Chapter 14
Stop your fussing, sweetheart.
I hear the voice in my head, after using my allotted a mental strength just to get my finger to twitch.
The closest I’d gotten to getting more control than that was when Loki… Well, when he was here—when he said what he said.
I’ve had time to go over it again and again in my head, and I still can’t accept it. There was a time when nothing would’ve made me happier than to hear that, but now, thinking about it just confused me even more… Granted, there’s a solid chance that it wasn’t even true—in which case, it was a pretty smart tactic to rile me up like that.
It pissed me off, confused me, and drove me nuts at first—but it wasn’t enough. In those few moments after he said what he said, I heard my own voice screaming in my head. It was refreshing, like wriggling out of a tight rope wrapped around your body, but that was all. It wasn’t enough.
All it did was leave a nasty cut in my chest—bleeding into tears I couldn’t shed, words I couldn’t say, frustration I couldn’t vent…
The spiraling thoughts suddenly pause, as Nisha turns over on the bench—toward the sound of a hissing door. She slices my eyes to the sight of Loki barging into the cell, smirking at the tight expression on his face.
“What are you—” she muses at first, pausing when her gaze falls on the syringe in his hand.
Loki strides straight over to the bench, and Nisha shrieks as he pins my body down onto the bench with insane strength, using his weight to keep me down. Being out of control gives no less leeway to the discomfort of being held down like that—particularly as something sharp suddenly pricks my arm, and pain cascades slowly through the limb.
Its contents drain into my arm as Nisha screams. “NO, NOOO!!”
She shrieks again and again, and both our voices fill my head—mine, from the numbing cold and chill that’s coursing by my every muscle, and Nisha because of… Well, who knows what the hell could make her scream.
My hands tremble against the bench as Loki grabs me by the arm, hauling me onto his lap. My voice twists and turns as I suddenly realize the reason for her panic—Nisha’s will, slowly melting away as she screams in pain. Slowly, the control transfers over, and I gain minimal sovereignty over the spastic movements of my body.
“It’s alright,” he murmurs, and I can practically feel his heart pounding as he cradles my face, knitting his fingers in my hair. I lift an arm slowly, panting now and wailing with the occasional sharp twinge of pain.
Nisha’s voice drains from my head, the painful screams shifting to frustration and anger. Relief sweeps over me mentally, while my body continues writhing in pain—growing more and more by the minute. And as soon as she’s gone, the full brunt of the pain hits me like a wall, with an unrelenting pressure caving over every inch of my body—like I’d only had a taste of it before, sharing it with Nisha in some way.
Loki struggles to keep me steady while I shriek and cry in his arms, and his hand suddenlyfinds the side of my face, brushing away the tears streaming over the edges. His grasp tightens a bit as I lock eyes with him, seeing a glimmer of relief brushing by his features in an instant.
“Yes—you’re fine, Cerys, you’re alright now,” he breathes out, a faint grin ghosting his lips. “I’ve got you, it’s alright…” he mutters again and again, holding and calming me until the pain finally begins to subside.
A little too quickly, at that… Like blood rushing from my face.
Loki’s features, the cell, everything in sight slowly begins to fade as everything dies down. Like an oncoming shut down of my faculties, relaxing slowly as my body settles. My vision starts to blacken after a moment, and I feel my head tip back, before everything goes dark.
***
I can’t tell if the screaming voices in the blackness are a dream. They start up and end again for some time—sometimes Pepper’s, sometimes Tony’s. Thor’s jumps in somewhere too, followed by Loki’s baritone voice.
My body relaxes back into whatever I’m laying on each time I rouse, pulling me back into sleep over and over again—until it doesn’t. Amidst the quietness of the brisk air ensconcing me, my eyes start to open slowly, allowing dim light to stream into them as they open.
Lamps. Lamps all around the room are turned on, with no exceptionally bright lights in sight. I shift slightly, hearing voice murmuring somewhere in the room. Orange and yellow wisps of cloud streak across the sky in front of me, and I furrow a brow at the sudden pounding in my head.
Slowly, I rise onto my elbow, hearing the voices cease as footsteps clamber in their place. Pepper and Thor suddenly appear around the couch, both darting over to me. “Cerys,” Pepper hisses concernedly as she drops to her knees in front of me, scanning the length of me—as though looking for some sign of… anything. “Are you okay? How are you feeling?”
“‘M…” I grumble, closing my eyes tightly as I look around the room—no one else to be seen. “‘M okay… What’s going on?” I ask, Loki’s face flashing in my memory—the last thing I’d seen before blacking out. Before being freed from Nisha’s grasp. “Where’s Loki?”
“He’s… with Tony, they’ll be back a little bit later,” Pepper stands slowly and sits on the couch beside me, going into full mama-bear mode—as she frequently does, in our circle. “What hurts? Tell me what hurts.”
“My head?” I murmur, looking out at the sky before her. “God, how long was I out? It’s morning already?” My voice trailed off.
Pepper and Thor exchange glances briefly before looking back at me. “Cerys,” Thor answers. “It’s evening time. You’ve slept for two days.”
My eyes widen, a small gesture of the strength returning to me slowly. “Wh—two days?” Panic spikes briefly, taking a bit of my energy with it as I consider everything I might’ve missed—people calling me, trying to get a hold of me… Work? Did I have work yesterday? Or plans? “W-where’s my phone?” I start looking around the couches.
“Hold on,” Pepper stands and teeters over to the coat thrown over the back of the couch. “Here.”
She hands it to me, and I immediately flip open the screen, furrowing a brow at the immense quantity of… nothing. I open up the message app to be sure, and find a few ‘read’ good morning texts from Michael—all unanswered—followed by a couple of worried ones. One specifically, asking why I’m not answering his calls…
I navigate to the call center next, seeing the evidence—three new calls. Two missed, and one answered. “Did you answer a call from Michael?” I asked her.
