Erica Posts the Prompt Response While Simultaneously Trying to Be Super Quiet So As To Not Wake the Sleeping Rinn
Case File #117808:
Subject: Clarissa Renee Reynolds
Attending Physician: Dr. Maurice Reynolds
Officer in Charge: Commander William Stryker
Date: 10/31/1979
The subject has shown increased awareness to the situation around her, constituting a definite and deliberate increase in the sedatives being introduced into her system by Dr. Reynolds, although the purpose of this experiment is clearly to test Claire’s cognitive functions and abilities now that the genes have been grafted onto her body. I’m not certain why Stryker has chosen to allow this, or why Dr. Reynolds has chosen to pursue this course instead of the more obvious course of allowing the girl to wake up. Perhaps we have grafted something onto her that we are not entirely certain we have the ability to contain. How they intend to control her, I do not know. Telepaths are notoriously resistant to mind control, and this begs the question of whether or not they would be able to plant a psychosomatic trigger in her mind or if we will have to neutralize her before she fully awakes.
In cognitive testing with the sedatives, however, Claire is already performing far about her baseline markers. So far, there has been no sign of DNA unraveling or instability in the situation. I am afraid that this means the mutations have taken root, which means that there is no turning back now. Stryker and Reynolds have both asked me if the process might be reversed. Given how stable she is, it is my expert opinion that the process cannot be reversed, and that Claire Reynolds will remain this way for the rest of her life.
In addition, she does not appear to be aging, a side-effect I don’t believe we anticipated. She appears frozen in stasis, unable to move forward. Whether she will be able to die, or she will remain on this Earth until the end of time, remains to be seen. It is my opinion that she will perhaps outlast us all.
Date: 11/7/1979
I fear we have awoken a dangerous beast, one that we cannot contain. Claire has absorbed almost all of the textual information place in front of her, and has demonstrated a cognitive understanding of everything she has read. We hypothesize that she is now the intellectual equivalent of the progeny of Howard Stark and Albert Einstein. She has an incredible understanding of the medical, genetic, and physic aspects of what has happened to her, and is beginning to understand the chemistry of what has been done, without having any kind of textual knowledge. She is progressing at a rate far and above what we expected of her, and even now, I’m not certain how far she will continue to grow before her rate of increase settles out.
Claire tried to look uninterested in Bruce’s facial expressions as he read through the folder of information. All of Dr. Robinson’s notes were in there, she knew because she had taken them from his hands herself, after he was shot for opening the door to her cage. Robinson had freed her, and died because of it, but he had given birth to the rage within Claire, and the strong need she had for vengeance upon those who had harmed her.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
“The man has nothing to do with it,” she replied, swirling the last swallow of tea in the bottom of her cup. She drank it, and then swished the dregs one last time before turning the cup upside down.
“Old tradition?” he asked, gesturing to the cup, his gaze piercing her from over the top of his new Stark Industries Glasses, the ones with the interface designed to allow him to monitor his vitals, or whoever’s vitals happened to be registering on the Stark Watch on his wrist.
“Habit, actually. In some of the darker parts of the world, it’s considered impolite to leave your tea cup right-side up, refusing to give the right to read your tea leaves to someone,” she answered. “I made a habit of it, and it has earned me quite a few friends over the years.”
“Do you know how to read tea leaves?” he continued, his gaze settling back on the papers before him.
“Would you like me to?”
He started. He wasn’t entirely aware what he had been expecting, but her offer to read the leaves for him was not on the list. Gingerly, setting the folder down on the coffee table between them, he picked up his tea cup and drank the last swallow. He swirled the dregs once, twice, a third time, and then placed the cup upside down on the saucer. With trembling fingers, because he’d never been so impulsive as to have this done for him before, he slid the cup across the table toward her.
She flipped it right-side up and peered at the leaves.
She slipped around the couch until the were next to each other, her body heat impossibly warm against his side, her very presence so close that with anyone else except for perhaps Tony, he would have been uncomfortable. He found himself drawn to her, leaning close, looking over her shoulder.
“See that, at the bottom? It’s an acorn. It is a sign of happiness and contentment, and it’s presence at the bottom means you’ll have good health. The bouquet over here means you have a romantic interest. The bridge means you will experience a life-changing event or someone will change your life for you, the butterfly next to it means that it will come from overdue happiness.”
Bruce could see more things that looked like shapes, but she stopped, setting the cup back on the saucer in silence. She did not mention the broken chain, meaning trouble ahead, or the exclamation mark nearby, that meant beware impulsive actions. Instead, she turned, intent on passing it off as some kind of mysticism or another, and he was right there, inches from her face. It had been so long since she had kissed someone, and she’d always been attracted to Bruce. But Bruce… he was always so distant.
