Intertwine

24 - We Cannot Let Them Win

T.W. violence and mentions of abuse.

ALINA

I was exhausted, sweaty, and pissed. We'd been all over the Avengers building, all around Manhattan. Nothing.

"Look, there's no point in keeping looking." Nat said as we regrouped in the living room of the tower. It was a main room I hadn't really been in before, as while Roara had been kept separate I had been with her mostly. Now she was gone, I felt like I was playing with the big kids. This room alone was on about three different levels, all modern and sleek.

"We find her." Tony said, pointing round the group. He looked as tired as I felt.

"We've looked everywhere Tony." Rhodey sighed.

"That woman nearly killed..." He trailed off, leaving the rest of his sentence unsaid. "She overpowered Barton by pointing at him." Tony gestured emphatically to Barton who touched his neck uncomfortably. I winced at the memory.

"She does sound kinda scary." I turned my head to look at the youngest member of our group, Peter Parker. "But is she all we're up against? I mean how many people can she do that to at once?" He seemed nervous to be speaking in front of so many avengers, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was considering the situation and his heart rate. The only reason I'd never had trouble speaking in front of the avengers, or crowds of people, is because I'd grown up with Stark stuck onto the end of my name. If I could be comfortable making mistakes around my uncle (which, to be fair, I wasn't) then I could be comfortable in front of any of these people.

"If it's anything like me she can't. I can only heal one person at a time, but I can register multiple bodies at once. For example Sam needs to pee, Cap is lacking serotonin, and Tony's been busting out that epinephrine for the last 40 minutes." I shrugged.

"Hey," Sam groaned, "why'd you need to tell them about the pee? I was holding it just fine!"

"You're worried about that, she basically just told the entire group I was depressed." Steve muttered to Sam.

"Your dopamine levels are fine." I shrugged. "You're not depressed per se, just very much not a happy chicken."

"What's epinephrine?" Barton asked from beside Nat.

"It's uh, it's a hormone right?" Peter asked. "Your body produces it when you're stressed."

"Bingo." Bruce sighed. "That'll explain why he's so pissed."

"Of course I'm pissed!" Tony sat down heavily beside me, changing the dimensions of the map of New York. "We just lost our most important prisoner."

"Look, I get the Ascendency is bad." Sam said, "But what actual threat is it to us? Why do we need this lady so badly?"

I sat down beside Tony and glanced at him, then looked into my lap. I couldn't look him in the eyes when I said this. I didn't want to see his face.

"The Ascendency has no mercy. I watched them kill people, slowly, to try and find a way to enhance themselves using other people's powers. They never chose people older than 25 to experiment on. They thought youth would be the answer. Clearly it wasn't, as most people didn't survive the process. If they lived to gain their powers, they were treated so badly that they didn't live to escape. They would walk past the children in cages as they were screaming for their parents and do you know what they would do? They laughed. They wanted to see how far they could push you. If you showed weakness, you were no good for their experiments. If they saw you cry... let's just say I made sure never to cry. There's a reason I have more than one power. I have abilities to control the human body, to understand and use pain. I can also manipulate light and shadow. It's because they wanted to see how many powers they could place in one person, how far they could enhance you before it killed you. They want to make the avengers obsolete, and not to replace them as defenders of the earth. They know the only thing that stands in their way between complete control is us, and they will stop at nothing, and I mean nothing, to get what they want. They would break the fingers of other prisoners, one by one, just to see if I could heal them. If I couldn't, they were... discarded. Just for a broken finger. The enhancement is a painful process, it takes hours, and even then it would only accumulate slowly. In order to do it they'd have to extract it from someone else. I don't know how they did that, but in all my time there I never came across someone who had not gained their powers through the process. My assumption is, it killed them." I looked up, scanning the faces across the room. "I know pain and suffering because of them. They tortured me for hours on end just to get the results they wanted, shouted abuse at me when I didn't do what they asked. We cannot let them reach their full potential, because then we will never defeat them. I am asking you to listen to me. Please. We cannot let them win."