The acronym slides into place. "S.W.O.R.D. - a division of S.H.I.E.L.D. for space?"
"Space, other worlds, colonies - whatever we need to keep an eye on. And it's not a part of S.H.I.E.L.D. It's a completely separate operation."
"Why?" Her voice is a whisper.
He's looking out through the window, into the blackness of space, and her stomach clenches as she spots a look on his face that she's all too familiar with.
She has seen it countless times on Tony, after the Battle of New York. He would sneak up to the roof and lie under the stars. It wasn't fear, not exactly.
Just a poisonous, haunted mixture of desperation and determination.
That combination, and the expression that accompanied it, had led to ULTRON.
"Do you remember Phase 2?"
She knows where this is going. "Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S.," she says, swallowing. "Tesseract-based weapons to fight… to fight alien armies. Nick… "
"Imagine what we could've done to Thanos if we'd had that," he says, finally turning around. His usually neutral face looks intense in the low light. "S.H.I.E.L.D. is no longer enough. You know it, I know it, Coulson knows it. Look what happened when all we tried to do was protect and defend. We need to be prepared for the next threat. S.W.O.R.D. helps me do that, as well as allowing me to keep a watch from up here."
She remembers the shimmer of the cloaking force field. "Up here makes one forget what's down there, Fury," she murmurs.
"There are other divisions that deal with protecting Earth from within. Coulson's crew is one of them. W.A.N.D. is another."
"Other divisions manned by Skrulls with your face?"
"No, that's just Talos," he says, then hesitates. Which would look strange to anyone who hasn't known Fury as long as she has. "It was a trial run."
"That was a trial run? He almost got London submerged because he was too chicken to call me in!"
"It's… a work in progress. Besides, he had his reasons." He sighs a sigh so deep it sounds as though it is drowning him. "Collins, we can't afford to have another Thanos. We lost too much last time. We weren't prepared. Most of the people we lost might be back, but Earth will never be the same again. And even now, we just keep losing more."
"What's that mean?"
His hesitation is long enough to turn her body cold. "We've lost all contact with the Manswell Expedition."
Her limbs feel leaden. "How?"
He shrugs. "Stark himself retrofitted their communication systems; he accounted for signal-interfering clouds like nebulae, proton storms, even tried to shore them up against alien interference. My best scientists have gotten no sign of distress beacons or unusual debris in their deep-space scans, and trust me, they've looked."
He shoves his hands in his trench-coat. "They've missed three of their monthly check-ins. We had anticipated eventual loss of contact - but not so soon. It's like they just… vanished."
Isabelle is suddenly reminded of Jacob Manswell, a man she had resented in the beginning for being indirectly responsible for her brother's heartbreak, but then had grown to like and respect tremendously. He had been a better man than most people she knew, better than Tony, or any of the Avengers. Kind, strong, gentle, smart, funny.
All of that gone in the blink of an eye, as Thanos wiped him from existence. Only to be brought back - just to get promptly run over by a truck.
"Nothing is coming, Nick," she says, and it sounds forced to her own ears. "Nothing could be worse than… than what Thanos did."
She knows that he can tell she's not talking about the Decimation.
She doesn't want to continue this line of conversation anymore; its sharp edges are cutting into her insides, making her bleed from places she'd just stapled back together. She casts her mind on another topic. "The Skrulls - what can you tell me about them?"
He nods, and there's a look on his face that looks almost like disappointment before he wipes it out. "How much do you know about your species' history, Collins?"
"What's that gotta - ?"
"Answer the question."
She stares at him, then shrugs. "Blue aliens known as Kree; experimented on humans to create extra-powerful warriors."
"Do you know why the Kree created warriors?"
"I'm assuming it was to fight a war."
He gives her a droll look. "The Skrulls are the Kree's mortal enemies - they've been fighting each other for over a thousand years. Inhumans were their solution to win the war once and for all, but your species grew too uncontrollable so the Kree abandoned you on Earth; tried to kill any they came across from that point onwards."
He waves a hand. "The space station belongs to Talos. He's the leader along with his wife, Soren, who took Hill's form."