“No?” she said.
“Well someone answered his call last night—do you know who it was?”
“I… I don’t, I’m sorry.”
“Okay, I—I should probably call him, right?”
Pepper gives me a hard look. “Well, as long as you don’t tell him anything… And don’t take too long, we need to talk about what happened.”
What happened was that I was freed from Nisha. Loki did it somehow—which, yes, I wanted to know. “I won’t, I’m sorry, I’ll just be a second—I’ll tell him I fell and hit my head or something. I’ve just got to make sure he’s okay, or that he knows that I’m okay.”
Pepper nods. “Sure—come on,” she gestures to Thor, and they both stand and walk away. “Don’t take too long.”
I dial Michael’s number, listening to it ring for a few moments.
No answer.
Strange… Michael never misses my calls. He always has his phone and always answers, especially in the evenings, when there’s nothing going on. The second and third try are in vain as well, and I finally drop the phone down next to me.
“He’s not answering,” I say to Pepper over my shoulder.
“Cerys, last night may have, uh…” Thor answered reluctantly. “It may have been my brother. He was the one to, um…”
Silence seeps into the air between us. I raise my brows at him, “…to what?”
He glances at Pepper. “You want to take it from here?” She gives him a tiny nod before looking back at me.
“Cer,” Pepper sighs, turning slowly on one of the high chairs, gathering her hands in front of her as she stares at me. “How much do you remember about what happened?”
I glance around the room, recalling bits and pieces of a scattered image—a cell, Pepper and Loki’s visit, and then… Loki. He was in my cell, and he came alone. “I remember Loki, he came to the cell with something in his hand, and then there was pain, and… after that, nothing.” Pepper slides off the chair, and makes her way back around the couch. I go on as she saunters over to me, “Loki did something to get her out of me, I think…”
Peppers sighs, plopping down beside me as her voice softens, “There was…” she pauses. “This is hard to explain. We a difficult choice to make, Cer.”
“…what was it?”
Tension ripples through her jaw as she stares ahead at the ground. “The woman who possessed you was telekinetic that used touch to code herself into your DNA. Agents Romanoff and Barton came by with a… serum. It was supposed to change your genetic profile. Make your siren genes express themselves more.”
“Um…” Heat drains from my cheeks. “Uh huh…?”
“And it was the only way, it was the only thing we could do… We had to use it, otherwise she would’ve killed you at one point, or another.”
I stare at her for a moment, and then shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“We used the serum on you—Loki did, anyway. He changed your genetic profile.”
I pause, all my thoughts coming to a screeching halt. “But I—I don’t feel any different.”
“We don’t know what changed yet.” She turned toward me with a solemn look. “We just… know that it worked.”
Panic and fear hit me like a ton of bricks, and my breathing quickens as I grab the phone again in a daze. I stare at the screen for a moment, wondering what I was even planning to do, and instinctually dial Michael again—as if that could distract me.
Still no answer.
Probably for the best, for now…
Pepper went on, “And since we don’t know what it did, you should probably stay here for a while so we can watch over you.”
The thought of bunking with Loki in the same apartment flashes through my thoughts, just like it did the first time I was asked to do it, but I quickly shove it down—there are more important questions to be asked.
“What’s going to happen to me?” my voice trembles a bit, dripping with the panic boiling over in my chest. “W-what am I supposed to do? I have to tell people what happened to me, I have to tell my family something…” Excuses, that last bit—my family would hardly notice anything different about me. They don’t see me frequently enough for that. “Do I look different!?”
Pepper glances up at me. “Your eyes are a little bit lighter, but… Other than that, no.”
“Okay,” I breathe out. “Well at least there’s that, what do we do now?”
“I don’t know. I mean, if you’re talking about right now, I don’t know… Everything’s calm, no one’s in danger, so I’d just like something… normal.”
“Normal?” I say, feeling the word roll off my tongue.
She shrugs. “Cer, I barely slept last night, so… I just need a break.”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s—that’s fine,” Guilt twinges in my chest. “I’m sorry, Pep…”
“For what?”
I wave a hand as wetness tinges my eyes, frustration boiling over. “That I got involved with them…” I say, practically whispering. “That all of this happened. I feel like I’ve caused more problems than I helped solve.”
Her lip quirks upward reassuringly. “Problems, sure, but…” she pauses. “We also got a lot done, you know? Remember how many heists we got in on? This is just the world we live in, now… You still haven’t given me as many heart attacks as Tony has.”
I chuckle lightly. “Yeah, but I keep getting in trouble, and you keep losing sleep to bail me out of it…”
A moment of silence goes by as I wipe the tears from my cheeks. “Sure,” she murmurs with a grin, glancing at Thor over the couch. “But that’s what siblings do.”
My breath hitches with a quiet half-sob-half-chuckle at the thought of it—of Pepper being my chosen family. I look over to see Thor smiling as well, and he nods his head toward us. “Ever the responsible ones, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” she nods. “But it only goes so far, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
Pepper looks back at me. “There’s a lot to figure out here, and we’ve got time to do it, but just… let’s take a breather first, okay? We’ll figure out what the serum did to you, just not right now.”
I look over the bags under her eyes, knowing that she only gets them when she’s truly sleep deprived, and offer a subtle grin. “Yeah, no worries… I mean, I’m not dying, right?”
“No, you’re not.”
“Then that’s what matters right now—I’m not dying, and no one’s dying because of me.”
“Yeah,” she grins. “I agree.”
I sigh as a scintilla of ease trickles in, dissipating quickly when I glance back down at my phone.
Still no answer.