Cornelia Street - Avengers

Favorite Toys

"Cause you should've seen him when he first saw me. And I'll tell you that he runs because he loves me. There was danger in the heat of my touch, he saw forever so he smashed it up."

Avengers Tower, 2017

(My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys, Taylor Swift)

...

Her mind failed to recall a time when she did not fear sleep. A time when darkness was a gentle curtain, signalling rest and reprieve. Now, sleep had become her tormentor, a relentless phantom that she could not escape. 

Lucia could not sleep in her own bed alone anymore. The thought of lying there, vulnerable and exposed, paralysed her in her entirety.

Every time she would find her brain slowly crawling and inching closer and closer to slumber, something violent appeared in her mind, jolting her awake, leaving her breathless and heaving, tangled in sheets once more. Inexplicable figures, shadows, memories taunting her, always lurking.

They were not just dreams; they were spectres of her deepest fears, invading the sanctity of her mind. Beth may have removed the pain and destruction at the hands of the youngest Maximoff, but the pain was still there. And something else remained, tainting her mind in its entirety.

Things lunged towards her being, cackling with malevolent intent each time she lurched backward. Their laughter was a cruel symphony, echoing in the hollow chambers where peace should have been.

Her hands shook with the mere force wanting to be released from them, and she clutched at her chest, trying to hold the pieces together, but they slipped through her fingers like sand. The room spun a kaleidoscope of despair and dread, trapping her in a cycle of waking nightmares.

Every night was a battlefield, her bed a war zone where she fought not just for peace, but for the solace of sleep. Although her unnamed enemy was relentless and the mere of closing her eyes filled her with dread, for she knew that sleep would not come gently. 

It would drag her into the depths of her darkest fears, and leave her there, gasping for breath, praying for the dawn.

She had been tossing and turning all night, her skin was damp with sweat and mind set ablaze. Memories of gunshots and the smell of gunpowder and chloroform pressed hard up against her nose.

A man's voice she did not recall, telling her to trust him. But she didn't. She tried to claw her way back to these fractured moments of faces and a place she remembered as home erupting in flames, the burning of lungs as she sprinted down cobblestone streets. Streets she had never been to. But then that searing pain returned, leaving her debilitated and broken, when she tried to see his face. The face of her oppressor.

The feeling of claustrophobia, submerged, someone holding her down and her body turning to ice, then to fire. Then she was pulled back up once more. Repeat. She'd been the prey, the predator, and yet the presence of power made her far more fearful more than the absence of it.

Lucia jolted awake once more, this time with such force that she was practically thrown halfway across her bed. She screamed as she woke, a wretched sound ripping itself from her throat beside a sob that rattled deep in her hollow chest.

Hunched over, onto her knees at the edge of her bed, she cradled her face in her hands. She choked back a sob as she felt something touch her back. But whipping around in the darkness her flailing arms never touched anything. She ripped herself from the cold expanse of her bed, throwing herself to the floor with a strangled cry, and the tug of the carpet burned against her calves and thighs, a grounding reminder of where she was.