She raises herself on the pillow. She's never much thought about the Kree and had been exposed to very few of her kind before the Inhuman Outbreak brought on by Terrigen crystals polluting the oceans, but from time to time the question of her origins had crossed her mind. "How long have you known about this?"
"About the Kree-Skrull War? About thirty years. I only learned about the involvement of Inhumans recently."
You'll find what you're hunting in your roots, Isabelle Collins.
Layers upon layers of secrets in Enoch Coltrane's mysterious words. "They don't trust me because they know who I am, what I was created for. Hence the cuffs," she says, rattling the manacles.
"They also keep you from growing insane in their presence."
"What?"
He shrugs. "Inhumans can apparently sense Skrulls when they've shapeshifted. It is something that is inbuilt in your DNA since Terrigenesis. If you didn't have those with you, the presence of all of them combined will trigger a murderous, and likely suicidal rage."
The fury she'd felt in the command center. The migraines, the nausea, the inexplicable hatred. All brought on by her genes, feelings that she's never had before… because she's never met any Skrull before.
"And even after all that, you're saying that they healed me? How badly was I hurt?"
Fury pushes himself away from the window. "Enough questions for tonight. You're still recovering, and you need rest." He raises a hand when she goes to argue. "We will talk tomorrow."
He slips out the door before she has a chance to respond.
August 15th, 2024
"S.H.I.E.L.D. arrested me," Parker tells her. "They said that it was for my own protection, and Miss Potts…" he swallows, " - Mrs. Potts-Stark agreed with them, especially when Secretary Ross landed in Venice almost at the same time. But when your situation became worse, Mr. Fury brought both of us to the Peak."
She pushes herself upright on the bed. "It's the safest place for you while they clear your name. They found Silvani's team?"
The kid nods. "Agent Mackenzie - he was the one who arrested me - found a hidden entrance in one of the housing buildings on the island."
Mackenzie, probably Coulson's 'agent monitoring the situation in Venice'. She owes him a massive thank you - it was possibly his intervention that prevented the Italian government from pressing charges.
She hesitates, then asks the question she really wants him to answer. "How bad was it?"
"You coded twice during surgery," he murmurs, picking at the threads of her bedspread. "They were able to revive you, but you weren't healing, no matter how many times they tried to hydrate you."
His eyes flick towards her legs, and her blood runs cold. "I eavesdropped on Agent Simmons and Miss Potts. They said… they said you wouldn't wake up, and that you were paralyzed for life."
She instinctively wriggles her toes. The screen registers her heightened heartbeat, and she's grateful he's lost in his own thoughts. "You remember anything else?"
He thinks for a bit. "Mr. Fury - he said something weird when he was talking to Mr. Coulson. Something about sending you to Tahiti. Maybe for a vacation?"
She recalls Fury's obvious reluctance in giving her details about her injuries, and the subsequent recovery. Recalcitrance is his usual M.O., but gut instinct tells her that he owes her a lot more answers, and she's planning to collect.
But for now, she nods, but says nothing, watching him carefully as he spirals even further downwards.
"I just…" he grits his teeth, then slumps. "I don't understand. Why didn't you collapse before?"
Now, this, she knows the answer to. "The adrenaline rush must've triggered my body to freeze. The bullets got immobilized inside, preventing me from bleeding out."
"So… your body put you in stasis so you could deal with the threat and…" he looks away.
She has put this off for long enough and almost died for her trouble. "... stop you from making the biggest mistake of your life," she finishes.
He nods, not meeting her eyes. "Please don't ask me if I want to talk about it."
"I wasn't going to. You're going to a therapist for that - May and Pepper were already making plans for when you're exonerated."
"I know F.R.I.D.A.Y. and Agent Fitz found something clearing my name, even in that mess in Poveglia, but I almost killed a man…" He shuts his eyes tight. "God, I was just so - angry."
"Part of that might have been your Spidey-Sense functioning on overdrive since you got exposed… " she says, but he's barely listening to her, lost in a dark world of his own making. His hands tremble suddenly, and she recalls how they'd done the same while he'd been holding the gun to Riva's chest.
She sighs. She doesn't have the words to help him through this. That's never been her. Silence is the greatest gift she can offer him, but at this moment, maybe she can try for something better.
