Silk

Chloe Duchess had always been stuck; always been locked away. Her life was airless, suffocating.
The hospital walls were thick, the training room walls were thick, the lab walls were thick, the cell walls were thick.
She was always meant to be trapped in, just a caged animal. An anomaly.
The anomaly.

When HYDRA first found the Omni-Stone concealed deep near the Earth’s core, they fought to keep it a secret. Earth’s own stone. A priceless artifact of cosmic power forged into our world when the Universe came to be. No one could know.

Experimentation was simple enough; they surely had plenty of subjects to test on, whether said subjects were willing or not. 35. 35 different people they tested on before the stone made its way to her. The others had all died, their bodies too weak to possess such energy. And somehow, her frail 10-year-old body could.

Chloe could still recall the bodies, nothing more than bodies at that point. That’s what Hydra twisted everyone into, just bodies. Just missions. Just puppets to exploit. And so that's how Chloe was raised to think.
“To them, we are just things. Weapons with no face that they can just throw away.”

It tore her apart.

There was guilt in the air that day, in the way that there’s heat before rain or tension after a fight.
The guilt stuck itself inside her and refused to let go. She was the only one to make it out of their Omni-Stone experiments.
The stars had glanced down at this small child feeling such an adult kind of responsibility. They all died for her, she thought.
How? How did she even survive?

Unbeknownst to Chloe at the time, her mother was the one and only test subject for the meta drug. The Meta Drug, initially made to mimic the Super Soldier Serum, was created by Hydra scientists such as Max Getty, her father. A low-budget project, of course, but so were all the others. One dose, one injection, one person. It was an easy practice, one they had perfected over the many years of ineffective serum concocting. One mistake this time. They thought the serum was defective.
But that was not the case.

Her mother, not knowing she was pregnant, took the Meta Drug. And through her veins, it immediately bled through to an unborn Chloe Duchess.
And now, an unidentified child superhuman, she is sold out to Hydra, and soon enough, she absorbs the Omni-Stone, and immense power quickly begins to build a home within her.

Hydra’s first child assassin not a Widow, one to make history. As she was shipped from facility to facility, trained for mission after mission, and credited with kill after kill, life drained from her. They drained her.
Of course, she tried to escape many, many times. Who wouldn’t? With that kind of power, it should’ve been easy. But they had too tight a hold on her, a grip that left fingerprint indents. Difficult to disappear and after hearing the horrors of how they trained the unwilling others, she figured it was easier to comply. Just till they kill her. It was unavoidable. She resigned. They were ubiquitous.

7 years later.

“Wake up, kiddo. We gotta talk to the rest of the team soon.”
Up.
Who’s speaking?
Eyes open, Chloe looks around in panic. No one ever talks to her when she wakes up, not unless it’s for training or a mission. No, please no more missions. I just got back from one.
Surveying the room, she slows down. Her spotted vision clears. She’s not in her cell. No, this room is large and open. There is light. There are doors. There’s a… man?

He walks over to her side as she quickly sits up in what seems like a bed?
She’s definitely not in her normal cell anymore; sleeping is normally done on the stone floor, not in warm beds. The straightjacket is nowhere to be seen, and her hands aren’t even bound in cuffs.

This must be a trick, a dream. Some sort of simulation Hydra has created. But no.
This man is staring at her.
“Hey, can you hear me?”
He sounds far away.
She lifts her chin and looks into his eyes, bringing his face into her mind now for the first time, and- is this? No, it can’t possibly be.
"Tony Stark?" she thinks aloud.
“In the flesh,”
She flinches when his voice hits her, unsure of what to make of the situation.

“Are you here to kill me?” is the only thing she thinks to ask, although the moment the question escapes her lips, she realizes how stupid it is. No enemy would ever answer that.
“No,” he replies, with a worried look. He deliberately sits down on the edge of the bed. “No, of course not.”
She doesn’t believe him. This is a trick, it must be.
But she slowly begins to notice, as she reaches up to her neck, that her shocker collar is gone.
“Oh, we removed that,” he says, before she can ask. His face contorts, wincing from the thought of what its purpose might’ve been. “You’ve got some pretty nasty bruising from it but it’ll go down soon enough. I wouldn’t touch it if I were you, though.”

His proximity irked her. Forever on edge, she was, especially these past few years. For good reason, of course. But still.
He removed my shocker.
“What’s going on? Why am I...Why am I not in the cell?”
The alleged Tony Stark massages his eyes, seemingly from exhaustion and concern, and his subtle but noticeable eye bags flare. He sighs out an weary sigh.
“Let me explain.”

