Flower - Marvel Fanfiction

Six

W H I T E  R O S E

Elena didn't know what to do. She wandered the halls, her eyes set upon the floor. She supposed she should just return to her suite, but that was too obvious. Her new housemates would find her there in an instant. Sighing, Elena took a deep breath. Even if she couldn't see their faces, she knew they worried.

Attempting to relax her shoulders, Elena scrunched up her nose. She bit her lip. Jarvis would be bound to know where she was. After all, he was an AI. Tony must have programmed him to have eyes all over the tower. That meant she would be found soon.

Looking up when the hallway opened up, Elena found herself in a common room. To her surprise, a grand piano stood in the middle of it. Blinking, she shook her head. Was she seeing things? From what she knew on the top of her head, none of the Avengers played an instrument.

She walked towards it. For a moment, she thought time had slowed, but the feeling faded as soon as she laid a finger on the black instrument. It hadn't been played in awhile, Elena thought. A heavy layer of dust had settled on it, a shame for such a beautiful instrument. Elena opened the lid, blowing the dust away. She peered into the piano, smiling when she found it perfectly clean. Even if it hadn't been played in a long time, it had been kept in perfect shape.

Taking a seat on the bench, Elena looked down at the keys. They were blurry, and she cursed her forsaken eyesight. Grimacing, Elena looked away. She hated how the cells looked blurry even more than seeing them in their full glory. When blurry, they looked even more like small, little monsters.

She started up, not wanting to stare at how her fingers danced if she played, but something dragged her back down. Elena sat in silence, staring at the dusty keys. Releasing a breath, she swallowed, nodded. She let her eyes flutter shut, and her hands found her way onto the keys almost instinctively.

She pushed down on a petal, setting her jaw. Elena pressed her fingers down. No thought needed to push her on then. Her hands knew the pattern like how a child knew how to cry. The melody was familiar to her ears like the voice of her mother. It was like magic, how the song came naturally to her.

Elena could feel her muscles relaxing, and a trace of a smile could be found on her lips. Then, almost like it had never happened, it was gone. Her eyes opened, and she found herself leaning towards her hands. Had she been moving with the music? She released the petal, raising her hands up in surprise at the wrong note she had played.

"I didn't know you could play."

Elena almost knocked the bench over as she jumped away from the piano. She spun on her heels at Steve's voice, blinking. "Yeah, well... Asian parents."

"You play beautifully."

"I messed up," Elena replied flatly.

"I think there's beauty in mistakes," Steve said. "You never know what could come out of them."

Rolling her eyes, Elena closed the piano back up. She lowered the lid. The only thing that ever came out of mistakes was failure. Playing a wrong note in a piece meant failure in performing properly. Circling a wrong answer on a test meant failure to pass. A mistake in a lab meant failure in her whole life.

She changed her subject. "I didn't know we had a piano. Does anyone play?"

Steve chuckled. "Tony just likes having one for the sake of having one. He says it makes him look good."

Elena halfheartedly laughed. "I don't think it does any good if it's dusty."

Steve agreed, but Elena was no longer paying attention. She turned away from Steve. Cells weren't something she wanted to see at the moment, even if they were a scientific wonder. Rubbing her wrist, she inclined her head. Still, cells were something she never wanted to see at this point.

"Elena?"

"Hmm?" She turned automatically, and almost immediately she winced, looking away. "What?"

"What's wrong?"

Rubbing her wrist, Elena clicked her tongue. She paused, shaking her head. "You know," she said, walking towards the elevator. "Evil villain wants something with me, and my apartment is about to be burgled. Who wouldn't be down about that?" She chuckled dryly, pressing the button to her floor before he could say anything else.

She quickly returned to her room, locking the door behind her. Since Steve had already talked to her, she figured she would be left alone for a while. Sitting on the carpet floor, she crossed her legs.

The room was dark, window blinds closed and lights off. If she didn't think hard enough, Elena would have thought she was back home in her own apartment. It wasn't that different, minus the expensive furniture. They were both eerily quiet and pitch dark, worlds away from the bustling streets.

Elena let herself fall back on the ground. She stared up at the ceiling, raising an arm. Watching her cells move around, she fell into her thoughts. Elena tilted her head to the side, hair falling over her face. She didn't move to fix it.

She wondered what would have happened if she had just stayed in her apartment. The guy outside her door would probably have broken in, but would things be differently than it was? She wouldn't have been with the Avengers but with Hydra. She let her arm fall back to the ground.

According to Natasha, Hydra was an organization that plotted world domination with the power of Inhumans. Although it sounded terrible, Elena couldn't help but wonder if she would be better off as a part of them. They did have a means of curing her after all. She hesitated.

Would she be considered an Inhuman?

She frowned, wrinkling her nose. Shaking her head, she sat up. That didn't matter. She was still human. She had to be. The cells were just an illusion, a trick that she had made up. Elena gulped, rubbing her wrist. She turned her head to face a standing mirror.

One look at herself was enough to drive her to the edge. She grimaced, looking away. She wasn't normal. But maybe she could be. Lieselotte Whitehall had a cure. She had seen it first hand with the syringe.

Elena stood, fists clenched. Maybe Hydra wouldn't be so bad.

...

Hehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Okay. I don't like this chapter, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut I really really like the next one, and I'm having a hard time not posting it right after this one. 

Let's see how long my self-control lasts. Knowing me, it'll probably go up in a few hours.