Chapter Text
Aren Alexander was asleep when it happened. They’d done more chemo that day, and he just wanted to curl up in his room and sleep forever. He always had to wear his gloves after treatment. Treatment made it hard to keep his powers under control. The batteries in anything he touched would die almost instantly when he couldn’t keep things under control. But the gloves were hard, and itchy, and they made his hands hurt.
He woke up feeling like his head was going to split open. He pressed the button on his bed to call for a nurse; that’s what they told him to do when he woke up in a lot of pain. No one ever had a chance to check on him though, before that blast of blue energy swept through the facility. He was surrounded by blinding light and equally blinding burning pain. He passed out at some point through the endless agony, and came to briefly a few times, before finally waking up in a different hospital bed, at a different SHIELD base.
He wouldn’t understand what happened that night until almost a decade later, when he had impulsively asked his mom if he could read the file that SHIELD had kept on him. An accident during testing with the Tesseract caused an explosion that destroyed most of the SHIELD base, and left only 12 survivors. He would learn that seven agents were seriously injured trying to recover him from that facility. His body had emitted bolts of electrified plasma for two days following the explosion. The SHIELD scientists that studied him after the fact theorized that his body was acclimating to the sudden influx of energy it was trying to store within it, and releasing it in those bolts to keep it from killing him.
The new power dampeners were much worse than the gloves. They were thick and heavy like the vest he would wear when he got X-rays. Everything he wore had to be like that, but no one would tell him why. They did tell him he still had to wear the X-ray vest when they took him for more scans, because it was made of something different, and the dampeners didn’t block the X-rays from hurting him.
Aren thought it was way too soon to even be getting more scans. He just had all of these done a few weeks ago, and they never made him do them that close together. But when they finished them all, they said he didn’t have to do chemo anymore so that was good. A lot of other doctors came to visit him after that. Aren didn’t like it when the other doctors came. Most of them told them they weren’t medical doctors, and they always took blood, or hair, or skin. And they would ask him to do things with his powers that hurt and burnt his skin.
Some of them were nice like Dr. Jemma. She always asked for permission before she did anything, and told Aren what she was doing when he asked about it, even if he couldn’t understand it. And whatever she was doing seemed to help, because one day she came in with her friend Fitz with new power dampeners. Since it was his hands and feet that usually caused a problem when he lost control, they said that bracelet things they put on his wrists and ankles would solve most of the problem. He didn’t have to wear the big, heavy things anymore, but he did still have a tight shirt and pants he had to wear under his normal clothes.
He was discharged from the hospital wing shortly after that, where he met the agent who would be responsible for him from then on, agent Julia Montgomery.
“He doesn’t have anything more than this?” Julia asked when handed the small backpack with his spare clothes.
Aren answered before the nurse could.
“Everything got burned up in the explosion.”
That answer eased some tension in her shoulders. She studied him for a moment. Aren was sure she was disappointed by her new assignment. A SHEILD agent being made into a glorified babysitter. She didn’t look at him like she was upset by it at least.
“Okay, well I’ve already got the info on your medical history. Do you need anything else before we go? Anyone you want to say goodbye to?” she asked, seeming relatively cheerful.
Aren shook his head. Maybe he would have, had the explosion not killed most of the people that had been taking care of him at the old base. He hadn’t gotten to know the staff here as well in just two weeks. Now that he wasn’t dying, everyone was more concerned with his powers than with him.
Julia didn’t seem to know exactly where she was going. She knew the base well enough to know what the numbers and letters beside every door meant, but she had to consult a slip of paper in her hand every so often. Eventually, they found the doors they were looking for, two right next to each other.
Julia sighed in relief when she opened the door to what was obviously meant to be Aren’s room. The colorful bedding and toys stacked neatly on the dresser gave it way pretty quickly.
“At least they outfitted this for a kid. I can’t believe this is all they gave you,” Julia said, opening up the backpack to put the clothes away. “You’ve been on base for weeks that’s unacceptable.”
There was a bathroom shared between their rooms. Julia was excited about that stating that she hadn’t had a private bathroom in years. Aren enquired about that, confused. She explained that the dorm-style barracks she had been in on her last assignment had communal bathrooms, which meant that the 20 or 30 people on that floor all shared a bathroom. Aren guessed that their rooms were a big step up from what she was used to.
Julia’s room was a mirror image of his, just styled for an adult. She took a look in a few drawers of her dresser and in her closet, muttering something about reorganizing. Someone else had evidently moved her belongings into her room.
Julia showed him around the parts of the base he would be using. He would have to have an escort most of the time but that would usually be her, which he didn’t think would be so bad.
He was pretty sure there were more people in the cafeteria than he had seen in his entire life. It was a bit overwhelming but Julia assured him it wasn’t normally this crowded.
The anxiety he felt from the resulting stares of the other agents left him with even less of an appetite than he already had. He didn’t finish even half of what he had been given. He tried to apologize for the wasted food, but Julia waved off his concerns.
“Don’t worry about it. I’d rather you have too much food than not enough. It's probably just going to take a little while to get your appetite back. Don’t make yourself sick trying to eat when you aren’t hungry.”
Aren was rail thin, and still weak and unsteady on his feet at times. After a few weeks, his appetite and energy did indeed start to come back. It was then that he was introduced to his trainer, agent Ethan Davis.
Even though Ethan was officially his trainer, they didn’t do much actual training. Mostly he helped Aren with exercises to build his strength back up to where it should be for someone his size. Not that it wasn’t difficult but when he pictured “training” he pictured learning how to fight, not the equivalent of gym class.
They did go to a special room tucked away in a remote corner of the base to work with his powers. It hurt worse now to use them since the accident. He burnt his hands pretty often, and had to go to the medical wing, which he hated, but eventually, he got the hang of it, and the burns became less frequent.
He rarely went back to his room unhappy with all the new activity in his life. But he was lonely. He was very lonely.