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📍SHIELD SHIP
2012
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Pain, was all she was able to feel.
In her senses and in her body.
Her eyelids were impossibly heavy as she forced them open, lolling her head to the side.
In her hazy vision, she could make out a head full of fiery red hair and muffled sounds of growling.
As the head turns, her vision began to clear up slightly and she was able to see the urgent worry on Natasha's face.
She was screaming something at her and waving her hand vehemently around, seemingly beckoning her to run but her entire body felt underwater.
Her eyes landed on the figure behind her, the figure that was growing green in muscle — the figure that was transforming into a mindless beast.
The beast rises from its kneeled down position and began to clamber away and with each vibrational thud, he grew and grew.
The spike of adrenaline from seeing this cleared the ringing in her ears and replaced the ache in her body with strength.
"Get out of here!" Natasha urgently shouted at her, this time she was able to hear the uncharacteristic fear in her tone.
"Not without you." she fired right back as she leapt up onto her feet.
She bent down and grabbed at the redhead's arms before using all of the strength that she could muster to yank her with a grunt.
Within a few seconds, the spy was freed from the debris that she was trapped under and quickly made it onto her feet.
The two women turned around to look in the distance at the Hulk in all of his glory.
The clothing that Banner once wore was ripped apart, he was only left with shredded dress pants that were now leveled down to stringy shorts.
The Hulk's head slowly turns to the side, looking over his shoulder menacingly at the two.
Natasha then shoved Cosima towards the nearby staircase. "Run."
At her demand, the Hulk seemed to have followed along as well.
Natasha purposely pushed the younger girl in front of her so that there was space between her and the green monster, the space being herself.
Cosima runs up the metal staircase, skipping a few steps in the process.
When she makes it all the way to the top, the staircase is ripped from underneath herself which made her search quickly for Natasha.
The Widow was already ten steps ahead and had saved herself by propelling her body onto the railing of the balcony bit of the supply room, rolling onto the second level.
Natasha quickly grabbed for Cosima again and shoved her harshly in front of her as they continued to sprint.
Pieces of the facility were ripped away by large hands behind them, fingers grabbing for their legs.
Eventually, they seemingly outran him and they took shelter behind a large crate.
Their breaths huffed and mixed in the gloomy air as they remained silent to ensure attention wasn't drawn to them.
Natasha slowly began to rise up from her crouched position, gesturing a hand out behind her towards the girl as a way to tell her to stay down.
She slowly peered around the corner of the crate—
RAWR!
The Hulk screamed right in her face, his hot breath and saliva assaulting her nostrils and the sound shook the entire floor.
Swiftly, she whipped out her gun and fired it up at an air tank right underneath his head.
Grey air goes whipping into his face and she took this as the opportunity to grab Cosima and force her to start running again.
They hop down several steps on the exit staircase as a very angry green monster was right on their tail.
Cosima sprinted with everything inside of her through a runway-like glass hallway, and she could feel Natasha's footsteps inches behind her own which pushed her to keep it moving.
The Hulk tears apart the glass runway and shards of glass come barreling onto them, landing in their hair.
They managed to make it to the end of the now destroyed hall and the air was knocked out of their lungs when their bodies were thrown in Hulk's wrath.
Cosima landed a few feet away from Natasha, knocking into a metal pillar and landing on her already bruised ribs.
She quickly whirred her head up to get an eye on her friend, who the Hulk was hovering right above.
The green creature raised his fist up and was about to give the redhead the finishing blow, until a blonde figure goes soaring straight into him — effectively getting him away from the women.
Natasha slumped against the crate behind her in relief before she gingerly crawled over to Cosima whom was frozen in place.
"You're okay." she panted reassuringly, out of breath as she gently grabbed her arm to pull her upright. "We're alright."
Without even a second thought, she brought the younger trembling girl into her arms, which she was sure were shaky as well.
They sat there for several beats, simply catching their breaths and trying to wrap their minds around what had just occurred.
That was until a crackle in their earpieces bursted their bubble.
"It's Barton." Fury spoke, clearly on the end of another conversation. "He took out our systems. He's headed for the detention level. Does anybody copy?
"This is Agent Romanoff." she said determinedly. "I copy."
"No, no." she said in a panicky tone, lifting her head to look at her with wide eyes.
"It's okay." she reassured with hands on either side of her grimy face.
