Her head was hanging low, her whole body so stiff it seemed like she was dead. The only movement that came from her immobile body was the little wave of the strands of hair in front of her face, due to the shaky breaths she would eventually take.
The hallway was extremely bright and clean, and the wheelchair she was sitting on rolled on the ground smoothly, almost without making any sound. Hazel tried to raise her head to look at who was moving it, but she only saw faceless people with white coats and black gloves that were tightly gripping her shoulders to avoid her every movement.
The scene suddenly changed and the girl fell to the ground, her surroundings darkening more and more as the only light came from the green power that she was unleashing like a storm.
"Stop it! Hazel, stop!" but she couldn't stop, she just couldn't. The green streams got wider and wider as she brought her hands to her head and closed her eyes, rocking her body back and forth to try and calm down. But that voice kept screaming and she couldn't stop panicking-
"Hazel, Hazel! Wake up, it's me, Steve, I'm here!"
Hazel opened her eyes and realized she was screaming. She closed her mouth shut and looked around herself, noticing Steve sitting on the bed in front of her and Wanda and Natasha standing behind him with worried expressions.
She started sobbing as she got used to her surroundings and Steve embraced her, her head resting on his strong chest.
"It's ok, it's over now. Shhh, you're ok," he started mumbling as Hazel did her best to stop the tears soaking Steve's shirt.
When she managed to calm down, she gently pushed Steve away and wiped her tears, blushing at the traces of them on his grey shirt.
"I'm so sorry," she muttered, looking at Natasha and Wanda. The first had a preoccupied expression, while the second seemed almost curious about what had happened.
"It's ok, we're used to nightmares. Are you ok now?" Natasha asked, not looking directly at her. She still remembered the way Hazel had talked to her the day after, and there was definitely embarrassment between them.
"Yeah, thank you," she said, smiling faintly while Steve stood up and followed the two girls out of the room after giving her one last look.
Hazel sighed heavily and stood up from the bed, padding towards the bathroom. She had an exhausted expression, but it wasn't the worst thing. Her mind was working ten times more than it normally did, and it wasn't good. She would normally have about fifty different thoughts in one minute, but now it was way worse. She could almost feel the headach kicking in because of the short circuit her thoughts were causing. She decided to take a shower, perfectly knowing it wouldn't have helped at all.
-
Natasha slumped down on the couch as Steve and Wanda followed her. Steve and Natasha immediately looked at Wanda as she mindlessly twisted the rings on her fingers, her lip trembling.
"What did you see?" Steve asked. He knew it was an awful thing to do, but seeing Hazel's dreams could have probably helped them to understand her more.
"It was... bad. They almost looked like mine, but the guiltiness in hers was way stronger than mine. She experienced the loss of someone really close to her, probably the only person she cared about. And I fear it was because of her powers. She was definitely enhanced by someone who wanted to create... a soldier? I don't know, the powers she has don't really make her a soldier, but it definitely looked like one," Wanda said, flinching at the memory of Hazel's dream. It was distressing.
"Do you think she killed that person because she couldn't control her powers?" Steve asked, rubbing the hint of stubble growing on his cheeks.
"Most likely, yeah," Wanda answered.
"I bet all my guns that she feels responsible for it," Natasha said ironically.
"I wouldn't blame her," Wanda said, still looking down. "Do you think we should inform the others?"
Steve shook his head, "We haven't found anything that could affect the way we see her, or at least we're not sure about what we have found. I would say we don't."
Natasha nodded, "I agree."
They all remained silent for a while, then Natasha stood up to get ready for her training with Hazel –even if Steve wasn't sure she would actually do it after what had happened- and Wanda remained on the couch, her mind wandering in places Steve couldn't reach.
"What are you thinking?" he asked her, instead. He would do that a lot, when he realised Wanda would get lost in her mind for too long.
"I'm trying to understand what she can possibly feel. Her dream was so... real, so painful. Not even I have ever had such a dream," she said, visibly confused.
"Can- can I see it?" Steve knew what he was heading towards, but if he wanted to help Hazel, he had to understand her more.
Wanda hesitated for a moment, then grabbed the hand Steve was offering her and closed her eyes, red hex joining their hands as memories flowed towards him. Steve's breath faltered for a moment when the dream appeared in his mind and, once it was over, he slowly opened his eyes with a terrified expression on his face.
"I know," was all Wanda said, before standing up and walking away, leaving Steve alone.
He was almost out of breath. Even if the dream itself was really confused, since everything he could see was Hazel's desperation and not her surroundings, the feelings were maybe too clear. The confusion, the helplessness, the pain, the anger, the delusion... he felt as if he had experienced all these things on his own skin, went through them and tried his best to move on, without success. He was starting to understand what Hazel probably was going through every day, and he was speechless.
-
As much as she tried to gain some more sleep, the feelings the dream had caused her were so vivid for her to attempt to drift into unconsciousness. It had never been so intense since she was little and the thought wasn't necessarily exciting her.
Hazel opted for going to take some fresh air, and realized she had never visited the roof of the tower. Being such a tall building, it was probably towering over the whole of New York, and the view was supposed to be breathtaking.
She wore a sweater to avoid the cold and paced towards the elevator, pressing the last button in hope it was the one that would have brought her to the roof. Once the doors opened, she stepped out in an empty waiting room and walked towards an iron door that, once opened, let the cold wind from outside sneak inside the room and gently tug at Hazel's hair. A small smile plastered on her face as she walked outside, breathing heavily as the sensation of not being oppressed by four walls made her feel immediately better.
