In Your Eyes // Steve Rogers

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For the final time, I fell. I seemed to be falling through a type of pipe-shaped time structure. On the curved outer edge, streaks of blue and distant sparks of green flew past me. Chatter reached my ears, but whomever spoke did it fast, too fast for my ears to decipher anything. I noticed flashes of people past the outer edges. I was unable to decode any of it. I moved too fast through the pipe.

I extended my arms past the wall of the tunnel. My hands were instantly stopped in their place. I came to an abrupt stop. My body slammed against the wall. I steadied my feet against the wall. Besides my hands, no other parts of my body were allowed to slide into the wall.

The fast chatter slowed. I squinted through the streaks along the wall, peering into the darkness, where the flashes of images became clear. Some were memories from my own head. Others were events I had never seen, simply because I wasn't there. Where I came to a stop, I watched Tony Stark sit across from a young man.

"...yeah, I would love to play football, but I couldn't then, so I shouldn't now," the young man was saying.

"Sure, because you're different," said Tony.

"Exactly. But I can't tell anyone that, so I'm not," said the boy. He shook his head, a touch of shame in his fingers. "Look, when you can do the things that I can, but you don't... And then the bad things happen... They happen because of you."

"Spider-Ling?" I breathed.

He and Tony didn't hear, nor react to my words. Tony continued to speak, though I wasn't able to hear, because the scene had been muted and began to blur.

My hands started to regain movement. I yanked against the force keeping my hands in place. I pulled too hard, which caused my feet to slip from the wall. I fell with my back towards what I prayed would be the end of the continuous tunnel.

"Take me to the Raft!" I begged.

I chanted where I wanted to go inside of my head, considering the gem was in my head, too. I put all of my strength into rotating my body. By the time I succeeded in shifting to fall face-first, the previous black dot at the 'end' of the tunnel had enlarged significantly. I didn't slow, but the fast chatter came to an end.

Clear as day, a voice said, "Steve, she's not here. We don't know where she is. We have to go."

"Barton!" I screamed. "Clint, where are you?!"!"

"I can't explain how, but I know that she's coming back, Clint. I can't leave her behind," he said softly. To the others, he said, "If you want to go, by all means. I'm not leaving until she gets back."

I came to another sudden stop in the air, caught between the blue tunnel and the black square underneath me. I reached through it. I felt a cool breeze on my hand. I grabbed the edges of the square and slid my body through.

The second my body left the odd surroundings of time, I was exposed to Earth's gravity, and I fell from the ceiling of my old cell. I hit the concrete roughly.

"Well," said Clint. "Look who decided to show up."

Sam rushed through the open door of the jail cell. He pushed my outstretched hand out of the way and wrapped his arms around my waist, lifting me from the floor and into his chest. His arms leaving my body caused my balance to falter, not yet adjusted to the gravity. He hovered his hand on my back.

Gravity wasn't the only difference in my body. I had trouble keeping my body straight. My feet felt as though they were boulders. My shoulders hunched significantly, a gnawing in the deep of my chest causing it.

Speaking without classifying it as a croak was a dream far from reach. A gnawing deep in my chest caused my back to hunch. My hands were curled into fists against my chest. I looked sickly. I felt sick. An aching, caused by a mysterious gem, was generating a pain that couldn't be removed. Unless, as it said, I took the gem as my own.