"Want to help me save a man?"
August 17th, 2023
"What's in Tahiti?"
Fury sighs.
She hadn't bothered announcing herself before bursting into his office. He hadn't come to see her again after that day, and it had taken her three days to convince the doctors to let her out, but they hadn't consented to removing the cuffs; she has reached the end of her patience.
She barely blinks when he nods to his and Hill's doppelgängers, who grimace but nevertheless make their way towards the door. The former glares at her as he slams the door shut.
"Talos doesn't like you very much," Fury says, rising and walking towards a blank wall to his right. He places a flat palm on the surface, and a door flickers into visibility, sliding open to reveal an elevator. "Might want to apologize to his wife."
"What's in Tahiti?" She asks again, slipping in beside him.
"Blue skies and water, white sands, coconuts. I've been told it's a magical place." He shrugs when she adopts a pinched expression. "You're asking the wrong question."
A hologram pops up, and Fury pinches his fingers to zoom in. After a second, she identifies the structure as a wide-angle view of the Peak exterior. The station looks like a long thin cuboid, tapered on one end, with three gigantic rings slowly revolving around it - two on either end and one not quite in the center. The inner ring is the largest, and she assumes it holds the command center.
He slides a finger down until it reaches the lowest, smallest ring.
The elevator starts moving downwards. "How about this one - where are we going?"
"Somewhere I feel I'm going to regret taking you."
She isn't able to tear her eyes off the tanks. The silence is all-pervasive, broken only by the almost gentle hum of the machines in the background. "What is this?"
"T.A.H.I.T.I.; Terrestrialized Alien Host Integrative Tissue, Version 2.0 - harvesting the bodily fluids and the tissue of specific hosts for regenerative properties," Doctor Goodman explains. "So far, the results have been… mostly… successful."
"Where did you find them?"
There's not a hint of evasion on Fury's face when he admits quietly, " - you don't want to know."
Nausea rises within her again, and she has a feeling it's not because of Goodman being a Skrull in disguise.
Each cylindrical tank contains a deceased member of the Kree race, in various stages of decay, or rather, harvest - buoyed in some kind of a perverse amniotic fluid. Most of them have their intestines exposed, with tubes disappearing into their insides, liquids pulsing through them periodically to feed into various vials.
"Did you use this on me because I'm an Inhuman?" Isabelle asks in a whisper. "Does this have something to do with… with how they experimented on us, created us?"
"No. Your genes do give you an advantage; you don't have the usual side-effects. But the treatment works just as well on humans."
There's something he isn't telling her. Something big. She has a feeling she already knows what it is, but her mind shies away from the realization before she can grasp it.
She thinks back to their ride here, to the very lowest point of the Peak - a circular ring populated by doctors and scientists who had forced them into scrubs as soon as they'd arrived, who'd erased holographic boards when she'd passed and covered up machines that she's sure would've given her endless nightmares if she'd caught more than a glimpse of them.
It all points to an undeniable conclusion - this section of the Peak facility is heavily classified, possibly completely off-the-records. She would bet her abilities that not even all the Skrulls know of it.
And yet… from everything she's heard, T.A.H.I.T.I. has been used before. Multiple times.
"How many have gone through this before me?"
"You are the tenth subject." He hesitates, then steels himself. "Eight humans, and one Inhuman. All of them were invaluable to S.H.I.E.L.D."
The realization is soft, almost gentle, like the kiss she'd pressed against a cold, pale forehead more than a decade ago. Sleep well."Coulson." His name trembles on her tongue. "You used T.A.H.I.T.I. to save his life after Loki stabbed him with the Sceptre. And… the Inhuman was probably Daisy Johnson."
Fury's lack of response prompts her to look at him. His lips are thin. "Collins…" he says roughly, " - T.A.H.I.T.I. didn't just save his life. It brought him back."
For one blissful second, she doesn't understand, but then it hits her. She staggers, as though the blow had been real, because it's not just the understanding of the impossibility that he's presenting to her, it's the implications of it.
T.A.H.I.T.I. Kree. Secrets.
Regeneration? No.
Resurrection.
He was right. She'd been asking the wrong question.
