✓ | parted [ ➁ ]

[ chapter three ]

"Victory at the expense of the innocent is no victory at all."

The voice of the Wakandan king, T'Chaka, continued in the background. Andi rarely watched the news but she had to know what she'd actually done, and after turning on the TV, she learned that many were killed, while many more were injured. And the only reason king T'Chaka was on the news talking about this was because eleven of those that perished were Wakandan people, who came to Lagos for an outreach mission. That made Andi feel even worse.

She sat on the edge of her bed, legs crossed. She wasn't looking at the TV because she didn't want to see footage of the destruction but she could still hear the voice of the news anchor going on.

Briefly, she looked up from her hands in her lap, to stare at the wall ahead. More specifically, the painting that hung on the wall straight ahead. In the past year, since Andi officially began to live at the Avengers new base, she had been given a room to call her own, where she could do anything she pleased. Andi had since redecorated because Tony's style was a little too clean for her tastes.

She had redone the walls, painting them a deep green shade, her favourite colour. One part of the left wall, closest to the window, had a metal net that stood tall, hooked to the wall. Vines crawled along it, growing from a rectangular pot at the base of the net. On her dresser sat a few small trinkets — mainly pieces of metal that she tinkered with time to time to create something. She'd tried to do something for each member of the team, using scraps of metal and paint. For Steve she made a miniature version of his shield and for Sam, an actual falcon. She was busy working on Natasha's, and the half completed piece sat on her dresser, in the form of a misshapen spider. It was the hardest to work on because spiders honestly gave Andi the creeps.

She'd been through torture by Hydra and survived an exploding city, and yet spiders were what freaked her out.

What further indicated that this room belonged to Andi, should anyone know her by now, were the paintings and sketches that lined the walls. Many of them were inspired by events in her life. Nat had told her, upon seeing her skill with art, that using it would try to help her get over her trauma, and it had helped, for the most part. Nobody thought it was a good idea to keep that hung up in her room since none of them were totally nice events, but she stuck it up all the same.

One was of her cell when she was in the labs. The other was the city of Sokovia, under attack by Ultron's army. But the one she stared at now was of the mysterious hooded figure that had visited her when she passed out after Sokovia was destroyed. She remembered him plain as day, mainly because she never saw a face. Just a shadow within a cloak. She could still hear his voice, saying that they would meet again two more times.

For the next time, because you will need something. And the time after that, because of your death.

Her death. Which was... when? Andi would be lying if she said the thought hadn't plagued her ever since she recalled it after waking up. She hadn't told anyone about it, not even Tony, but she had painted it, in the hopes that it would help her get over it and stop thinking about it, but that didn't really work. Andi didn't even know the guy's name so she had no clue what to look up on the internet, if there was even a record of him.