Chapter Text
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The hands on the clock shifted with each passing second, their noise stark against the silence in the room. The plain clock hung on an austere wall, with a long leather couch beneath it, and two seats at either end of that. Across from it, there was a wall plastered with degrees, photographs, and awards, a coffee-colored desk in front of it, neatly set. There was an overgrown money plant to the side, and—
"Lucille?"
Antsy brown eyes snapped up to look at the woman in the chair across from the couch. She had long, curly hair that fell to about her waist. She wore a neutral gray sweater and a black skirt, with black boots and gold jewelry to match. Her eyes were green, and she had freckles scattered about her face. Her sharp features were pulled into a look of concern, her lips turned downwards. Even when she was annoyed, Doctor Amina Rashid managed to look pretty. Lucille envied her for that.
"Hm?" the girl pushed her long, dark hair behind both of her ears, feigning interest in the conversation.
Dr. Rashid gave a small sigh. “We’re going to need a bit more than that today.”
Lucille leaned back, crossing her arms. “I’m here, right? That’s already a lot of effort.”
“Bare minimum effort,” Dr. Rashid corrected gently. “Especially when your mom brought you here.”
Lucille's eyes flicked away. “Still counts.”
Dr. Rashid didn’t argue. She just opened her notebook, pen resting against the page.
“Last session, we talked about adjusting to school,” she said. “Online classes, your routine. How’s that been?”
Lucille let out a quiet groan, tipping her head back against the couch. “Don’t get me started.”
“That bad?”
Lucille sat up slightly, as if suddenly energized by the complaint. “It’s not even school at that point. It’s like… organized waiting.”
Dr. Rashid raised an eyebrow. “Organized waiting.”
“Yeah,” Lucille said. “You log in, you sit there, you stare at a screen where everyone’s either muted or pretending they don’t exist, and then you get assigned three essays and a ‘discussion post’ like we’re all in a very awkward group chat that nobody asked to join.”
She gestured loosely with one hand.
“And the participation grade? Based on what, exactly? My willingness to type ‘I agree with your point about symbolism’ in five different ways? I mean, come on.”
A faint smile tugged at Dr. Rashid’s lips.
Lucille noticed. “Don’t laugh. It’s actually very sad.”
“I’m not. I took my fair share of them.”
Lucille huffed, though there was a hint of something lighter underneath her frustration now. “It’s just… inefficient.”
“That’s your main complaint?”
Lucille tilted her head. “No. My main complaint is that I’m bored.”
Dr. Rashid nodded, but her tone shifted slightly. “And yet you’re keeping up.”
Lucille shrugged, deflecting. “I have nothing else to do. Not like I have any friends to hang out with, my parents made sure of that.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Dr. Rashid said.
Lucille didn’t respond immediately.
Tick.
Her gaze drifted back to the clock.
For a moment, the room felt different—not just quiet, but… contained. Controlled.
“Sure,” she said after a pause.
Dr. Rashid studied her for a moment. “We’ve been talking around something important.”
Lucille expression didn’t change. “We’ve been talking around a lot of things.”
“That’s true,” Dr. Rashid said. “Let’s not do that today.”
Lucille exhaled through her nose. “Bold strategy.”
Dr. Rashid didn’t react. “Tell me about the day everything changed.”
Lucille's posture shifted—barely, but noticeably. Her eyes flicked away from Dr. Rashid and back to the clock.
Tick.
“...What day?” she asked.
Dr. Rashid didn’t take the bait. “The incident at Avengers Tower.”
Lucille let out a quiet, humorless breath. She tapped her fingers against her sleeve once. “Yeah, okay. That one.”
She leaned back further, like she could physically distance herself from the memory by sinking into the couch. “I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the lab.”
Dr. Rashid nodded slightly. “Whose lab?”
Lucille gave a small, matter-of-fact shrug. “Tony and Bruce’s.”