"Fury… what is T.A.H.I.T.I.?"
He takes a deep breath. "Project T.A.H.I.T.I. was designed for one thing and one thing only - to potentially revive a fallen Avenger."
He stumbles under her punch. "You son of a bitch," she shouts, grabbing his scrubs and slamming him into a tank. "You son of a bitch! You had something that could've saved him - why the fuck didn't you use it?"
Frost is spreading across his chest where her fingers are pressed. Blood is trickling down his lip, and he appears half-dazed, but his hand still snaps up to stop Goodman when she rushes forward.
Isabelle shakes him harder. It is roaring across her now, all that pain, all that rage that she's been holding on to, all that sleep she's forced herself to miss out on, all those seconds she'd lost when she'd been ash - she uses it all to scream herself hoarse. "You saved me! Why didn't you save Tony? You should've saved him instead!"
"He tried," Goodman says, and Isabelle rounds on her. The doctor's earlier indifference is gone, and she is pale, shaking, armed with a syringe that she drops at whatever look she finds aimed at her. "He tried, I… I tried. The results are always instantaneous… always, and for a moment, it seemed like it was working. Cellular tissue was regenerating, the skin was knitting back - his body was repairing itself."
"But…," she swallows, " - but there was no neurological response. No brain activity, not even his autonomic nervous system. The damage was too severe."
"By all accounts, so was mine!"
"Collins," Fury says, softly. He doesn't flinch when she glares at him, doesn't attempt to struggle out of her hold, just holds her gaze steadily. "We tried for three days. There was no pulse, no heartbeat… he was just a shell."
"Why didn't it work on him?" Her voice is little more than a plea. Not for a theory, or an explanation. No, she aims higher. It's a plea for a miracle.
And like Icarus, as she aims higher, she falls harder.
"I don't know." Fury shudders out a breath, for the first time since she's known him, he looks crushed. "Best theory I've got is that the Infinity Stones demanded a price."
He swallows. "And Tony was it."
"Why am I still here, Nick?" she asks tiredly. Her earlier outburst had drained her, and while there are pools in the facility, Fury knows her too well to allow her access with her inhibitors still on.
Parker had already been sent to the surface, to Sicily as she'd suggested. Happy will pick him up, take him home, but she knows what his first task will be - using E.D.I.T.H. to restore Vittorio Silvani's mind. There's no guarantee that their plan will work - the Poveglia survivor's mind will have to accept the fictional sequence of events himself. B.A.R.F. is no miracle worker.
But it'll keep Parker from thinking too much.
There's no such easy solution for her.
Fury guides the elevator towards the uppermost ring, which is the only place she hasn't been allowed to so far. She doesn't know why, and frankly, she doesn't see why she should care, either.
"Do you know how long I've been up here, Collins?" He doesn't wait for her to answer. "I left immediately after reinstating you. No one knew about this, no one was supposed to find out - and if Talos had been even halfway decent at being me, no one would have. I suppose it's a good thing I'm used to improvising."
"Improvising?"
"I'm going to show what this place really is, and you'll see for yourself why secrecy is important."
At this point, Isabelle doesn't even have any words, she's so overwhelmed.
"We call it the Gagarin Station," he says into the silence. "Most of it is being constructed beyond Pluto, right at the heliopause; we regularly transport materials with crew rotations. The station will be used for deep space telemetry, exploration… and to conduct experiments considered too dangerous and too illegal to be attempted in the vicinity of more expensive assets."
The huge spinning hologram in the middle of the viewing room shows that the station is almost complete. A flat cylinder mounted on long, thick shafts, it echoes the basic frame of the Peak, except newer and shinier. There's one incomplete component made entirely of clamping docks, and she is no engineer, but Fury's deliberate words prompt her to imagine a ring fitting neatly into it.
She stirs from her apathy. "You're transferring the T.A.H.I.T.I. section to Gagarin."
He nods towards the tall, wild-haired woman on a platform, flicking through holograms. She jogs over. "Missed you around here, chief," the woman says, before winking at Isabelle. "This one caused a lot of excitement." She holds out a hand. " Monica Rambeau, Chief Overseer, and pilot, for the Gagarin Station."
