The Empress of Magic

Chapter 94 : Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place

When Marisol had turned six years old, she and her parents were sold to one of HYDRA's most profitable facilities after most of their family perished in a fire caused by accidental Magic.....

She could not remember much about that day, besides her younger cousin excitedly telling her about a spell she had seen the neighbor boy perform and wanted to repeat....

After that, it was only black smoke and the sticky sensation of drying blood on her skin clouding her senses......

The panic of not being able to see, smell, or hear anything almost felt as horrifying as the blood coating her hands and face, the result of having been pushed out of the way from a collapsing wall by her uncle....

If someone were to ask her now how she or her parents had managed to find each other in that burning building, or how in the world they had gotten out, she wouldn't be able to answer them.

She could only remember the bright flames in front of her, dancing across her vision in an eternal battle of orange, yellow, and red.........

A life before HYDRA was something many had forgotten about once imprisoned for a long time.....

Her parents, two of the kindest people she had ever known, did not survive five years of being captured and held in Sokovia.

First, her mother died. She had caught the flu one day and was not able to recover quickly enough for the taste of the scientists, so she and others, who would most likely not have survived another night, were executed via injection.

Then it was her father's turn. An experiment gone wrong, was what the other prisoners had told her, upon being made to identify the beaten and broken remains of what had been the last bits of security and familiar love that she had.

The kind were usually the first ones to die, as she figured out...

So she took an example of the older prisoners, who had survived decades under this kind of treatment and became an emotionless dolls for HYDRA to shape and mold as she grew.......

It was not ideal. She was still tortured and received more beatings and broken bones than what should have been tolerable for the human body, but she was left alive, which was all she hoped for and wanted for herself.

Not because she thought that someday she would be able to leave the facility, but because she wanted to kill the scientists who had caused this misery and pain to begin with.

Her Muteness, a side-effect from the trauma that losing her family in the fire had caused, gave her the advantage of often being overlooked by others, which meant she could sneak around and steal certain objects without worrying about someone questioning her absence or alerting the security system.

And the arrival of the Maximoff twins shifted even more of the focus away from her and the other prisoners.

Honestly, should she one day meet them for one reason or another she would thank them and the girl they had brought with them, for giving her the opportunity to collect information none of those working for HYDRA wanted to reach the outside world.

When she heard that the twins had been relocated for a task near Sokovia's capital, she had been made to halt her operations for some time, though the one thing she could not figure out was why the girl that was always by the male twin's side was left here instead of being taken with them...

She obviously meant something to both of them and could serve as a great reminder to make sure the twins held their end of the deal unless they wanted to see her hurt, but she also heard a few guards talking about her ability to manipulate Ice, so perhaps they had other uses for her...