Cornelia Street - Avengers

Teen Spirit

"The art of disappearing completely and never being found."

Siberia, 2013

(Nightmares, Henry Jackman)

...

By the fall of her twelfth birthday, Alyona felt trapped. Caught in between the clutches of childhood and the nearing promise of teenhood, she felt as if she was growing and maturing whilst everyone still viewed her as a child. 

Bending down to speak with her, pushing her around and speaking in condescending tones, it was like what they were expecting of her was well beyond her years, and yet they still viewed her as someone in the clutches of youth.

She had more responsibilities and harsher training, and this was because she was trusted more, she was viewed as more of an asset. But there was something else she was feeling too.

Power. Unyielding power.

With every passing year, she was pushed to her limits, physically and intellectually, training for hours upon hours a day. Punching. Kicking. Shooting. Blocking. She would learn about what it took to destroy an empire, to tear it down undetected, and about how to fortify her mind.

She would learn more languages, how to stitch and fix wounds, how to hot wire all vehicles, and hold her breath underwater. She was dunked into freezing water tanks for minutes upon minutes until she learned how to control her heart rate. 

Occasionally she would be dropped in the middle of the mountains, deep during a Siberian winter. She would have to survive for a week before being forced to make her way home without any supplies.

Forced to break the ice out on frozen lakes in the Siberian mountains, taught to figure out how to grab hold of something to claw her way back from the point of breakage. She needed to know how to survive in every situation, she needed to be unbreakable.

She isolated herself often, drawing herself away from any potential personal attachments to people. She adored her Mama, to the extent that she knew she could, and respected her Papa. Growing up she never truly understood the concept of time, of longing for something or someone. But now she did. More than anything.

In her youth she would spend her days curled up on her bedroom floor with a Sokovian History textbook in her lap, left alone to flick through the pages curiously. Graphic drawings and mystic folklore etched upon every page, stories of Sokovian witches deep within the countryside, powers of amber and gold.

A power to make one run at the speed of light, to make one warp physical matter around them, to tear down buildings at the flick of their hands. Sokovian stories fascinated her, whilst all other languages started to bore her.

 But the magic of Sokovia, never bored her. Not at all. She wanted to learn more than words and weapons, she wanted to know the stories from the true people, from the sources themselves, from the people who lived with their feet on the earth from the beginning of time.

Her Mama had managed to slip her a couple of science and radiation textbooks, even ones about mechanical inventions or thermonuclear radiation. Vivid images and coloured depictions awoke a spark deep within her, as she would scan through the pages.

The girl with hair the brightest thing in all of Siberia, would often ask her Mama why she was only allowed to learn particular things about particular subjects. But her response was always the same.

"The world fears not just beauty or intelligence alone. It's the combination that makes you truly dangerous. Embrace it. It is your most potent weapon."