You’re thinking too much, she admonished herself.
It wasn’t really a decision. There wasn’t any cognitive thought behind it. One minute she was telling herself it was a bad idea, the next she was pressing her lips to his, gently, tenderly, trying not to scare him away. After a moment, when he started to kiss back, she dared to cup his cheek, to brush her thumb across his cheek bone and his jaw line.
When she needed to breath, she pulled back just enough for air.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know you don’t like people to get close.”
She did not, however, back away.
“It’s not that I don’t like it. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“You can’t hurt me, remember?” she replied.
“If I had to leave, you want to tell me that I couldn’t hurt you?”
Claire was chained in the spread eagle position, wearing only shorts and a bra, her heart thudding dully. This was what she got for trusting the wrong person, for falling in love with someone bad. She never should have trusted John, because now she was under Erik Lehnsherr’s thumb, and that was not a good place to be. After all, Magneto knew all he had to do was wind her up high enough and point her in the direction he wanted the destruction to radiate from.
“I trusted you!” she yelled as John moved across her field of vision.
“Hey, don’t hate the player; hate the game.”
“So it meant nothing?”
“Would it make you feel better if I said it did?”
She felt a flash of anger at the back of her mind, and focused on it, harnessing it and sharpening it. And, when she felt it surge, she spoke.
“No,” she said. “The only thing that’s going to make me feel better is when your blood hits the floor.”
He was skewered to the door, and she could hear Erik scrambling to unlock it, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret it. She knew he wouldn’t die; she didn’t have the strength to kill him, being kept on edge like she was. But, as the first of the electric shocks designed to wind her up and unbalance her again buzzed through her body, she noted that there was a lot of blood on the door.
She couldn’t help but smile through the pain.
Case File #117808:
Subject: Clarissa Renee Reynolds
Attending Physician: Dr. Maurice Reynolds
Officer in Charge: Commander William Stryker
Date: 12/8/1979
They intend to kill her. This much I know. She has progressed so far, and her control of her powers is enormous, but they lied to me. She was not a willing volunteer. She was duped by her father, and drugged for these experiments. I must record this last entry, and then I will hand over my files. May God have mercy on my soul, but I must let her out. She cannot stay here. They will end her.
Claire has developed far beyond the telekinesis and healing factor she came in with. She began exhibiting signs of what I can only call ‘elemental control’ almost a month ago, and has nearly mastered the ability to exert control over and even produce on her own fire, ice, wind, and even earth. She has also begun to show signs of telepathy, not to mention the powerful learning capacity she has. Her ability to process is magnified a hundred fold from her original baseline tests. She is completely stable, and, I fear, immortal. I hope, in the face of this, she can forgive me, because I cannot forgive myself.
Stryker most surely will kill me for this, but I believe it will be a blessing.
Bruce had never snuck into anyone’s room before, let alone when they were in it sleeping. Claire was curled on her side, wrapped around a pillow, her eyes streaked with tears, her back against the wall. He had finished reading the file that she had given him earlier. He couldn’t imagine what it had been like to lose someone like Dr. Robinson, who had clearly cared about her. He hadn’t known that she was a victim, and when he had figured it out (albeit not as quickly as he should have) he had let her go, at the cost of his own life, surely.
That was not, however, what had made her run away earlier.
He remembered the first time S.H.I.E.L.D. had caught up to her. He had heard stories of how she had been kidnapped by Magneto, and how she had been tortured, how he had tried to turn her into a weapon. She seemed so much more careful than that. But she had been kidnapped, and it had taken Clint and Natasha to get her out again.
He had a feeling he knew how she’d been kidnapped.
He sat at the edge of her bed carefully, and watched her eyes flick open. He had always admired them, silver-blue orbs set against a black ring at edge of the iris, something the files explained as being a tracker that Robinson had disabled two days before he let Claire out of her cage. Still, it leant a kind of exotic beauty to her eyes. Her hair, tossed back over the pillows behind her, was getting long, longer than she usually wore it, and Bruce marked in the back of his mind that he should get Tony to take her to a salon before she chopped it off herself again. The strawberry-blonde ringlets were too perfect for the rough edge of a knife. Hell, the woman herself was too perfect, even though others would disagree. She was curvaceous, and had meat on her bones. She wasn’t as scrawny looking as she had been when he had first heard about her, and he thought that, perhaps, getting three square meals had helped her return to a healthy weight balance because she looked, well… healthy.
It occurred to him that he was staring, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop.
“I don’t know what I said that frightened you,” he whispered. “But I’d like to make it up to you.”
