Burn

Chapter two: Shrive

About a year ago, coming home from a friend's house, Addie lost her memory. The last memory she had was the long ribbon of dark road glistening ahead of her, stretching on and on and on. She remembered a song, delicate and sweet, playing in the car. A light rain was washing against her windows, yet she was driving with the window half way down because the air smelled like summer.

It was mid-spring. Two weeks before final exams.

There was nothing to fill the gap from that moment, driving peacefully at night, to the moment she awoke in her room. She had no memory of the accident, that her parents said almost took her life. Even her body held no physical reminder of the crash. She was told a drunk driver nipped her car and she had suffered multiple concussions, hence her week spent in an induced coma.

But she knew there was something wrong with herself the moment she woke up to her daisy white room with the heart monitor beeping. She remembered, in those first instances of wakefulness, the feel of something sharp and painful buzzing in her veins. A cold feeling, as if she had spent a decade in ice, overwhelmed her. The heart monitor went crazy, her heart beating so fast it was inhumanely possible.

When the first days passed, the painful sensation and the cold receded, but not the feeling of being out of place. She wasn't the same. Her parents avoided her like she was the plague. Three months was missing from memory. Her mother spent hours talking lowly on the phone to whom Addie assumed must have been the doctor. Her father recoiled from her touch and even installed a lock on his bedroom door.

Once she had dropped completely out of school and had been somewhat encouraged by her parents to move out, she rarely saw them. They moved somewhere up north and bought a house she only saw once in the past year with money she didn't know they had. A bad feeling was coiling in her stomach ever since. Something was terribly wrong.

That's when the electricity came. It came in one white hot shock that blasted through her chest and destroyed the wall in her room, leaving a big hole to gape into the bathroom. It was as if someone reached a burning fist into her chest and ripped open her rib cage. Her limbs went numb and everything slowed, her veins feeling as if they were boiling. Her muscles coiled under her skin, prickling and sizzling under the flesh. Her ears became filled with sounds she never knew she could hear. Her eyes saw things impossible for the human eye. She was sure she was going crazy.

After the first initial shock, her body became used to the sizzling. Her fingers would burn every time her control slipped, and when she'd wake up the next morning, the skin had healed completely.

Her fear became the essence of her life. She was terrorized of her own self; she always kept an emergency sleep pill in case she slipped, or she wore gloves most of the time, and even refused to touch anybody for a long time. Until she decided she would control it, nevertheless use it.

What at first was terrible sessions soon turned regular and harmless. She was scared to look at it at first; she was a freak of nature that could do serious harm. Yet once she came to hold a tiny ball of condensed electrical impulses in her palm, she came to like it. And once she came to understand that what she referred to as the whispers and the sights were actually the electricity talking to her, she came to smile and enjoy it.

However, she needed to hide it. Whatever or whoever created her would come looking for her one day; maybe that was why her parents fled. She always wondered if they knew beforehand of her newfound abilities.

So when Steve and James, Captain America and The Winter Soldier, stepped into her bar, she was trembling in her boots. She thought they would take her away from the only normal life she could have, the only salvation from her horrible transformation. Surely they figured her out like they had with the Maximoff twins. Like they had with every other enhanced being on their Avengers team. Surely SHIELD had found her.