She’s been lost in space since she was a kid. She’s had nothing to tie her to earth. She grew up gazing at the stars, wondering, always looking up. What’s it like to fly, to soar? She’s been falling her entire life, always falling—cuts, and blood, and the exhilaration of air pounding through her lungs. All for that moment, that single moment, when she’s carried by the inertia and she thinks—maybe now, just maybe—maybe. But the hit always follows, the fall to earth, inertia giving way to the cold, hard science of gravity. But that isn’t going to stop her.
Higher, faster, further. She’s got no choice.
She wakes on Hala, cold blood shuddering through her veins, but she’s all heat and light, vertigo ebbing through her. They tell her that she isn’t falling anymore. That they’ve caught her. This is what the Kree do. Yon Rogg takes her under his wing and he tries to stop her fall, to make her better. You need to control your emotions, Vers, he tells her, over and over, like a drumbeat. You need to control your emotions, you need to control yourself. He comes the closest, maybe, the closest to stopping that fall by issuing a simple challenge that she’s too stubborn to refuse during a training fight, her face bloody.
Do Better. Be Better.
She’s never been one to resist a challenge. She’s never been great with following orders, or so she thinks, but she loves a challenge. She maybe doesn’t know who she was, but she knows that. She asked once, late at night, after a dream: who am I? And Yon tells her that she is Vers, nothing more, nothing less. That it doesn't matter who she was. What matters is now. She has snatches of it, in those dreams, of what it’s like to fly. But that isn’t her anymore, and this is now. So she tries—she joins Starforce, she fights, and she works, and she tries to shove it all down. She tries to do everything that she’s meant to do. Everything that Yon Rogg says will make her better—make her be better. Become something that the Kree intelligence can use because she owes them that.
They made her, she is Vers, nothing more, nothing less.
It makes her worse, trapped inside rules and regulations, trapped inside buildings that can't hold her. She finds herself looking up again, at the stars, even if she doesn't know what (who?) she’s looking for up there. The Kree tell her that they speaks the truth about the universe and she believes that. Most of the time she believes that. But Starforce doesn't ground her—not in the way they think it will. Not in the way Yon Rogg hopes it will. She can still feel it, that vertigo, at the pit of her stomach saying that she’s falling, still falling, despite it all, emotions flooding through her like a virus. They make her weak, Yon Rogg tells her, they are the only thing holding her back. But she can’t help it sometimes, can’t help but laugh at how serious he is, how serious they all are.
They tell her that her laughter is a weakness, something to be reined in and controlled, but that’s not who she is, and she can only be herself.
She has no idea who she is.
Maria helps her understand—someone who knows her, a friend. She looks at Maria and there is something in her stomach, like vertigo, but it feels different. Maria talks to her, tells her about Carol Danvers. Tells her that this, Vers, this is not who she is. She has no idea who she is. She dances around Maria because she is logic, and sense, and everything she’s been told she’s not. She learns quickly that Maria is made of the same stuff as she, made from stars. That Maria, too, wants nothing more than to fly. Which is not a surprise, because they were both born for this, after all. Maria talks and never tells her that she needs to be less, to rein herself in, to feel less. And she wonders, is this it? Is this what it feels like to fly?
It's not until the core is flooding through her, Kree ships burning, that she really stops falling and starts to fly. The power moving through her is warming every part of her, lighting her up from the inside, hitting parts of her she didn’t even know existed. What is given can be taken away, but this? They can’t take this. Because this is who she is, who she has always been. Standing, her face bloody, the fear and exhilaration as the go-kart turns, hauling herself out of a plane wreckage. If Carol Danvers—if Vers—is anything, it’s this.
She’s this.