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The room was dark– not even a ray of light piercing through the sterile walls, the cold cement and rough bricks whispered the stories of the screams that were silenced there, of the souls that were tormented there. Strip bare of their everything– freedom, choice, soul, dignity and life in some cases.
Laying in the middle of that ice like floor was the shivering form of a young girl, her body curled up in a corner. Her clothes were disheveled, battered, and torn– mere threads keeping that fabric up– just as she was hanging from mere threads to her life, her morals close to snapping one or another. Her face was stained with tear stains and blood marks, bruises lingering on her jaw.
Her mind though, was more of a mess than her clothes, a swirl of emotions ranging from fear, and helplessness to defeat. To every emotion she had never thought she would experience– hadn't thought when she was still away, still safe in the warm embrace of the woman whose body had now gone cold.
"Please," she whispered, her voice a broken prayer– broken due to the realization that there truly was no one, who could help her... who would help her, "please, someone, anyone, help,"
Her innocent soul was being tormented in the worst ways there– had been tormented for the past three years, the pieces of her remaining self, chipping away like dust. Till the only one she can see, the only one she can feel was just a shadow of her former self.
Then again maybe she had become a shadow from the second she was born.
Her pleas and prayers were all unanswered– and not just then, at that moment where she had begged and pleaded, but for the years to come too. When she would be no more aware of the events transpired than anyone else outside that place. No one ever heard them– her please, nor mortals, nor gods.
Nor the monsters outside.
She was left there to be used there, which they did again and again in more ways than one.
While she let them do that.
Until there was not even the shell left of her former self. Just a completely new person– barely hanging by a thread to the person she doesn't even remember.
21 years later.
SHIELD Headquarters, New York.
Director Nick Fury stood at the head of the conference room, his eye patch a stark contrast against the sterile white walls that were illuminated by the fluorescent white and pale blue lights giving the otherwise normal room, a more refined and advanced look.
The Avengers sat around the oval table, their expressions a mix of curiosity and wariness. Meetings with Fury usually don't bring good news for them– they are always about how there is a new existential crisis for the world, to destroy the old bases or if they are unlucky that day– about how their missions had raised questions in the authorities.
