Tili Tili Bom (An Avengers fanfic)

Chapter twenty-one

I...

I...

I can't... What?

I can't move. I'm... Falling. My brain feels hollow, and every word is echoing.

I hurt.

I can't move. God, why can't I move? Thought is becoming easier, accelerating, snapping back into focus. I should be dead. Why am I not dead?

It's not dark, but I can't see anything. I... I need to find someone. Something tugs at my memory. A yellow butterfly gleams on the delicate flower and I hold my breath. It's too beautiful a moment to move, but the spell is broken as is wings flutter, leaving the too-empty flower, and I look up. "Ptitsa!" Somebody behind me says sweetly. I turn around to see her.

I screech in pain as the memory ends. Remembering hurts me- I can feel a sharp ache spiraling down my back- but I have to know. Something else pulls at me. I grab the spoon off the counter, bringing it out of the kitchen. Someone calls from upstairs. "Ptitsa!" I'm at her side at an instant. "Oh, Malvina, I have told you not to play in the rain," I reprimand her. Her warm blue eyes are ringed with red. "I'm sorry," she tells me, before coughing. I kiss her forehead, brushing her blonde bangs out of her eyes. "I brought you some food. Please eat," I tell her. I don't want her to know I am worried. Her soul is unlatching. She must get better.

The pain explodes behind my eyes, but this time, I push through it. That girl on the bed... She looked like me. She called me ptitsa- bird. How did I know she was so ill? I let myself get swept away again.  "Look at the birds! Like you!" Malvina giggles. Her head brushes my chin as I braid her hair. She points to a small brown bird with a reddish throat. I laugh with her. "I am much better than a thrush," I say. She bats the top of her head against my chin. "I know."

She is older in this memory, but I can hardly focus on that through the sudden pain in my shoulder blades. It's a relief to lose myself in another memory. Shadows dance across a wooden wall as someone behind me giggles. Is this the thing humans speak of? Is this... Love? Love should not be a hook in your chest that makes you remember she will die and you will not. She makes another shadow puppet. "Ptitsa, do you see?" I've forgotten that my sweet girl is still a child. I'm back in myself for a moment, but it's like a dam has broken. Memory after memory pours into my mind.

Malvina makes a flower crown and drapes it over a rock. "It's for mum," she tells me. She's already placed a necklace made of leather and small bones over the other rock, for her father. She should have died too.

I leave the cottage in the middle of the night, soaring over the town until I find the man I'm looking for. He is between breaths when I take his soul. Someone will miss him. I go home before Malvina wakes up. Someone is playing a flute- it comes out as the most beautiful lilac I have ever seen.

Flying, air rustling through my feathers, trying to forget the reason I am in the sky. I hear sobbing from below. I land. I'm not sorry.

His name is Howard Stark, and I take his soul as a man crunches on broken glass. I pity him. I let my fingers brush against him as I leave, and I see a moment of peace in his eyes before fear wipes it away.

Emptiness and noise and a world coming into being and so so much fear- I know they will all come back to this some day.

Soldiers storm our little cottage- I kiss Malvinas forehead one final time before I send her away. She runs from the back door, sprightly as a deer, disappearing into the woods. They will not take her. They will not take my little one. My features shift until I look like she did. They cannot know what they have. I allow soldiers to place me in their car. "We've got her," one says into his speaker. "The guardian will come soon enough." I do not laugh. Fools, I want to say. You have me.

I come back into myself, wave after wave of agony coursing through me. I feel it surge into sinew and feather, into wings like a crows. It clouds over and sharpens my vision, turning the iris and whites of my eyes an inky black. My teeth are jostled, and grind against each other as they turn into those of a wolf. It is a fierce kind of hurt. I let it come. I have known pain. Pain is Malvina disappearing, pain is forgetting her, pain is taking soul after soul without being able to control it. I roar as this goes through me. Tears gather in my eyes- I know that they will be red as blood. I embrace it, let those mortal trappings fall away. Somewhere, part of me shrivels and dies- the Queen, indeed, is gone. But I am the Rook, the Devils Bird. I am the monster that children hear in between notes. I am a monster, and I laugh as I embrace it. I have stopped falling. I am flying upwards in a dizzying spiral. I am power, and the end, and I will not be contained.

A little thing like death is not enough to stop me now.