porcelain

"None of what he has done can be forgiven."

HYDRA Facility - January 2016

And then she woke.

It was like rising out of a thrashing, ice-cold ocean that had filled her lungs with water and salt, and into an air that was on fire.

Christa was panting, eyes burning with the need to blink, staring out at a screen of swirling blues and purples and whites once more.

And all the pain came back again--but this time, it wasn't just in her mind, not just part of a hazed mixture of images and neurons firing at her as they'd been told to by whatever Jin had plunged into her bloodstream. She thought she saw a hint of her reflection in the screen before her--and it was somebody she didn't recognize. It was bloody. Bruised. Face a painting of blues and greens and purples, eyes bloodshot, arms dripping red so much she thought she might be sick. The stench of metal was overwhelming.

Her mouth opened in a silent scream, and she panted, hair sticking to the sides of her face in a mixture of sweat and blood. It took her a moment to be able to let any noise out, and after that she threw up.

Her throat burned with acid. That was all that came up. She hadn't eaten in days.

The smell was still unbearable.

"Hurts, doesn't it?"

Her eyelids were released, and Christa shut her eyes, squeezing them tightly. They burned horribly. She couldn't look at the woman.

"I feel it too. Every day."

Christa heard footsteps, and wished, wished so desperately, that she'd never been given the things in her ears.

"And the only people who are to blame are the Starks."

Breathing decelerating, heartbeat lowering, Christa opened her eyes to see Jin standing less than a foot away from her.

She stayed silent.

"Howard Stark. Genius. Wealthy. Godlike in his power. People revered him. They loved him. They should have feared him."

Christa stared at the woman, expression unmoving, hollow brown eyes staring into Jin's drowning black ones.

"My family was murdered by his people. You know what that's like. You know the pain of losing a parent. You know the pain of never knowing one. My father and brother were murdered by his people, my home attacked without a second thought simply because they'd discovered my brother worked for HYDRA. Each were shot so many times even my mother wouldn't have been able to recognize them. My mother fell into a coma soon after she saved me from the attack. I was a baby. She died two years later. I never knew them, but I knew what they did. Their loss from the world has been seen for decades. Their work was never completed. I saw their pictures. I saw their names. But I never knew them.

"And you... you knew your mother, and she loved you, and she was ripped away from you. And you never knew your father. I never knew my family. But that wasn't their fault. Tony Stark has more power than even his father could have imagined; he could have found you. His ignorance led to your solitude. That cannot be forgiven. None of what he has done can be forgiven."

Suddenly, a sound like acid could be heard, and Jin's eyes seemed to become like a snake's before it bites its prey. She lunged her hands out towards the girl and wrapped them, vice-like, around her arms, and Christa screamed. It felt like her skin, already beaten and bloody, had been set on fire. There was a stench like sulfur that seemed to fly down her throat, and she heaved, more acid coming out of her throat and onto her shirt.

And then it was over.

"That's what it feels like." Jin's demeanor had suddenly changed. No longer was she cold and dry, but her voice was fueled with rage. Like an animal. Her eyes seemed to shine a poisonous shade of yellow for a moment, but that might have been the lighting. It was gone to soon for Christa to tell.

She stood back, and something in her seemed to shift. Her eyes had softened, her voice more gentle as she spoke again.

"Not very talkative right now, I see?" she said, head tilted slightly.

"I tend to be quite partial to communing with monsters." Christa tried to spit the words out, but it felt unexpectedly painful to speak, so it came out more as a weak croak.

Jin's mouth turned up in a small smile. "It's a wonder you put up with Tony Stark for so long."

"Tony Stark is not a monster."

Jin's smile dropped instantaneously. "You've so much you've yet to understand." She bowed her head down for a moment, then looked back up at the girl, gave her a curious look, and then walked swiftly back out of the room.

"Wait! I can't--I'm still--"

But her words were interrupted as she, connected to cords as though she were in a hospital, felt something enter her bloodstream again, and instead of falling back into the nightmare, she was knocked out cold.

- - -

When she was next woken up, it was to realize that today (she had to presume it was the next day, because she had no way to keep track of time but count it by her sleep) was to be the second of many like this. She woke up. Jin came in and talked to her. Her eyelids were trapped. The liquid was forced into her bloodstream. And the nightmares came again. And again. And again. They would last hours and hours, or at least she thought they must have, because each time she woke drained as if she hadn't slept in a century. And she woke up from the nightmares with her body on fire. And then Jin would come in and talk to her. And she would tell her about how horrible the Starks were, especially Tony Stark, and when Christa would resist this hatred of the man who was her father, Jin would hurt her more. Her hands would burn Christa's skin again, and again, and again, and she had to wonder if it would ever heal. When she dared look down at it, all she began to see was raw flesh. And after, she'd be forced asleep again.

She wondered about food, water. She soon came to the conclusion that whatever she was hooked up to must be providing her with her needed nutrients, because she was never given anything.

Her stomach still growled when the pain in the rest of her body didn't distract from it.

She'd lost track of the days when the nightmares began to change.

