Chapter 1
When Elizabeth was born no one thought she’d amount to much of anything, especially not her father Howard, but that was mostly because she was a girl and he wanted a son.
Elizabeth was born with several health problems, she had been born a month early and with fluid in her lungs leading to asthma and severe allergies, her heart was weak and something was wrong with her eyes, she would need glasses before her twenty’s, Howard didn’t seem to happy about her but he was appeased when he had his second child, tony.
Just from the short time she had spent with her father, she tried to keep his aggravation mostly toured her and not her little brother, who was two years younger than her, but she supposed some of her disobedience rubbed off on tony, he started grasping for his father’s approval but also staying away from him as much as possible, Howard didn’t seem to mind.
Elizabeth knew her father wasn’t really as mean and uncaring as people thought, he was just bad with emotions, and didn’t know how to communicate; he pushed them to be their best even though he did it the wrong way sometimes, or in the wrong fashion, always comparing them to someone from the war captain America.
She would admit openly that just as many of those posters in the room she and tony shared belonged to her as they did to him, he was their idol when they were young, they were always acting out scenes from the comic books.
But those were just stories in her mind now.
Howard and their mother died in a car wreck when tony was 14 and she was 16, tony had been left at home because he was sick for once instead of her, they had been on their way back from a gala, something she hated but was forced to attend.
A car collided with theirs and all she remembered was a heavy weight and pain, she was the only one to survive and then just barely.
Two months later when she woke up from a coma her chest felt strange and heavy, the crash had damaged her already weak heart and sent her into heart failure, and it was a miracle she had survived.
She found out why a few hours after waking up, Howard had made up for everything he'd done wrong the only way he could by covering her body with his own taking to brunt of the crash, he mother had died instantly the collision having been on the passenger side, she had been strapped in on the same side and he in the last second had flown over the seats and put himself between her and the oncoming car.
She was told his last words had been ‘save her’. She yelled raged and screamed until her throat was bloody and they had to sedate her, she felt tony crying on her shoulder as she let the darkness take her.
As the years passed she grew to accept it the only way she knew how, she encored it, focused on taking care of her little brother, even if she couldn’t care for herself, as time went by her condition got worst instead of better, she had almost no immunity system, her heart was so weak it barely sustained her.
She knew she was going to die before she was 30, the doctors only gave her until 23, but she never did what she was told.
On one of her regular doctors’ visits to see how much more her health had degraded and where they'd tell her to stop the parties drinking and everything else fun, she was left in the room after a nurse had looked at a chart, her normal checkup finished, she hated how weekly she had to go to those places and sometimes stay for a few days, she always wound up sick afterward or having an asthma attack.
20 minutes after the nurse left and she was thinking of bailing a woman walked in, she wore plane but nice clothing and Elizabeth had never seen her before, since she had been on a first name basis with nearly half the hospital and social with the rest it was strange.
The woman offered her a fix to her problems, a solution to her weak body, the woman was old, but the light in her eyes, a kind of recognition that Elizabeth had never seen before compelled her to agree that and the way tony had clung to her just a few years ago when she returned from yet another stint at the hospital the worst of all of them that had left her nearly dead and broken down saying he couldn’t lose her to, she had promised she wouldn’t, that shed do whatever she had to.
She was going to keep that promise.