REQUIEM | Avengers

IX.

She was no longer human. Even as she moved her fingers, the muscles twitched and ached as if she had been clenching them for her entire life.

The ship was dark, but where the depth had been endless before, now she could see shapes and shadows and even the far wall of the large room. She could hear a high-pitched drone wailing in the background of her mind and the scraping metallic sounds of the ship's engine. Her heightened sense of smell filled her head with the sharpness of metal and stale air. 

She took a step. All her life, she had been trained to be in sync with her body- to memorize each muscle and bone that shaped her and moved her. And she knew with that first step that something was horribly wrong.

He had changed her. He had changed her at the cellular level- she didn't know how she knew but she could feel it somehow in those recesses of her mind that had trained to be more weapon than human. She could feel the very fibres of her muscles pulling and moving with such ease. She was stronger now, impossibly strong. The step was too easy, her breath came too deeply, her eyes could see too far and too much. Even her sense of smell was heightened; she could smell the sticky sweat that coated her skin like oil.

"What did you do?" she said into the darkness, to those shadows far away. He voice was barely an echo. There was a scrape against the metal floor. She felt the vibrations. Her teeth clenched at the feeling- the strength even a single vibration was felt in this new body of hers. Still her skin, her bones, but so terribly, horrifyingly new.

She stumbled forward- another new, sickly feeling. She wretched onto the floor again, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. Her head was spinning, her chest contracting. Everything was wrong, wrong, wrong.

"What did you do?" she asked again, louder this time. Her voice cracked with the strain, and she wondered, then, if she had been screaming in that pain-induced haze of memory.

"Nothing new," came that deep, immortal voice. Her bones quailed at the sound of Thanos' words from across the chamber, and for a split second she was thankful that at least her fear was still there- at least that barest human instinct still existed within her- to be afraid of this hulking titan.

"You've seen this before, you know what I've done," he continued. "If you're as good as I've seen, you'll figure it out."

He spoke as if he had seen her in some sort of vision- some sort of prophecy. She felt the click of the arc reactor in her chest quicken.

And he was right, she did know. She knew exactly what he had done to her, now that she thought about it- about what Steve had told her. She thought about that day she had offered him a glass of wine, and he had told her the effects of alcohol were void on a super soldier. She told him he should drink it for the taste, anyways. He had smiled and sipped, and she had done the same.

He had told her, that night at the compound, about what it had felt like to have his skin stretched and his bones lengthened. He had told her, as the sun had set and as she started a fire in the small hearth that sat in the middle of the small living room, what it had felt like to endure the cellular chance of his body- that some nights in the months after the procedure, he had woken up in a cold sweat to the feeling of his fingers elongating against the metal of the machine he had been locked in.

He had been on pain-killers, she thought, as she rolled out her shoulders and a bought of nausea threatened to keel her over once more.

"Why," she croaked, the bile still burning her throat. "Why do this? Why me?"

"So many questions, shadow girl," he said, in a voice that might have been fatherly in another life, another world.

"I'd have less if you actually answered some," she gritted out, willing herself to stand up straight and lift her chin up to look at where he finally appeared in the single light of the ship's chamber.