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(noun) a violent, windy storm.
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THUNDER ROARS BUT DOES NOT STRIKE. LIGHTNING STRIKES BUT DOES NOT ROAR. CHOOSE TO BE LIGHTNING.
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LITTLE GIRLS NEVER WONDER HOW STORMS ARE CREATED UNTIL THEY BECOME ONE.
They don't wonder about what they're made of. They don't think about their blood and bones being held together by strings of muscle and a prayer. They don't understand their veins, sprawling, sickly things running deep beneath skin, branching through every part of them like a spiderweb.
They certainly don't understand that storms take those veins and rip them apart. That storms replace the parts gluing you together with static. Isolation was turned into a chance for rest. Peace was found in shingled cracks hiding in the mind. And the spider's web beneath your skin has transformed into a circuit box, ready to destruct.
Levina could say this from experience.
H.Y.D.R.A had not been kind to her. Her parents had not been kind to her. Life, as a whole, had not been kind to her. From ages ten to thirteen, Levina was treated like a brewing storm. Being poked and prodded at, being taken apart and stitched back together, paying the price her parents should have paid when they turned their backs on the most dangerous organization in the world. She didn't remember how they died, but she remembered how she lived. How she was part of an experiment she didn't sign up for, but was too young to question why. H.Y.D.R.A shoved her in a lab and held her down until her old life frayed at the edges. Until the face of her father went milky and her mother's perfume smelled sour. Until everything was stripped and beaten away to make room for their storm.
