The Only Way Out is Through
“Do you want to tell me what happened back there?”
Adelina refused to meet Fury’s gaze as she tilted her head against the cool metal of the aircraft. An hour had passed since they had returned to the sky - an hour of complete and utter silence of which Fury had been aggressively preparing to break.
“He escaped. What else do you want me to say?” She muttered, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes as she turned towards the window. The night sky was littered with starlight, small orbs sparkling amidst the somberness of the Quinjet.
“Do you know why I requested you to accompany me tonight?” Fury asked. His gaze was flammable to her skin, prickling with hints of his own irritation.
“To ensure your own protection, of course,” Adelina condescended, crossing her arms as she turned.
“Not just mine, Tanase. The world’s. You have unbelievable abilities, unbeatable abilities… yet you failed to perform. The world depended on you and still depends on you. No more carelessness, no more arrogance. Do your job.” His words sparked something within her, reigniting the embers of the anger that had burned through her earlier that evening in the midst of defeat.
“Do you remember why I am even doing this job in the first place?” Adelina asked. It was a rhetorical question - of course Nick Fury remembered - the man did not forget a single thing. As if he realized her awareness of this, he nodded in place of a verbal response. Her jaw clicked as she held his gaze, placing her hands atop her thighs as she leaned forward in her seat. “Then you remember that my loyalty to you - to S.H.I.E.L.D. - depends solely on your ability to provide me with the information that I requested three years ago. Information that I have yet to receive, questions that you have failed to answer. You need me to do my job - you need me to ensure your own safety, the world’s safety… but have you even considered the fact that I don’t need you?”
Adelina’s lips curled, a cold smile forming on her face as she loosened the reigns on her powers ever so slightly, shivering as the iciness of Fury’s rage brushed against her, laced with the hint of fear. She reveled in the fact that she had struck a nerve in him, forced him to remember that she owed nothing to anyone, especially him.
“I understand that I have not held up my end of the deal within a time frame favorable to you, but I do have some answers to your questions - answers that I am more than willing to give you once this threat has passed. I suggest that you continue to follow my orders for now if -“ Adelina didn’t let him finish, ignoring what was sure to be another idle threat and choosing to cut him off as her curiosity got the best of her.
“Answers to which questions? What did you find?” She asked, leaning even further towards him as her eyes widened, a plea for him to give her just one piece of information - easily contrasting her words from only seconds before as she realized how desperate she truly was for this knowledge.
“Your family - your ancestry,” Fury provided, a knowing look in his eye as he analyzed her posture. Adelina exhaled, falling back against the wall and placing her hands against the cool metal of the seat to prevent them from shaking.
“I want to know. Now,” Adelina demanded, gathering her composure as she returned her gaze to the man that claimed to hold answers to the questions she had been asking since she was a child - eight years old and lost within a world that refused to accept her for what she was.
“As I was saying, I will tell you… but only after this threat has passed. There are more important things at stake right now - and if you think that I don’t know that you'd run off the second you had this information, then you are surely mistaken.” Adelina scoffed in response, about to interject before Fury continued. “If you stay, and continue to hold up your end of things until we make it through this, I will give you everything that I was able to find and you can do whatever you want with it - far from here, if that’s what you choose.” Another pause as Fury gauged Adelina’s temperament, watching as her knuckles turned white from her strengthening grip on the seat. “We land in thirty minutes. If you’re still here, I’ll assume that we're in agreement.” Fury nodded towards her as he stood up and stalked towards the cockpit - a swagger in his step that made Adelina hiss a sound of exasperation. The man always had to have the last word, and for once, she had yielded.
Leaning her head back against the cool metal of the wall that separated her from the simplicity of life outside, Adelina closed her eyes and wondered what it would be like to be someone else - wondered what it would be like to be normal, powerless, and so blissfully ignorant of the horrors, the disappointment, that existed in the world - or in the universe, now, it seemed. The truth of what existed outside of Earth was beginning to gather clarity, first with Thor’s startling arrival, and now Loki’s - two sons of another realm. The universe was truly as vast, as intricate, as she had once believed as a child, maybe even more so. Even now, she couldn’t help but to acknowledge that spark of intuition that aimed to reason with her, a mere suggestion that the answers she sought were not, could not be, limited to this planet.
As she pondered endless possibilities of her existence and the answers that she had yet to uncover, she thought about her current circumstances and all that she had endured to get this far. She thought about the little girl, only eight years old and terrified of the power that she had discovered within herself - so young and so desperate for someone to understand her, to love her in the way that a family should, in a way that she had yet to experience even now, in her early twenties. She imagined what it would be like to tell that little girl, full of both fear and questions, that the answers she longed for were nearly in her grasp. All she had to do was surrender. Surrender to the arrogance and self-sufficient ideology that she had come to rely on for so long that the mere thought of being held to an ultimatum such as the one Fury had rendered left her reeling, in a miserable search for some form of escape. Though, she realized, to escape without so much as one question answered would be to abandon that little girl - and the thought of abandoning her was so much worse.
It was then that Adelina knew. She knew that she would have to see this through - if not for her sake, then for the little girl that she once was.