So she does.
She sits there for many full minutes as the man illustrates the picture of how she came to be here. She lets him. It puts her at ease to know that if he tries anything, she could fight him. Easily. It was foolish of him to remove her shocker.

As time goes by, the story builds on itself. He recounts that he and Wanda (where have I heard that name before?) broke into one of Hydra’s last facilities and found a hostage. Her.

It could be true, possibly.
I could let myself believe him, just for now at least.
“But why did you take me?”
“Because you were hurt. And because when Wanda read your mind (ohh god that Wanda) and saw your past, she looked… scared. And Wanda's not one who scares easily.”
Chloe lowers her head, though whether this is because of embarrassment or sorrow was unclear.
“I really hope you’re telling the truth.”

Tony lets out a bittersweet smile and pats her shoulder, pulling himself up from the bed and putting some distance between them as he walks to the middle portion of the room.

“Wait, so the others you were talking about? You mean the Avengers?”
“Heh, yup,” he responds easily, his voice soft. For someone known to boast, he sounds humble here.
“Holy shit.” In wonderment and disbelief, her eyes widen.
“HAH,” He gestures to the farthest door on the wall to her right, “Pep picked up some things for you.” Pointing now, he continues. “Change. I’ll see you in 5 minutes, yeah?”
Tony then walks out of the room, turning to smile as he closes the door.

How long have I been here?

The door Stark had pointed to, she comes to find out, has a closet behind it. A very large closet. But what did she expect? This is the Avengers Compound, for god’s sake.

It still doesn’t feel genuine, and walking around only makes her question herself even more. To feel the rug under her, and touch the chill of the metal doorknob, and get blotching eyesight meant her senses were intact. How could this possibly be a simulation?
But, how could this possibly be real?

She decides to shake her head and play along with whatever game this is. If she really is here, she might as well take advantage of being away from Hydra.

Chloe could pretend this is just another one of those little side lives she lives during missions. The ones where she’d sneak out of whatever snotty hotel they had stuck her in and go to a movie, or abuse her fake ID at the smelly bars across the street and tell people her name was Lily and she was from out of town but she had come to wherever she was (they seldom told her, so she had to read the street signs and pick up clues from there) to be a writer, and half the time, she ended up flirting with the bartender and getting her number, although knowing she’d never be able to use it.
But it was fun.
And this could be fun too.

So Chloe leaves the hospital gown and her paranoid mindset on the closet shelves, puts on something smelling like the dryer sheets her mom used to use, and forces her line of sight to the mirror.
She looks the way she always does.
Not her body. Not her clothes. Not her smile.
This isn’t right.
None of it.

Why does it have to be like this?
She went back and forth like this in her head whenever she “gets out”. Whenever society is present. They remind her of all the other lives she could’ve lived, all the other somebodies she could’ve been. Why, why, why.

Her reflection is sore, tossing salt in the wound. Anyone else would’ve said she was pretty, had a great figure, blah, blah, whatever it was they thought.
But it isn’t her body.
Not really.
Not anymore.

Inspecting the person in front of her is like figuring out a nondescript sculpture at a Modern art gallery. She has to squint and lean in and tilt her head and spin around and poke and poke. She starts at the top.

Her head, exploding and quiet, is clean of its expected layer of dust but is still sprinkled with freckles and a couple of small scars here and there.
Her bottom lip tastes like dried blood and medicine.
Her neck is stamped with faded sickly-looking yellow and purple bruises, lined out around the edges of where the inhibitor collar is supposed to be. Bandages white and cloth taped near her ribs blow her mind back to what feels like a couple of days ago. The clouded memory of the guard’s bat swinging into her side, beating her for “misconduct and irrational exertion”. Standard punishment. She always bled for days.
Chloe tears her gaze away from the mirror, but the remembrance lingers, the way you can still taste shrimp in your mouth even after 2 hours.

She pulls the shirt over her head.
She forces a smile until she feels it.
I’ve done this before, I'll be fine.
I’ll be fine.
I’ll be fine.
I’ll be-
“Knock, knock. You ready?” Tony’s voice calls out as it seems to get closer.
Chloe walks out of the closet.
“Yeah,”
“Much better,” he smiles, trying to comfort her.
“Hey, uh,” he whispers, lowering his head to reach her as if they were discussing a new gameplay at halftime, “It’ll all be fine. You’re safe here, I’ve made sure. And I’ll be sitting right next to you, ok?”

Half of her hated that she was being treated so delicately, and the other half felt her inner child twinge with longing.
I can handle myself.
Yes but,
He cared.
Somebody cared.

“Yeah,” she smiles, “Hey, thanks,” breaking the sappy moment of silence and starting towards the main door, “Let’s go.”