“And how, Dr. Banner, do you plan to do that?”
Her voice was flirtatious, lower in pitch than it usually was, and he felt it lap at his ego, high tide on the shores of his psyche. He liked it, and he realized that what he really wanted to do for her was to make her scream, to send her voice to the other end of the spectrum entirely, to make her come so hard she couldn’t even remember her own damn name.
But he could never give her that.
And now he owed her that honesty.
“I can’t… ever…”
She sat up, oversized night shirt slipping off one shoulder, bruises from this morning’s sparring session already yellowing, and cupped his face with a single hand, long, delicate fingers settling against the bones of his face, turning it so that he was looking at her again.
“Yes, you can, but it’s irrelevant at this point,” she whispered. “I want you. We’re not even going to try to put a quantity on it. And even that’s irrelevant, because if we never get there, that’s okay too. But I think we can, if you just… If you try.”
“What did I say, earlier?”
“It wasn’t what you said. It was just old memories. Because the last person who promised they would hurt me did. I just thought he was being melodramatic about it. But I know you. I know you better than I ever knew John. I don’t… You wouldn’t hurt me the same way he did, and nothing… not even ripping me apart limb from limb over and over again… would ever hurt that much.”
He leaned close to her, reveling in her proximity for a moment, before he kissed her.
She broke out the GameCube on a Wednesday, spreading four controllers out. And, when she had everything set up, snacks and drinks spread across, she asked JARVIS to make an announcement; everyone in the Tower was to report to the central living room for a Mario Kart tournament the likes of which no one had ever seen, and yes, Bruce, that means you too. Shortly after, with her setting up a bracket, because she knew who was in the tower, they filtered in.
“It’s double elimination,” she said absently, filling in the starting names. “Two strikes you’re out. Winner gets to try out the new virtual reality suit Tony and I were working on.”
“Ooo,” the engineer said, vaulting over the couch and picking up the second controller.
“How do we do this with four players?” Natasha asked, looking at the bracket.
“We’re set up to run warm up races first. Also, if Pepper wins, Tony has to be nice to everyone for a week,” she replied. “Anyway, warm-ups are four player, races are one on one.”
“Hang on-“
“You picked up the controller. You back out now, that makes you a Welsher, Clint wins twenty bucks from me, and you still have to be nice to everyone for a week because you forfeited.”
“Alright, but if I win, I demand the rights to host a loud and raucous New Years party.”
“Deal.”
By the end of the warm up rounds, it was clear that Steve was going to be the first one eliminated, mostly because he had no clue what he was doing. It was also painfully clear that the semi-finals were going to consist of Bruce v. Tony and Pepper v. Claire, because those four were killing it. Steve was the first to go down, followed swiftly by Thor. Clint and Natasha’s face off left the Hawk in the loser’s bracket, although Natasha lost to Claire in the next round. And, true to prediction, the semi-finals landed on Bruce v. Tony and Pepper v. Claire.
Bruce and Tony spent most of the race playing leap frog. Neither one was concerned with much other than placing higher than the other, but Bruce had an advantage; he knew it was just a game. He wasn’t concerned with winning or losing, he just really wanted to beat the pants off Tony, and that calm helped him focus better than the brilliant mind of Tony Stark ever could.
Crossing the finish line first was just a perk. The real reward was watching Tony throw the controller down and storm away.
Bruce stood in the wings, everybody else perched on the couch, to watch Claire and Pepper take each other on. Whoever took this one would be going head to head with the Hulk’s alter ego, and, while everyone kind of wanted Pepper to win, most people knew that the best matchup would be between Claire and Bruce. Both had the extreme calm on their side, evidenced by her easy overtaking of Pepper in the first lap, and the insane focused afforded to the determined mind. So, when Pepper crossed second, leaving Claire to take on the big guns, everyone was secretly a little pleased, even if it meant endless ribbing from Tony.
Rainbow Road was the battleground for the championship, even though Natasha stiffened a little at the choice. But, it was Bruce’s, Claire having deferred to him, and if he thought he could handle it she wasn’t going to question it. Instead, she stepped back just a bit, just in case.
Everything was fine until the last lap.
Anyone at the outside wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong with Claire, but they’d all been living in the tower for months now, and it was plain as day that her concentration faltered on the last lap, and that was all that Bruce needed to take the lead. But only Tony noticed that she let her focus slip, similar to how she would sometimes let him win their sparring matches to give him an ego boost if he took a hard hit in battle.
As they split apart, Tony pulled her aside.
“You’re trying to get him to strut,” he declared.
“Just wait until tomorrow. Then we’ll see if he struts.”