"What if he comes back?" she worriedly stated.
"He won't." she denied. "Go find Fury, alright? Stay with him."
"Why can't I stay with you?" she bargained with her. "Don't go."
"Because Clint is unpredictable right now and I'm the only one who can deal with him." with a thoughtful pause, she then squeezed her hands. "Go, okay — i'll find you."
Cosima reluctantly rose with her, her body facing hers as the grip on her hands tightened.
"Go." she urged again but it was more stern.
She swallowed down the blood in her mouth with a gulp before reluctantly backing away and running off.
The hallways of the ship were nothing but chaos, a complete contrast to the empty eerie silence of the basement of crates.
She turned another corner and entered a longer corridor, the corridor with the labs and the cell.
Except, the door to the cell at the end of the hallway was clearly open and the cell itself was missing.
Cosima let out a non-curse underneath her breath and broke out into a sprint down the hall despite her body's protests.
She goes stumbling inside from her speed and the sight that she was met with made her stomach drop.
Loki's smirk grew at the arrival of the young girl. "Well, what a pleasant surprise."
"Cosima, run." the weak voice of Coulson advised — stabbed and bleeding on the ground.
"I'm not leaving you." she resolutely states.
"How heroic of you." the god drawled in amusement. "It's heinous that you don't take after your father."
Her eyes narrowed at him exasperatedly, tired of his games. "My father is dead."
"Is your father dead?" he sardonically questioned as he paced. "Is that what they told you?"
She then felt a burning sensation crawling up her goose bumped neck, causing for her to cringe and wince at the feeling beginning to settle in the back of her head.
"Cosima, he's messing with your mind." Coulson warned through a bloody gurgle. "Don't listen to him."
Cosima stumbled back as the haziness set in — her surroundings were blurred and flickering between the cage room and a home.
"A family is forever." a deep accented voice said.
She found that the voice belonged to the man now standing in front of her, but his face was distorted in her cloudiness.
"I love you to the moon and back, Mein Stern." [ "...my star." ]
Abruptly, the enchantment was broken by a harsh explosion from a weapon.
The fog cleared and she saw Loki getting fired backwards by the weapon that was sitting in Coulson's lap.
"Oh, so that's what it does." he weakly joked.
Cosima blinked away her stupor and quickly took the three steps to the agent and fell to her knees beside him.
She swiftly rolled the weapon from off of his lap. "Keep your eyes open." she sternly pronounced as she ripped off the sweatshirt from her body and balled it up.
With two hands, she pressed the cloth into the center of the clear hole in his stomach.
"I'm dying."
"You are not."
"It's okay." he gave her a weak smile. "I'm not scared."
"Well I am, therefore you are not dying, Agent Coulson." her voice was growing frantic.
"Phil." he calmly corrected. "Call me Phil."
"I'll call you that after you get the help you need, yeah?" she promised. "But for now you need to keep your eyes open."
Merely a second later, Fury comes rushing in.
They made eye contact for a brief second before the spy of spies crouched down in front of the dying man while Cosima remained off to the side catering to his wound.
"Sorry, boss." he apologized through a heavy breath. "The god rabbeted."
"Just stay awake." he urged and though his voice was steady, it was clear in his rigid movements he was panicking. "Eyes on me!"
"No, I'm clocked out here." he defeatedly replied.
"Not an option."
"It's okay, boss." he breathed in another hefty breath as his eyelashes began to slowly flutter. "This was never going to work...if they didn't have something...to..."
His voice trails off and his body went fully limp against the wall as his distant eyes look away, sighing his last breath.
Cosima's face crumpled on the spot and she broke down into complete tears, shoulders shaking and hands still gripping tightly onto the sweatshirt to apply pressure to the wound that he had succumbed to.
As the medical team arrived, Fury gently grabbed onto her arms and pulled her away so that the team could access him.
Wordlessly, and maybe even uncharacteristically, he pulled the wailing girl into his chest and held her tightly — his expression grim as he watched the team work on his friend.
—
Her palms and fingers were still stained from the blood that had inevitably met her porcelain skin.
Her pink tank top and mini skirt were newly dyed in splotches of crimson.
She sat the farthest away from the two other men, curled up in her chair with a numb expression on her tear-stained face.
