Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
There are some tides in the universe you cannot swim against.
He is cocooned in the darkness, in the tomb of his body, though it doesn’t feel quite right. He feels… disarticulate. As if he has been carved into a million pieces; curls of ice shorn from a glacier, thrown up into the air.
–No, he muses, because antithesis serves as reminder. Not ice. There was fire.
He can feel it now, all at once: the incineration of every cell in his body, the inhuman, voiceless scream of the parasite that for so long had occupied him as it too burned. The short moment in which it relinquished control, at the end of all things, as if to spare him from what would come. The sudden infinite pain, darkness.
Death.
He is, by all means, dead. So how can he think?
Panic wells up, staggered by disorientation. He is naked without the grudging symbiosis he had with the parasite, naked and forsaken and cursed – not by death, not by life, but by the grey space between. He sees an eternity of desolation stretch out before him, living half an existence, and phantom terror sets in, not precisely his – but he has seen this before, lived it through the memories of the parasite, unwittingly assimilated its fears.
His walls finally come up – too little, too late – years of drill and doctrine reduced to toothpicks against the torrent of fear. All thoughts give way to one, words he does not expect will work, but he repeats them over and over like a prayer.
I am Grant Ward, Agent of Shield. I am Grant Ward, Agent of Shield. I am …
Who am I?
Thought ebbs away from him: slowly, then all at once, the way ice disintegrates against the warmth of skin.
When the dust settles, he will be whole again.