She shakes it, but Rambeau just grabs the inhibitor around her wrist and taps at it. "Don't worry… you'll only need these until you get used to the Skrulls."
The apathy crumbles. "You're an Inhuman?"
In response, Rambeau just holds up a hand with a wicked grin. As she watches, the hand turns slowly transparent until it utterly fades from view.
Isabelle has learned to spot the faint shimmer given off by cloaking tech, but this is true invisibility. The potential is… unnerving. "I'm not planning on staying that long," is all she says.
The other woman shares an incomprehensible look with Fury, then nods. "We deployed Armstrong at 1500 hours. I sent you the reports. The Moon is officially occupied, chief." She knocks off a salute and jogs off again.
"Armstrong is our first extraplanetary domed settlement," Fury explains quietly. "We're planning one for Mars. For now, the only inhabitants will be scientists working undercover for the Peak."
She looks at him for a long moment. "This is a lot… and yet, you seem even less impressed than usual."
He works his jaw, stares at the hologram. "We're too slow for it to be effective. It's too open here, too vulnerable. There are threats that I don't understand - magical and mystical and extraterrestrial - and that I can't shoot with a gun. And the one man who could have solved this for us is gone."
"Solve what?" She twists around to face him fully. "I'm a soldier, not a scientist, Fury. Why am I here? "
"Because I want you to join S.W.O.R.D." His hyper-focus on the view outside makes her flesh crawl. "Collins… I couldn't have predicted Thanos - he knew too much, arrived too fast for us to have done anything but lose. Makes you wonder what else is hiding in the dark."
"I'm not going to work with you based on some paranoid delusion of yours!"
He shakes his head. "Just because we can't see something, that doesn't mean it's not there. The Battle of Earth, this thing with Beck… none of them feel like a win. Just a lull."
"A lull? In what?"
"In the war between humanity and whatever else is out there." He sighs. "Tony might've bought us some time, but the sand is running out."
His words make her heart race. She shoves her trembling, white-knuckled fists into her pockets. "You think that - what? Thanos was… a harbinger of something much worse? No… no, I… no."
"I don't know what to think. But I'm keeping my mind, and my eye open."
August 18th, 2024
Stark Mansion
Manhattan
Maria's portrait hangs in the parlor, fitting in flawlessly with the rest of the decor as though it has always been here, instead of gathering dust in an Italian villa whose owners hadn't visited in decades.
She isn't able to tear her eyes off it.
Pepper's gesture had been kind, and on any other day she'd have probably appreciated it, but now, with the impossible burden of new knowledge, all she feels is survivor's guilt.
Mother… I'm sorry I failed him.
"The invisible emergency protocol on F.R.I.D.A.Y. that sent up an alert when I went down -," she says with some difficulty " - that was you, wasn't it?"
Pepper's indrawn breath is her reply. "I wasn't going to lose you too," she admits from behind her.
She exhales slowly, gingerly, even though she knows that her wounds have completely healed, without even a scar to show for it. Just like how Tony had been in his casket - unmarred, perfect - which is about as far as they'd been able to mend him. "When did you know… about T.A.H.I.T.I.?"
"Six years ago; Phil told us everything. I thought…" Pepper swallows a sob. "I thought it would work, and when it didn't… I just… I couldn't tell you."
"Neither of us could," Rhodey murmurs from somewhere to her side. She aches to turn and look at him, but fears that she'd crumble if she does so. "This was on me too."
Isabelle breathes until she stops trembling. "Parker?"
Pepper sniffs and chuckles wetly. "Once the courts realized that Riva's drones could create hyper-realistic illusions, any video footage regarding the case was considered inadmissible."
Isabelle nods, once again blown away by the utter brilliance of S.I.'s lawyers. Sure, they couldn't use the footage to incriminate Riva, but they didn't need to… the data recovered from Poveglia was more than enough to put him away for life.
The icing on the cake, however, was that the rules applied to the prosecutors too… whose entire case rested on the footage 'evidence' unveiled by one J. Jonah Jameson in Madison Square Park a month ago. Without it… they were toast.
Her imagination provides an image of Thaddeus Ross frothing at the mouth and she allows herself to bask in it for a few moments. "Where's he?"
