The Tower

Working in SHIELD

Bruce had been looking at Alexa's DNA with the help of Jemma Simmons. There had been a lot of questions about how Vision had been tricked into thinking Wanda was in that building when she wasn't. What they had found when they looked at a blood sample was really shocking.

Alexa was riddled with cancer. It was everywhere. How she was still functioning at all let alone at the high level she was, was beyond reason. She had also done something to herself to trigger some mutations. Bruce had worked out she'd used my research to work out where in the DNA genes could be switched on or off to create certain abilities. She'd turned on the rapid healing factor possessed by Steve and Bucky for example. She had also switched on telepathy. There was something wrong with what she had done though. The healing factor was weaker and all it was doing was slowing the spread of the cancer, and all he could do with her telepathy was project thoughts. Just like that, I had a purpose again.

I buried myself in the work. Jemma was a dream to work with. You would pose a question to her about something you were stuck on and a few hours later she would come back to you again. There was one day where I literally just disappeared for 12 hours. I didn't stop until Sam came in and physically removed me from what I was doing and forced me to eat food and then go to sleep.

The other thing that was happening was that I was being taken in to question Alexa with Sam and Natasha. Not because I was supposed to be questioning her, I was there to talk to her about the science. She knew her science, that's for sure. Wher Justin Hammer was a huge blowhard who stole everything he could get his hands on, Alexa was an actual genius. It turned out she was his daughter, but she was everything he wished he could have been.

It made me uncomfortable being in there with her. This woman had been fundamental with my coming to terms with my new life and how to balance it. Now I wasn't sure if all of it had been lies just to get to my work. She would also become obsessive with me when I was there. I think because she saw me as the weakest link. Which of course I was.

All this talk of what to do with her got to me really badly. Her condition meant she was going to die, really painfully. The way she was now, the healing factor had slowed it down, but the mess up in her DNA was causing other problems. I could take the powers away and she'd die on the table or I could fix them and we'd have a psychopath with superpowers on our hands. She seemed to love taunting me with it. She knew me. She knew I would struggle with the idea and she prodded me with it.

"You know they won't let you cure me, don't you?" She taunted.

"We've already told you, you speak to us not her." Natasha snarled.

Alexa completely ignored her. "Your choice is to do nothing and watch me die knowing you could have helped, or kill me."

"Maybe if you told us where our friends are we could come to an arrangement," Sam said.

Alexa laughed. "Oh, honey." She said, shaking her head. She looked back over to me. "What's it going to be, Elise?"

"What do you want me to do? Tell me what I should do here?" I said, my very thin shell of composure finally cracking.

"Oh Elise, I want you to kill me. But only you. Let's see how much your precious Avengers like you once that little bit of innocence they love so much gets taken away from them." She sneered.

"Alright, we're done," Natasha said standing, she went to Alexa and unshackled her hustling her out of the room as Sam came and took my hand.

"Don't let her get in your head, El," Sam said, leading me down to the conference room. It was where we ate when we all ate together as it was the only place that fit us all. After a few days, we'd started eating together every night. We'd lost three of us, we were determined that we weren't going to let her split the rest of us apart too.