Fury takes leisure steps towards them, fiddling with a deck of cards in his hands. "These were in Phil Coulson's jacket." he then tossed them towards Steve, blood splattering against the glass of the table. "Guess he never did get you to sign them."
The Captain picks them up and stares at the card of himself, covered in a dead man's blood, almost mournfully.
"We're dead in the air up here. Our communications, location of the cube, Banner, Thor. I got nothing for you." he stated. "Lost my one good eye." he swallowed thickly. "Maybe I had that coming."
After a beat, he spoke again — he spoke the truth this time around. "Yes, we were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract. I never put all my chips on that number though, because I was playing something even riskier.
"There was an idea, Stark and Cosima knows this, called The Avengers Initiative.
The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people, see if they could become something more. See if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could."
He stopped his pacing, staring down at the ground solemnly for a moment before addressing the trio. "Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea, in heroes."
Abruptly, Tony rose to his feet and began to walk off — it was as if there was a storm cloud over his head that only rained harder with each heavy step he took.
"Well, it's an old fashioned notion."
...
Cosima didn't move from her spot, not even when everyone else dispersed and went elsewhere.
She remained frozen in her seat as the scene continued to play on her mind in repeat.
She felt someone sit down right beside her, then pivoting the rolling chair to face her head on.
They found themselves leaning forward with their elbows on their knees as they carefully looked at the young girl.
"I've never seen anyone truly die before." she blurted out, her voice void. "The closest i've seen to death imagery was when Bambi's mother dies.." she trails with a breathy self deprecating short laugh. "I've always known death existed and that there was an eventual end but...seeing the light die in someone's eyes — feeling the spirit leave that's..." she stopped herself and chose to curl even tighter into her body.
Steve's frown deepened as a wave of hurt for the girl passed through his chest. "You shouldn't have seen that, I'm sorry."
She just kept talking, practically disregarding his words — this was shock, he gathered.
"You know, i've always known that I was sheltered but with everything that has happened to me in the last two years, it's really made itself known.
"There's this girl on my team, her name is Ororo but everyone calls her Storm and she grew up in this poor town in Egypt." a small smile crept onto her lips at the thought of her friend. "She's the eldest out of four siblings and she had to hustle to make sure they were alright and well fed and healthy after their parents were murdered right in front of them — I mean, she grew up in wars...I.."
"What are you saying?" the Captain questioned.
"I'm saying that i'm not the right person for this job." she finally turned her head to look at him. "They chose the wrong girl."
Steve's heart could've broken right then and there.
Her eyes were deeply red-rimmed and wide while her once even skin-tone was splotchy and slightly swollen from the tears.
"Don't say that." he advised softly.
"It's the truth, isn't it?" she cynically said. "I know who I am, I know that...I don't have the same life skills that the average person has and I know that I can be painfully naive." she rolled her eyes at herself. "And even now, me sitting here talking to you, there's a part of me waiting for the part where Phil is completely okay and we miraculously catch Loki and all further bloodshed has been erased from the story — and we all live happily ever after.."
"I think your innocence is a superpower as a whole."
"What?" her head tilted to the side as she incredulously said that.
"I'm serious." he doubled down. "Being able to see the bright side is good — you haven't lost your youth, and you should embrace that as long as you can."
"In this business you can't have that."
"Yet you're in the business, are you not?" he countered. "Although Fury isn't...the best...right now, he chose you out of your other teammates for a reason." he took a pause to emphasize the gravity of his words. "That's not something to second-guess."
Cosima chose not to reply, and rather, she turned her head back to stare at the reflective table glass, her chin on her pulled up knees.
"Embrace who you are, okay?" he tilted his head to try and grab her gaze. "Embrace the light that you still have shining inside of you."
She looks at him again, eyes wide and doe at his words and she couldn't help the way her heart began to pound in her chest.
Without a word, she let her legs fall correctly over the chair and turned it to face him before throwing her arms around him and stuffing her face into his shoulder.
Although Steve was taken aback, he welcomed the touch and hugged her right back even tighter.
"Thank you." she whispered against the fabric of his shirt.
She couldn't help but to take a couple of deep breaths to breathe in and savor his scent of fresh linen and the faint underlying smell of sweet airy vanilla.
"Anything for you." he whispered back. "You're the only friend that i've got."
She would've thought that Captain America would smell like sandalwood and musk, but being in his arms he just smelled like home.
a/n
r u guys sensing what i'm sensing...