"Safe, at home. He has a lot of work ahead of him, though."
Isabelle nods, unsurprised. "PTSD."
There's an anticipatory silence, but when she doesn't give them what they want, Rhodey speaks up. "He's not the only one. We know why you haven't been sleeping."
She squeezes her eyes shut. She doesn't want to do this; but she's always known that prevarication would only take her so far, especially with them.
"Agent Simmons reported coincidental flooding of the beaches in Lido both times you coded. She guessed that it's what strained your abilities until you could no longer heal yourself."
"I don't want to sleep," she finally admits.
Pepper exhales. "I dream of him too. Almost every night. I can't…" she breaks off.
Isabelle says nothing. What can she say? They've got it wrong, they've got it all wrong.
How can she explain to them that it's not Tony that she dreams of? He does appear in her nightmares sometimes, but for the most part, it's her own death that she sees when she sleeps - collapsing into nothing more than a heap of ash on a blood-soaked battlefield.
Her own death… and what came after.
A realm of perpetual sunset, where the orange glow of an invisible sun bleeds everywhere.
A world where only vague shadows and distorted whispers break the endlessness of the bare landscape.
A world… where she'd been so very alone.
Remembering fragments of your own afterlife in your dreams is not normal, even in this crazy life that they lead.
A shuffling sound brings her out of her existential dread. Pepper is bringing over a small box from the wall cabinet, her face sympathetic but determined as she hands it over.
"What's this…" Isabelle pulls out thin blue square patches from the package. A liner covers one end, and she peels it back slightly to reveal an adhesive surface. "Transdermal patches?"
"Dendrotoxin - the same compound that's in your S.H.I.E.L.D.-issued I.C.E.R.," the redhead explains. "There's enough in each patch to keep you down for a few hours without you accessing your abilities subconsciously."
She recalls the hangar she'd found Enoch Coltrane in, when she'd felt the impact of the bullet from the tranq gun, and how even that small amount had almost managed to knock her out. She violently suppresses the hope blooming inside her. It takes all she has in her to say, " - this will stop me from dreaming?"
"Simmons assured me that it will."
Her fingers tighten on the box, and after a long moment, she nods.
Pepper and Rhodey take the Jet home. She, too, will leave for Georgia soon; technically, she's still on vacation.
But there's something she needs to do first.
The aquarium lounge has always been her favorite. She has never bothered keeping fish - she always forgets to feed them - but the feel of cool water behind glass walls and the caustics throwing soothing patterns onto the floor has always spoken to her of safety. Isolation.
Something she desperately needs right now.
She flinches as the hauntingly familiar Greek accent filters from the speakers.
"Please state your name to activate this A.I. module. "
"...Collins, Isabelle." Her voice is a whisper.
"Access denied. Please state your name to activate this A.I. module. "
She drops her head into her hands, fingers bunching up loose hair strands. "… damn you, Tony."
"Access denied. Please state your name… "
"Stark , Isabelle Morgana."
"… Voiceprint established… Identification verified… Primary user designation confirmed… Access granted." There's a pause. "Establishing uplink to Stark satellites… Uplink confirmed. "
The wait is momentary, and yet to her, it feels like time is crawling. But still, the first words out of J.O.C.A.S.T.A. are a shock that sends her reeling.
"Ah… oh, Tony. " The grief in her voice sounds real, even though Isabelle knows it's just part of an emotional subroutine programmed into her intelligence matrices.
She is not able to completely swallow the terror that threatens to pull her under. "Hey, J.O.C.A.S.T.A."
"Hello, Izzy. Your vitals indicate you're in distress. Should I call Pepper?"
The fact that she's referring to her owners personally, so unlike her predecessors, makes her dizzy. The only other A.I. to have ever done so, to have so much contempt for his creators to ever bother with honorifics had been… had been… " No," she gasps and shoves her violently trembling hands between her knees.
The violent negation is not a reply to the A.I.'s question, yet she nevertheless takes it as such and falls silent. Isabelle can almost hear the processors beneath the mansion whirring as J.O.C.A.S.T.A. uses her access to the Internet to analyze her boss' unusual behavior.
