Something about your mother's death never sat right with you. It wasn't like she was in some accident or had become terminally ill where the doctors could explain what happened or what was happening to her.
There were warning signs.
She stopped eating, she was fidgety, she barely spoke in her last few weeks, and it killed you to see her like that. You thought maybe she had become depressed or something, but she refused to see anyone about it and your dad acted like nothing was wrong. You thought he was doing that for your benefit, so you wouldn't worry, but looking back, you knew he was in a deep denial and he just plainly refused to admit something was wrong.
She would disappear for hours sometimes and then it became days. When she was around, she would constantly zone out or start walking around like she was sleeping walking and you'd always follow her to make sure she didn't accidentally hurt herself. It really freaked you out when you saw her open her mouth or move it like she was speaking, but no words or sounds came out. You'd shake her when it got really bad and in less than a minute, she was your mom again and she'd apologize for worrying you, but she'd never explain what happened.
You can't pinpoint the exact moment you lost your mom forever.
It wasn't the day some man in a suit came to the door to tell you your mom had passed away, and it wasn't the first time she was mumbling incoherently while sitting on the couch with her hands folded, staring blankly out the window. It was long before that and it broke your heart into a million pieces every time you sat next to her, taking her hand in yours, and just told her endlessly that you loved her and that you wanted so desperately to help her.
It took about a year for your mom to slowly deteriorate with whatever was happening to her and that was the longest year of your life. You cried yourself to sleep those nights, knowing something was wrong, knowing you couldn't stop it, and wanting more than anything for the thing that was hurting your mom to hurt you instead.
Deep down, you knew this wasn't some unidentifiable disease or virus attacking your mom from the inside out, you knew it was something in the apartment walls. It was something you could hear whispering in her ear at night and following her like a shadow during the day, haunting her constantly. It was dark and it was something that crawled out of the deepest pits of hell to take on a host or just to hurt whoever it could touch.
When it got so bad near the end, you peeked into the future, wondering if you ever find a way out of this for her, but that only brought you darkness, death, and endless pain. You were in bed for days after that, with grief and exhaustion sinking you into the mattress, pressing on your chest with a weight of a thousand pounds.
It plagued your father to this day, but he refused to sell the apartment or leave because it was his only connection to her. Through your countless arguments with the old man, he would let it slip that he could still hear her voice and that made your blood run cold.
Because you knew it wasn't in the way many people who lose someone can still hear their loved one's voices or footsteps or laugh, it was something else.
Something much more sinister and dangerous.
You considered burning the entire place down one day when you knew he wasn't home, but he wasn't the only one who lived in the building and it could become dangerous really fast, even with an evacuation first. Instead, you broke in one day and started taking apart the walls, digging for something, you didn't know what, but he never mentioned it and the next time you came by, they were back like you hadn't touched them.
So, you kept your distance for your own sanity and safety.
It had been a while since you took care of yourself at that point and this was a big step. No matter how much you had pleaded and begged your dad to leave or just live with you in the townhouse, he refused. It was like he was glued to the floorboards of that place and it used to have you sobbing into a pillow, you felt so helpless, but you eventually accepted it. He was his own man who could do whatever he wanted with his life and that included letting it waste away.
It was a hard thing to accept, but you tried.
You had to, to keep going.
This wasn't something you had ever heard of in your entire life. This was a different type of evil that can't be found in the big three – alien, wizards, and androids – that the avengers were getting used to fighting. This wasn't something from another world that had preyed on your helpless family and somehow stumbled onto the one where the daughter happened to have a couple of special gifts that made her different.
This was an evil that you see in horror movies or you hear old stories about in a religious setting. Something so dark and sinister that you shudder to think is real, but when faced with it, you have no choice but to accept it as so.
You didn't realize it at the moment, but it was sourced from your powers.
It thrived off you using them and grew stronger whenever you halted time, messing with the universe, even a little, but when you turned the world upside with stopping the avengers' civil war?
You woke a beast that crawled from the darkest parts of your soul and started planting seeds in the eyes of the innocents.
It saw what you saw, it heard all the words that flew into your ears, and it learned things as you did them.
It got so powerful, so full of knowledge, that it realized it needed to drain you of your power as much as it could and to be able to mask itself with a body.
And unfortunately for you, it was succeeding.
