REQUIEM | Avengers

VII.

- VII -

She was not used to being surprised. It was so rare, that as a cold hand grabbed her arm from behind, a sharp jolt of that foreign fear jumped through her chest.

Too cold, those hands. Too cold, too strong, too silent and unyielding. She whirled around, every instinct in her body rearing to life in the split second it took for her to take in a breath.

She twisted and shoved her shoulder in to the chest of her attacker in a move that had sent full grown men falling on their asses, but instead she was met with a bolt of pain that shot all the way to her fingers and the clang of skin on metal. She looked up, eyes wide, at the depthless eyes of the person who had grabbed her.

No, not a person. The thing that had grabbed her was not a person at all, but some sort of robot- half woman, half machine. Her skin, if that was what it could be called, was a bright blue, stitched together with pieces of shining silver metal. Her lithe body was equally as inhuman, toned and hard as she stood before Nina with that preternatural stillness. Her eyes were the only human thing about her, deep and black and endless in the rage that echoed through Nina's chest as she stared.

Her arm ached from where the robot held her, throbbing as she felt the warm blood pool from where the skin had ripped as she had tried to evade the blue figure. But she tried again, this time using her free had to grab the robot's neck and swing herself around, sending them both to the ground.

Their bodies echoed on the metal ground, and there was the whir of hollow clicks and machinery behind the rasp of Nina's breath.

She swung her body around, trapping the cool, metal figure between her legs and bringing her forearm down hard against their neck, blocking the airway. The robot just smiled. Half-human, half-machine. No, there was more metal than there was humanity behind that wicked black stare, and it was too late before Nina realized the blue woman didn't breathe- that her hold on her meant nothing- when she was tossed into the air by arms that shouldn't have been so strong.

As she flew through the air, she tucked in her head and leaned into the force, pushing her shoulder down as she hit the ground and rolled back to her feet.

"Who the hell are you?" she seethed, her chest heaving and her head pounding. It had been pounding since she stepped aboard this damned ship. The constant rumbling, the altitude, the fear. She swallowed back a breath, lifting her chin. No fear, no hesitation. No hesitation.

"I am a child of Thanos."

She scoffed. It seemed the Titan had a penchant for collection ferocious offspring.

She reached around the cyborg's neck as they both fumbled for grip on the cold metal floor. She felt for wires but there were none exposed. Fine, she thought to herself, that foreign smirk that she had worn for so many years returning to her lips. Maybe she had missed this.

She ducked down, tucking in her head as she used her body weight to feign right as the cyborg lunged for her. But she spun back to face her, kicking out her leg, making contact with the centre of the cyborg's back. She ran forwards, to meet the half-woman before she hit the floor- to grab at her neck and find those wires, to pull them and be done with it. To smile up at Thanos, wherever he had faded into the darkness.

But before she could take that last step, there was a hand around her neck, yanking her backwards with enough force that she bit down on her tongue and couldn't help the yelp that escaped her. The air was pushed from her lungs as something hard collided with her gut, but she couldn't keep over- the hand was too tight, strangling her and forcing dots to cloud her vision. She tried every maneuver she knew to escape, but the grasp was too strong. Inhuman, that's what it was. Impossible and inhumanly strong.