Just like she'd been programmed to.
Some masochistic part of her wants to know what she comes up with - if she's as perceptive and intuitive as her premature successor had been.
"Your mind is noisy."
Isabelle breathes. "Clarify."
"You have too many unresolved issues. They're crowding your brain, and there's no space left for you to do what you were trained to do. "
"Which is?"
"Spot the holes in the universe, and plug them. You see things that are off, that are wrong, and you bridge those dots to form a big picture… but you can't do that until you clear your mind."
There's a heavy pause, a silence that settles in the empty spaces of the lounge, broken only by the soft gurgling of the water.
"I should know… my neural patterns are based on you, after all. And your biggest unresolved issue is… my code wasn't the only one derived from your mind."
She exhales, falling sideways into the couch, drawing up her knees and wrapping her arms around them.
"I know our programming is similar, but I'm nothing like ULTRON," J.O.C.A.S.T.A. insists. Isabelle chokes on a scream at the sound of that name. "I was the proof of concept that led to his creation, but I'm not nearly as powerful as he was. I am milder, much more intuitive and I have thousands of digital shackles preventing me from ever…"
She can't do this. "Deactivate A.I. module."
The audible hum as the processor powers down sounds like death.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Context:
Project T.A.H.I.T.I.
The T.A.H.I.T.I. base was destroyed in the show, but Fury has never been the type to keep all his eggs in one basket. A top-secret project like that - Fury must've had another base ready to go. So I tossed Version 2.0 onto the Peak.
I couldn't resist the 'magical place' dig.
Doctor Goodman: Doctor Goodman was one of the members of the T.A.H.I.T.I. Program. She only appears briefly in the show; maybe one or two episodes.
In my fic, I like to think of her as a Skrull in disguise, which is how she knew about the Kree corpse and how to harvest fluids from it for medicinal purposes. She has been working for Fury for a long time.
I got the impression that she's rather morally dubious. Super interested in medicine, not super interested in actually curing people.
MCU Context:
Monica Rambeau
Daughter of Maria Rambeau, who's the best friend of Carol Danvers.
I borrowed Monica from Captain Marvel, changed her backstory a little to make her an Inhuman. She will play a pretty essential role in this fic.
In the comics, she is an Enhanced with the ability to manipulate and transform herself into any energy wave in the EM spectrum - UV, IR, you name it. I haven't decided yet whether I wanna go full range in my fic, or just limit it to the visible light range.
The Peak
By all accounts, the space station shown at the end of Far From Home was the Peak. And since there were Skrulls roaming around, I figured I could use it for my own fic.
S.W.O.R.D.
In the comics, the acronym of S.W.O.R.D. was Sentient World Observation and Response Department./i I changed it to something a little more appropriate for the crossover. S.W.O.R.D. won't just protect Earth; it'll also protect any and all extraterrestrial colonies.
Skrull Electroshock Baton
The purple glowing weapon Talos used to attack Collins. In Captain Marvel, it is shown to be able to knock even Carol Danvers down, and she's way more powerful than Collins.
J.O.C.A.S.T.A.
For the purpose of this fic, I had J.O.C.A.S.T.A. become the 'mother' of sorts for ULTRON. She's a minor version of what ULTRON was supposed to be, but she was never quite what Tony envisioned for an A.I. who defends the world. ULTRON was born as a result of Tony's meddling with the Mind Stone, which J.O.C.A.S.T.A. was never exposed to. So she has basically the same abilities as ULTRON minus the god-complex.
Mass Effect Context:
Gagarin Station:
Massive space station being built beyond Pluto. The official concept art showed that it looks a lot like the S.W.O.R.D. HQ, which is why I made up the fan canon that Gagarin Station's model is inspired by the Peak. Project T.A.H.I.T.I. seemed like a good candidate for 'experiments too dangerous and too illegal to be conducted in normal space.'
Author's Note:
I'm gonna be taking a three-week hiatus on this fic. Real-life's taken a bit of a hectic turn and I'm not able to maintain the breakneck pace on submissions anymore. It's the reason there's no artwork accompanying this chapter. I might decide to add it later.
Updates will resume on the 2nd of August. Please stay safe and stay home.