afterglow - tony stark

27

          When she woke up, she had no idea where she was but everything looked sterile and cold. (She would later come to learn that she was in Siberia). Her captor wasn't even the same as there was only an authoritarian man with a Russian accent as she laid on a metal table with bindings on her wrists and her ankles. She didn't see anyone with a metal arm.

         Her mind was still drowsy from whatever drug they gave her. Her eyesight was blurry as the man seemed to introduce himself. Valonkov. He was explaining something as he held a little device with only two buttons.

          "You will comply or pain," he explained coldly.

            Suddenly, her neck erupted in pain as he pushed the button. It felt like electric shocks that started in her lower neck and spread out so she felt it everywhere. She started to scream before he let go of the button and one of her hands kept twitching from the shock.

           "If you escape, you die," his finger hovered over the top button. "This will work no matter how far you go so don't get any ideas. Perhaps, I will give you pain first but death will find you. Do you understand?"

            She didn't say anything as she started to cry before he hit that pain button and her body spasmed with shocks. She screamed before the pain stopped.

         "Yes," she cried. "I understand. I understand. Just stop."

          Valonkov nodded to his guards that stood in the room. They moved forward and undid her bindings before carrying her by her arms through the facility.

       Her feet dragged on the ground and her legs felt like mush from the uncontrollable muscle contractions the electric shocks caused. They threw her into a room that was all concrete and she laid on the floor in pain as they shut the door and left her in complete darkness.

           She clutched the gold necklace that was still around her neck. The marigold necklace. She could feel the engraving on the back even in the dark.

          Truly, Madly, Deeply. It was her favorite song at the time and yet that was how Tony felt about her. She started to cry as she thought about him. She promised herself she would get out to see him but for right now there were no lovely songs in her head, only pain.

           ____

           It was three weeks later before she saw the light again. They hardly gave her any food or water and she felt so weak. It was even harder when while in her cell, she was given pain just to remind her not to get any ideas.

             She figured out that they had placed something in her neck; some kind of microchip device. She could feel the scar of the incision on her neck.

            She tried to pick at it with her fingernails but they must have had cameras of some sort because as soon as she did, she was given pain again. She would spasm on the floor and eventually she learned not to do that.

        She wondered while she laid in the dark for weeks if Tony was close to finding her; if he even could. It gave her such pain in her heart to think that maybe he never would.

            While she laid in the dark, she only had her thoughts to keep her company or so she thought. As she laid there, her eyes adjusted to it and the small crack of light underneath the door. That was when she found the caterpillar crawling on the floor next to her.

              She formed a weak smile, "Hi, friend."

           She put her finger in front of it and let it crawl up her hand. She petted it with her other hand as she asked, "Are you lonely, too?"

            "So am I," she replied to the caterpillar even though the insect didn't say anything. She wondered how low she had gone to talk to a bug but her little fuzzy bug was the only thing she had.

             _____

            Eventually, once they thought she was weak and complacent enough, they brought her out of the cell. She had to squint her eyes from the lights until they got into the same room again.

               She was placed on the metal table and bound. There was a different person in a white lab coat. He grabbed a needle and she squirmed before she felt the pain. She let out a cry and when it stopped, so did she. She was too weak to do anything; they made sure of that.

            The doctor took her blood; he took multiple vials of it. That made her even more weak as her eyesight blurred. She wondered what they wanted her blood for but then it made sense; they wanted to recreate her.

         She finally understood why Tony and Nat never wanted her to use her powers in public. Why they wanted her to be so cautious. Power attracted the greed of the world.

       When the doctor was done taking her blood, they dragged her back to her cell. But as they did so, this time she paid attention now that she wasn't blinded by the lights of the facility.

         She could see multiple people in frozen chambers. She could even see one had a metal arm and her eyes widened. Her kidnapper. But his face stood out now that he wasn't wearing a mask.

          She couldn't place it at first but as she laid in her cell, it came to her. She remembered going to the museum in Washington; Tony complained because he had no interest in Captain America (something about his dad always talking about him) but she thought it was interesting.

          Now she remembered the man, the best friend, that supposedly died. James Buchanan Barnes. With the revelation, the man became her spark of hope.

            The others in the this place truly believed in HYDRA but this man had a life before the Hell he was placed in. Perhaps, she could get him to remember and he could be her ticket out of here.

              Eira shut her eyes as she focused and she hoped this would work. She thought about the chamber he was in and she thought about heating it up.

        She could picture it clearly as she thought of the ice melting and the tubes connected to the chamber sparked into flames before turning to ash. She didn't know if it had worked until she heard an alarm throughout the whole facility. She smiled in the dark.

AN: okay so Eira is kind of going through hell right now and we are not done but I'm kind of setting up Bucky as her best friend