Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver Imagines

Waiting Around

When they tell Pietro he has to go to the labs, his first thought is to run.

He knows it's silly. These are not the same doctors who made the Maximoff twins strong and fast and utterly alone in this world, these are the scientists with the Avengers. They're the good guys. Apparently. But Pietro has learned fairly quickly that people calling themselves good aren't always good in the end.

Pietro has a lot of learning to do since he and Wanda escaped Ultron a few months back. He's doing his best to be patient and take things 'one step at a time,' as the Americans keep telling him. Mainly, he would like their steps to be faster. Pietro has things to do, and they don't usually involve waiting in line for someone else to decide if he's worthy of their loyalty or not. The Avengers are trying, he knows that. It's just hard sometimes.

Especially when Pietro is still trying to shake off the feeling that he should have died back in Sokovia. He came away with his share of narrow escapes, but there was one moment towards the end, when the ships were firing at him, when Clint needed his help, that Pietro thought would be his last. Luckily, he was faster than a few bullets, but there's still this nagging voice in the back of Pietro's subconscious that whispers to him late at night: what if you hadn't been fast enough?

So he's been uneasy as of late. What about it? Stress is common in inhumans and Avengers, one glance around this coffee-dependent complex could tell him that. Still, it's a good thing to get checked out. That's part of the reason Pietro is being directed to the labs, along with a need for a good annual physical.

It sounds good, too, were it not for the fact that Pietro has had plenty of experience with laboratories in the past few years and none of it was good. The Hydra labs made him strong, in a sense, but they were torturous. He can still remember the pile of corpses ushered out every day, the experiments that failed. He remembers curling up in a corner of his cell, begging his body not to give out, not to make him another body in a bag. He lived, but he remembers.

This is not Hydra. Pietro knows that. He left them behind. Still, there will always be some part of him that shrinks away from every syringe, that distrusts every doctor who comes poking and prodding at the bizarre novelty that is an inhuman. That will never go away, no matter who's side he's on.

Still, the lab remains. He has to go in, the others will know if he doesn't. At first, Pietro hesitates just outside the door, afraid to knock, afraid to listen. There was always a chill in the air throughout the Hydra complex, he remembers the gooseflesh forever on his skin. Signs that nothing good happened within the walls. Or maybe it was just because of the stone buildings in cold climates. Everything has an explanation.

He can't back out now. Pietro grits his teeth and swings the door open in one broad movement. For a moment, he stands there, waiting to walk back into his old cell, his old life, and then he looks around and realizes with a grin that he's going to be fine. This isn't a Hydra ploy to get him back under their thumb. For one thing, Hydra never used this much pink. Just barren walls and gloomy, monstrous skull logos. In retrospect, that should have been a bad sign. Pietro has a problem with ignoring details, though, and it tends to get him in trouble.

These details, however, are quite difficult to be ignored. Everywhere Pietro looks, he sees pinpricks of pink– the handle of a pipette, labels on equipment, notebooks full of scrawled data points, hair ties in a carefully organized container. No, Hydra never had this much fun, and Pietro is starting to think that this is going to be very fun indeed.

Smirking to himself, Pietro weaves further through the lab. He sees a few assistants scurrying around in the back, but they pay him no mind so he does the same. Pietro almost reaches the end of the room when a sudden voice calls out to him: "Don't take another step."