It wasn't just Tony Stark anymore, though he and his barrage of snarky comments and careless treatment of human beings never left. Christa would have begun to memorize the scenes if the pain hadn't been so bad. No, others began to come in, slide into her nightmares like a snake ready to bite.

Pictures of history books, documentaries, speeches from survivors of World War II, all describing HYDRA and its deeds and how absolutely horrible it was. And then cuts to different books, different documentaries, different words from people describing HYDRA. And they were different.

They spoke of HYDRA like a religion, like the creature that symbolized the organization was God himself. They spoke about how the rest of the world was blind, how they could not see what HYDRA and its people saw. They talked of the countless diseases, terrorist attacks, and wars that plagued existence. They talked of moon landings, of statues, of dates like the Fourth of July, in which the world was celebrated--money, time, and resources wasted on behalf of needless pleasure. Cancers had yet to be cured, and the U.S. was worried about a race to the moon. Violence exploded left and right, and it was meaningless, completely and utterly meaningless, because the world would never change in the way people thought it would. People wrote HYDRA's intentions off as evil; but were theirs not evil in their own right? Wasn't the massacre of millions of people a worthy sacrifice to save the lives and the future of billions? Was it worth it to attack these small matters of shootings and slavery and trafficking when there were countless ways to destroy this pointless bloodshed at its roots, even with a small cost in the beginning?

These questions, these images of death and blood and bones, these words of lies that were truths and truths were that lies, these feelings of pain and smells of rotten flesh and tastes of poison filled Christa's head even went she didn't go beneath the water.

Oh, yes, there was water involved.

She began to be lowered into a pool of liquid, and her lungs would begin to fill with it, and the top was closed on her and she could not escape. The first time she fell into the pool she thought--she knew--she was going to die. Liquid was all about her, her body stripped of clothes and her eyes stripped of light, she existed within, and she gagged, and she kicked, and she screamed. All was muffled. She couldn't hear a thing.

She began to wonder if she'd gone insane when minutes later she realized she hadn't drowned.

Her senses seemed to have been stripped away from her completely.

And so when she was pulled into the black hole of her nightmares once more, the reality in her mind became ever so much more real.

And she began to break.

And she began to believe the words she was told.

Any time she saw or heard word of the Avengers, of Tony Stark, of Iron Man, of a world outside of HYDRA's, she knew pain would come.

And she began to hate the world outside of HYDRA.

But there was a part of her that held on, a little voice in her head that said no, this can't be true, you know it's not true, HYDRA is bad and the Avengers are good and you can't forget your what your mother told you about good and evil and the line between the two, you can't forget your mother, you can't forget your mother--

She didn't forget her mother.

The final nightmare came in the form of her, after all.

It must've been weeks--weeks of torture, weeks of nightmares, weeks of thinking she was going to drown but still somehow managing to breathe, weeks of a spiral down to insanity. Her body was a porcelain doll that had cracks running through it like veins, just on the verge of shattering. But she was still holding on. She was still holding on.

But when she dipped back into the water for what she didn't realize would be the last time, and after she'd gone through the series of the murderer that was Iron Man and the cure that was HYDRA, there was something new.

There was silence for a moment, her mind foggy, dizzy, torn to shreds, and tired.

She thought she was about to wake up.

But then she heard it.

The beeping of a monitor in a hospital.

And then her mother.

Cold. A skeleton. A piece of glass about to snap with the slightest of breezes.

And she heard a voice. A voice she hated and longed for, a voice that caused her body to catch on fire and fall into the depths of a cold, pressing, smothering ocean.

"You know, it's moments like these when I realize what a superhero I am."

The man standing on a stage, arms out before a crowd of thousands, fireworks and music and glittering rain of gold and silver and the entirety of the rainbow behind him.

Her mother lying in the crowd, in the front row, hospital bed inexplicably situated right in front of the speaker on the stage, a ghost among the thousands of bodies filled to the brim with life.

Dead before her eyes.

And again, the words, the words of him, of Tony Stark, of the man Christa could and would never look at in the same way again, the man Christa might have begun to love, then began to hate, and finally, finally knew with the surety of a thousand suns that she absolutely loathed,

"I am Iron Man."

And then she shattered.

- - -

hey! it's been a while. but i've been going through and revamping some things in this story and realized i had this draft just waiting to be published, so i went through and did some minor edits and, well, published it! hope you like it; again, i know it's been a little while haha. let me just say that college in the time of corona isn't exactly the easiest.

speaking of this thing being revamped somewhat, feel free to check out the first "part," epigraph, prologue, and chapter one again! you don't necessarily have to read them, but if you could simply look at them, that would be lovely! i'd like to think they're a lot prettier now (though chapter one does have a fair amount of actual story editing, so don't feel like you shouldn't read that one! lol). ^_^

anyways, thanks for reading! i love you all so, so much.

-maddie

p.s. the mandalorian, anyone? my mom was screaming the entirety of season two ep. two (the most recent one as of right now). i was simply trying not to.

(a gif to help you in these trying times)

(yeah i know i'm not the first one to insert funny gifs at the end of their chapters leave me alone adjfskj)