Avengers: Liberation

Chapter 26- Unable To See

“Liberty I understand, that taking you away from Tony’s Stark’s side at this moment in time must have been difficult, but I must remind you that this is of the most important.” He was beating around the bush, Ruth was gently muttering underneath her breath, as her head was turned in my direction.

“What did Ruth see?” I asked as she moved from around the desk towards me. I suddenly moved away from her. I remember what happened last time, and that is not a mistake you make twice. I felt the electrical impulse rise to the surface of my skin as Ruth reached out to me in her world of jumbled visions and darkness.

“Liberty, you need to see what Ruth saw. Only you can see what she sees, without destroying your mind in the process.” I looked at Charles in show, without destroying my mind?

“What did you call last time then? A minor concussion, I was brain dead!”  Suddenly the door knob clicked behind me. I could hear Logan’s low voice grumbling within an argument with both Scott and Eric. I opened up the palm of my hand towards the door closing it with a strong magnetic and telekinetic force. The door was knocked on multiple times and tried to be forced into by the time Charles had given me and answer.

“I know you were brained dead Liberty, but you are the only mutant that can help us, no other mutant with the power of telepathy can enter Ruth’s mind without the risk of falling into a coma, and never returning.” I looked at Ruth who hadn’t uttered a solid word since I entered.

I looked at her and saw her out stretched hand.

“How important is this vision Ruth?” her face was bleak and pale, as she uttered her first words from between her pale bloodless lips.

“I see you dying Liberty.” I let go of my magnetic and telekinetic field around the door which was being hammered by the force of three grown men.

I looked over my shoulder to see Eric’s, Scott’s and Logan’s wide eyes as I grasped Ruth’s hand with a smirk on my face. I knew I would be back…and before they could even stop me I was plunged back into the dark and tormented mind of Ruth Aldine.

If I said it was worse than last time it would be an understatement. The pain started earlier, maybe just fraction of a second earlier, but still it tore through my mind and physical body like a tidal wave of shock. I felt my physical body shake in agony, as I travelled through her mind.

There I was, it was night, I could hear the crashing of waves beneath me. I looked down at my phone I looked at me from a third person perspective; I searched through text on my phone all from Eric, suddenly a voice called out from behind me.

“I will be a hero.” As the phone fell from my loose grasp a ear bleeding shot rang through the night. The bullet exploded against my chest, blood spattered out across the grass that was once beneath my body’s feet. I fell from the edge of the cliff, still bleeding plummeting into the see beneath me. I looked down at myself and met my own eyes as my body slammed against the ice cold sea. The moons light refracted from the wave. I could see beneath the foaming wave at my body in the light pierced darkness. I expected to see the bronze and silver haze float away from the bullet wound but all I saw was thick and deep red flooding the water above me as I sank deeper and deeper.

Suddenly I was pulled away as I desperately tried to claw back the image of my death, but still I wasn’t strong enough.

I looked around me to see myself in the grasp of the hulk, but not the hulk I was so used to. His eyes were black except from the radioactive green irises. His large hands constricted my body. My nails dug into his thick green skin and found nerves I pulled at them and sent hundreds of volts worth of electrical potential through them. He screamed out, and dropped me. My broken body slammed against the ground I was that my left leg had been stripped down to the bone, the skin surrounding it collapsed at the ankle looking like bloodied cloth dragging behind me. My arm had been broken in three places bone jutted out breaking the skin and muscle in its fight to escape my body.

As I tried to pull myself away trying to find enough time to heal, my left muscle bound bone leg was grabbed. I screamed out. I looked away from the hulk and ahead of me to see Eric and Tony quickly coming towards me. I splayed out my hands and pushed them away.

“Liberty!” Eric screamed as hulk picked me up by my neck and slammed we against the reinforced concrete walls of a high-rise office. I choked up blood and spat it out at Hulk. His grip increased on my neck snapping my wind pipe. Before I completely went I smirk.

“If I’m going down Bruce, you’re coming with me.” I chuckled with a mental voice as I reached up a splayed out hand and quickly pulled it into a fist. I looked up with my shutting eyes, and watched as the building’s shattering glass bending steel and broken concrete rushed onto us.

I watched that darkness fade to welcome a new one.

I waited for the mind my mind would tear apart but it never came, but still my body shook in agony on the carpet of Charles office. My head was rested on Eric’s lap, my head turned on the side so I didn’t choke. This darkness was different, this wasn’t the darkness of a vision this was the cold darkness of Ruth’s mind.

“I must let you go Liberty, you must go.” A quiet almost childlike voice spoke to me from within her mind, but I couldn’t see anything. Was this how Ruth felt day in and day out? Unable to see the present world around her, only the future to come.