Clarke snapped her eyes open. She was lying on a ratty little bed in an apartment in the suburbs of LA. She'd just witnessed the death of a young girl. She hadn't even known her. She couldn't help thinking about if she had a family.
Maybe it was her fault?
Her fingers nonchalantly toyed with the switchblade in her pocket. Its cold metal blade felt breathtakingly pure in this world of confusion. The night that she'd first felt its clean touch was the night that she became anything but clean. Flames had licked up her body, and scorched their image into her eyes forever. The image of her own burning flesh was accompanied by memories of chilling screams all around her.
These thoughts preyed on her brain in her moments alone, like vicious parasites.
Air flowed around and into her eardrums. There was someone else in the building.
She gripped her blade by the hilt, and silently inched off her back. Her feet rooted themselves to the wooden floor. Her breath held itself in anticipation.
The tiny particles drifting around her stank of gunmetal and lead. Her hand squeezed the serrated metal. A single bullet cascaded through the left wall of her apartment, and splinters and chunks of wood flew around Clarke's hair.
She inhaled and closed her eyes.
Speeding molecules pounded on her eyelids, and she felt splinters and wooden debris pierce her burnt skin as she ran straight through the wooden wall of her house. She jumped through clouds of swirling atoms, and landed a kick into the face of one of her assailants.
Clarke landed with a bleeding face and stomach, and with several guns pointed at her. Laser pointers danced among the blood on her face. She gritted her teeth, lacking the energy to run, and preparing for death. She held her hands out to protect her face on raw instinct.
Nothing happened. No bullet. No death.
As her eyes inched open slowly, she saw the gunmen's eyes widened in pure terror, and their throats pulsing grotesquely. Their faces slowly went a shade of scarlet, and their eyes rolled up through their skulls.
She looked down at her hands in pure amazement.
A smile graced her lips, and she wiped cold sweat from her brow. The smile was replaced with a gasp as an injection needle penetrated her neck.
The last thing that Clarke Maximoff saw before she passed out was a man dressed in a black motorcycle helmet standing over her as she hit the floor.