The roof was way bigger than she had expected. There were three landing sites for the quinjets and an elevated platform similar to the one Tony had outside of the living room floor that he used to get rid of the suit once he got back from the missions. Hazel noticed how every single part of the tower was equipped with everything the Avengers could have needed in case of an attack, from small jets to guns to technologically advanced computers. It wasn't exactly the perfect place to relax and get distracted from everything else, but she knew it was their job and there was no spare time to relax. Still, she wondered whether they had an actual place for themselves where they could have headed off to when it all got too much.
She was lucky from this point of view. She had learned to be calm and relaxed even in the worst of situations, except for when her past and the way she got her powers came back to bother her. In that case, there was no way for her to calm down immediately. And it made her feel extremely frustrated, since she had the power to heal almost everything that was physical and psychological, but not herself. She had tried multiple times to remove some of her memories from herself, but she only managed to let the images fade. She had realized that this kind of power was supposed to take memories away from someone and put them in someone else, which happened to be her in both of the cases. She had no way of removing her memories because she had no one to entrust them with, and she didn't want to burden them anyway.
So she was stuck in trying to survive without having a chance of making her life better, and memories that were menacing her every single second, ready to attack her as soon as she felt slightly vulnerable.
"Miss Hazel, Bruce Banner is waiting for you in the laboratory," Friday startled her, making her slightly jump on her position.
"Thank you, Friday." she smiled, walking back to the waiting room and into the elevator. She had relaxed enough to be back in being surrounded by four walls, but she made a mental note to go back to that roof every time she was feeling too oppressed and distressed.
-
"No, wait, look here. It speeds the healing process three times more, if not four, but I don't think she can stop here. Her power seems completely out of control for her, she knows how to heal people and she probably decided it was enough for her, but there's more. There is totally more."
Natasha looked at Bruce with a sympathetic expression. She didn't know whether he was being so excited because he loved his job or because he was still deep down hoping Hazel could have healed him. She sincerely hoped it wasn't the latter.
It wasn't as if she didn't wish for Bruce to not be the Hulk anymore, because as much as he was the best ally for the Avengers, Bruce couldn't handle it and it brought him too many negative reactions to allow it to go on, but Bruce wasn't sick, at least not physically. He wasn't injured and needed to be healed, and Natasha wondered whether he had realized it and had completely ignored it, or he knew something she didn't.
"Bruce, don't push her too much. You see the state she is in, she might not handle this," she pleaded him, placing a hand on his own. He glanced over at their intertwined hands for a moment and his expression softened, but the moment was ruined by Hazel coming in, a sweater completely hiding her upper body and her cheeks reddened.
Natasha smiled sweetly at her, glad that she seemed to have recovered from the nightmare, and Hazel smiled back, walking down the stairs to reach the two.
"Thank you for coming, Hazel. I know this might sound weird, but I want you to experiment something.. on me," Bruce said, looking firmly at the girl.
Hazel widened her eyes and backed up a little, trying to understand where he was going with these words. "What do you mean?"
"You said a few days ago that you could feel a wounded heartbeat from someone who needed to be healed, not only physically, but mentally. I don't know if you have already, but I think you would have heard something from us if there was," he said. Hazel slowly nodded, still looking at him with a careful expression.
"Well, what I'm asking to you is if you can watch inside of me, see if there is something wounded in me. If.. the other one has caused some damages that you can heal."
Natasha tried not to yell as Hazel sighed in defeat, her arms limp on her sides.
"Bruce, I already told you I can't heal you. There's nothing to heal."
"Look once more."
As Hazel and Bruce kept discussing, Natasha slowly walked next to the table behind Bruce and placed a hand under it, searching for the button. As soon as she found it, she pressed it and walked away as carefully, placing her other hand on the gun stored on her left leg.
Hazel seemed to have given up and was looking directly at Bruce's chest, eventually moving towards his head. Her eyes were slightly glistening as her green power floated around her hands, that she was moving in a fluid way that reminded Natasha of Wanda. Bruce had his eyes closed and his hands were tightly gripping the table behind him, but he didn't seem bothered by Hazel's invasion.
After ten minutes, Hazel started to shiver slightly. Natasha noticed because Hazel's power started to grow in front of her like a shield, but it couldn't protect her from Bruce's mind.
"Bruce, what are you doing?" Natasha exclaimed, walking in front of him. Bruce had a satisfied smile, his eyes still closed and, as she turned towards Hazel, she noticed blood flowing out of her nose.
"Bruce! You're killing her!" Natasha yelled by now, grabbing Bruce's shoulders and shaking them. It wasn't until Steve, Tony, Wanda and Clint rushed in the laboratory and started yelling at him that Bruce woke up from his trance and backed away, tripping on his own feet and falling on the ground.
As soon as he woke up, Hazel's power disappeared as well and she dropped to the ground, carefully protected by Steve's arms before she could hit the cold pavement. Blood was still dripping from her nose, but Wanda grabbed some towels and immediately started cleaning her. As Natasha assured both of them that Bruce seemed to be fine, they both walked away, Steve tightly holding Hazel as she didn't seem to gain consciousness yet.
Chapter five here for you c:
I don't know what you think about this chapter, but it had been way harder than the others, mainly for Bruce's part. I tried to understand the way he felt and the way he would process his thoughts, and I hope I haven't completely destroyed his character by making him act this way. I wanted to show how Hazel's powers have quite negative reactions on people, so much that they act irrationally.
I really hope you liked this chapter, I'll see if I can post another one :3
love you all,
Elena.
EDITED