Her tone stayed flat, but there was a faint edge underneath it now.
“They had been working on something. Something… important enough that I wasn’t allowed to see it.”
She glanced sideways. “Which, obviously, made it extremely interesting.”
A hint of Tony Stark’s cadence crept into her voice—dry, dismissive, a little self-aware. Amina recognized it right away but didn’t comment.
Lucille continued. “I asked. They said no. I asked again. Still no.”
She shrugged. “So I did what any reasonable person would do.”
Dr. Rashid raised an eyebrow. “And that is?”
Lucille glanced at her. “…I went anyway.”
Her gaze dropped slightly. “I called Loghan first.”
The name settled into the room. Loghan was her older sister, who had been wrapping up her finals at UC Berkeley at the time. She had gone missing six months ago, after her boyfriend died in what everyone else was quick to call murder. Lucille disagreed.
“She told me not to do it,” she added, almost immediately, as if preempting the obvious conclusion. “Like, multiple times. Very clearly. Even threatened me, saying she was going to snitch to my mom and she’d take away my phone, that Tony’d never let me into the lab again. But I ignored her.”
Dr. Rashid’s tone softened slightly. “Why?”
Lucille shrugged, but it was tighter this time.
“Because I thought it would be cool. And I wasn’t wrong--But don’t tell my mom I said that.”
Dr. Rashid didn’t respond to that.
Lucille continued, her voice flattening again as she slipped into recounting mode. “The lab was upstairs. Restricted access. Security was supposed to stop me, but…” She lifted one hand vaguely. “Not exactly prepared for me.”
Tick.
“There was this object in the room.” Lucille's fingers interlaced, tighter now. “It wasn’t supposed to be active. At least, not like that.”
Her brow furrowed slightly, as if trying to reconstruct something she didn’t fully understand even now. “It reacted when I got close.”
Dr. Rashid leaned in a fraction. “Reacted how?”
Lucille hesitated. “…Badly.”
A small exhale.
“It felt like something pulled on me. Not physically. More like… internally. I don’t know.”
Her fingers tightened. “That’s when everything… shifted.” Her voice lowered. “Gravity stopped behaving normally. Not around the room. Around me.”
She swallowed once. “Objects lifted. Moved. Not in a straight line—just… unstable. Like the rules stopped applying properly. And I couldn’t stop it.”
Silence settled again, heavier this time.
Tick.
Lucille's jaw tightened.
“It got worse before it got better,” she said. “If you can call it better.”
Dr. Rashid’s voice was careful. “What happened next?”
Lucille's answer came quieter.
“Things started, like, crumpling in on each other. And then I passed out.”
“When I woke up, everything had already changed.”
She leaned back again, arms crossing, but this time it felt less like deflection and more like containment.
“People were there. Containment. Monitoring. Questions I didn’t know how to answer. And my parents were pissed. Tony especially.”
Dr. Rashid observed her closely. “And how did that feel?”
Lucy didn’t answer right away.
Her eyes went back to the clock.
Tick.
“…not great,” she said finally, without emphasis. “I think it’s why my parents pushed the Accords so much. Tony…sometimes I think he feels like it’s his fault, but that’s not true. They said it was the safest…Nat told me the same thing when I tried to go with Steve.”
She didn’t look up as she said it.
“She said if I stayed, that if I ever wanted a normal life again, that was the only way I’d get it.”
Silence.
Tick.
Lucille leaned back into the couch, gaze fixed somewhere between the ceiling and the wall.
“…I didn’t really get a choice after that,” she added, quieter.
Dr. Rashid closed her notebook slowly.
“And before that?”
Lucille blinked.
“…Before that,” she repeated. Then, with a small, defensive exhale: “I made a really bad one.”
Lucille glanced at Dr. Rashid, as if daring her to argue.
But her expression held something more complicated underneath it now—not just deflection, but a thin layer of honesty she hadn’t fully covered up in time.
The clock kept ticking.