one

Ice so cold that it burns her throat is the only thing that she feels. It reaches every inch of her skin, tracing its biting claws down her arms and her legs, raking them into her veins and her arteries and her throat. God, her throat. It aches like she wailed. How long had it been since she could scream? She'd been asleep for so long, stuck in what felt like an empty, numb blackness for so long that she almost would have given anything for them to turn her arm to crystal again and shatter it.

Of course, Brooke knows she's lying to herself. Even now, that ghost pain haunts itself into her bones and she winces as she clenches her fist, feeling it again.

Then, she blinks. Blinks again because she can blink.

Alarms blare around her, so distant sounding with the incessant ringing in her ears. She cannot hear anything over the nothingness threatening to take her back, even now, as she's finally yanked free of it. Why does it want her so bad? What did Brooke do to deserve so much attention from the darkness?

She goes to take a step out of the freezing shower that she was kept in, its door bashed in so hard that it caved in on its handle and burst, but her body takes it for her. She stumbles into that heavy metal cage and through it and down into–

A disaster.

Brooke already wanted to hurl, but she does at the sight of the wreckage. She hasn't eaten in so long and nothing comes up but her own stomach acid, but once she starts, she can't stop.

It's mayhem. It's awful.

The chambers that the Russians kept her and Ben in all collapsed. The walls were reduced to splinters and shreds of wood around her. She sits in the remains of it. The ash and the shards. And glass, too, the glass of the windows they watched them in. There's metal. Incinerated by a big blast, melted and curled and coiled.

Blood. Blood of the doctors who studied them. The doctors who tortured them.

Across from her, there are two people struggling. One is hurt, her body crippled in on itself. The other is trying to help her. Desperately. He's begging her. Holding her like a flopping ragdoll in his arms as he's trying to carry her through the wreckage.

Her hurling must have caught their attention. His, at least, because the girl is half dead, half human.

His eyes go as wide as saucers. They drop to her stomach, where her clothes must still be bloodied and torn. They go back to her face. It's without a doubt that he recognizes her. He says something that she can't hear over the ringing and the blaring, and then something she does.

"Fuck!"

Brooke's energy is returning slowly. It's an hourglass filling not dwindling. Her power sits on top of her tongue, bubbling in her veins, waking up just like she did. She does not remember how to control it.

There is another voice. Another man. It's so distant, farther down the exit, she assumes. She doesn't know the layout of this place. Only the torture chambers.

But everywhere is an exit now. It's exploded.

Her powers are only waking up. She can't hear him. Just that the man in front of him still trying to situate the dying girl before he takes off too says, "There's another one!"

And Brooke snaps. A taut rubberband let go.

Another one. Another one. Another one.

Because the other is not here. Did these people dispose of him? Did they free him? Did they plan to leave her?

She is on her feet so fast that her head spins at the movement but it clears. She smiles. Brooke used to get movie contracts with this smile, you know. It was her best asset beyond the crystals in her palms.

Oh yeah.

The man in front of her realizes it at the same time as her.

He ducks into the hallway that the other man must be just as she raises both of her hands and lasers through the remaining wall behind him. Fire burns through the metal, wilts it back like a blooming flower.

It feels different to do that, she thinks, squeezing her hands into fists. More effortless. Maybe being a Russian lab rat wasn't so bad.

Brooke does not run after them, because the effort to run is too much for her. She doesn't know how long she's been stuck in the Nothing, but it's been enough. Her head does spin still even if it clears itself. The healing kicks in but it does not fix the root of the problem.

She walks after them, barefoot over shards of glass and molten metal and broken wood panels, in a bloodied hospital gown.

There is more than three, when she sees them. There is another man, running but looking back more often than the others, glaring at her. She flashes her teeth in a threatening attempt of a smile. This one did not get her contracts. It got her heads to bring to police chiefs.

"Where," she shouted, her voice hoarse in her own ears and grating in her ice burned throat, "is he?" Her palms shot out to her sides as she walked, sending lines of pink laser into the walls. The roof began to crumble behind her, spiderwebbing above.

The tall one, the one that seemed to just be running, not looking at her at all, did look then. And she could see his lip tremble from where she was.

"Holy fuck," he said, horror dripping off of each syllable. "Holy fuck, holy–"

"If you're talking about Soldier Boy," the glaring man spoke up from ahead of the former, oddly British despite the American and the other man being some other accent, "he outright left you."

Brooke's nostrils flared. Another burst of crystalline fire left her palms. "You liar."

"Why would I lie?" He stopped running at all. They all did. They faced her like equals. She stared them down like they were not. "You could kill us at any moment. What would I have to lie to you for?"

Brooke watched his face. The arrogant smirk that pulled onto his mouth, the twitch of his eyebrow when it all started to sink in. Ben left her. He left her. "I could still kill you."

"But you won't," the man said, that stupid look on his face still, "because you want to kill him more, and we'll lead you right to him."