Hydra kept its secrets the way a grave keeps bones, silent, layered, and heavy with things that should never see daylight, and deep inside a Sokovian facility buried beneath concrete, steel, and arrogance, one such secret sat breathing in a glass cell while the world above pretended monsters only lived in fairy tales. The file didn't carry a name at first, just a designation number stamped in red and black, surrounded by warning symbols that meant nothing to the soldiers who followed orders and everything to the scientists who learned too late what they had helped create.
Lucy learned early that pain had a rhythm, because Hydra never hurt you once and walked away, they stayed, they observed, they adjusted dials and dosages and emotional pressure the way chefs adjusted seasoning, always searching for that perfect reaction where the body broke but did not die. She learned to count her breaths in the dark, to focus on the hum of machines instead of the screaming nerves in her spine, and to pretend the walls were not listening even though she knew they were, because in Hydra, even concrete had ears and everything you were became data.
The Mind Stone was never meant for her, not directly, not the way it was for the twins, but Hydra learned quickly that proximity alone was enough to change a human body, enough to twist cells, rewrite instincts, and awaken hungers that had no name yet. Lucy felt it like heat under her skin, like something invisible pressing against her soul and asking permission she never gave, and when the first guard collapsed near her cell after a power fluctuation, she didn't even understand what she had done, only that she felt warm for the first time in weeks and the hunger in her chest went quiet.
That was the day Hydra stopped calling her a subject and started calling her a problem, because Wanda bent reality and Pietro bent speed, but Lucy bent something uglier, something that didn't show itself in pretty red light or visible motion, something that crept into veins and lungs and hearts and drank quietly until the body noticed too late. The doctors argued behind glass, their voices muffled, their hands shaking, because this was not a gift they could showcase, this was not a weapon they could easily aim, this was a predator they had accidentally raised in a cage.
They increased restraints after that, thicker cuffs, insulated walls, gloves for anyone who came within arm's reach, and Lucy learned the cruelty of distance in a place that already felt like hell, because she could hear people, she could feel life moving around her, and her body reacted to it like thirst in a desert. She pressed her hands to the glass sometimes and imagined warmth flowing into her, not to hurt anyone, just to feel alive, and then hated herself for even thinking it because Hydra made survival feel like a sin.
Somewhere in another wing of the same facility, two siblings were being told they were special, that their pain meant something, that their suffering would change the world, and Lucy heard their names whispered by technicians who thought she was asleep. Wanda Maximoff. Pietro Maximoff. The twins with visible miracles, the ones Hydra would parade if they could, and Lucy realized in that moment that she was the secret you buried so the heroes looked cleaner, the stain you locked away so the narrative stayed pretty.
Her first real escape attempt ended with three soldiers on the floor and blood on her hands that she did not remember spilling, because her powers did not ask permission and her body did not wait for her conscience to catch up. She remembered screaming, not in fear, but in shock at how easy it was, at how natural it felt to pull warmth and strength out of someone else like air into starving lungs. Hydra dragged her back, sedated her, labeled the incident a containment failure, and updated her file with a single word written larger than all the others, unstable.
Lucy stopped crying after that, not because she felt less, but because tears felt useless in a place that cataloged suffering like inventory, and instead she started watching, listening, learning patterns, memorizing guard rotations, memorizing the way fear smelled on people who pretended they were in control. She learned that Hydra feared her in a way they did not fear the twins, because power you could see was easier to counter than power you could feel slipping away with no warning.
When the alarms began during the Sokovia incident, they did not sound heroic, they sounded panicked, jagged, full of voices yelling codes and names and emergency procedures that overlapped into noise. Lucy felt it before she heard it, a surge in the air, a pressure shift that made her bones hum, and she knew something big had broken loose, something that would change everything whether Hydra wanted it to or not.
Cells opened and closed down the corridor as systems failed, red lights flashing like angry eyes, and Lucy stood barefoot on cold metal, heart pounding, because this was the first real chance the world had ever given her. She didn't run right away, she pressed her palm to a fallen technician's shoulder, felt the familiar rush, felt strength flood her muscles and clarity snap into her thoughts, and for one horrible second, she understood why Hydra had never stopped.
She saw Wanda once, only for a moment, red energy flickering around her like living emotion, and Lucy felt something twist inside her chest that had nothing to do with hunger. That was what power was supposed to look like, visible, dramatic, something people could cheer for, and Lucy knew even then that if anyone ever saw what she did up close, they would not cheer, they would step back, they would flinch, they would call her a monster before they called her a miracle.
By the time the facility started collapsing into itself, Lucy was already moving through smoke and sparks, fueled by borrowed strength and raw adrenaline, touching walls, touching railings, touching anything that grounded her long enough to keep the panic from swallowing her whole. She didn't know where she was going, only that forward was better than back, and that Hydra behind her was more terrifying than whatever waited outside.
She emerged into cold Sokovian air with lungs burning and eyes watering, the sky gray and heavy like it was holding its breath, and for the first time in her life, Lucy stood without glass between her and the world. Freedom did not feel clean or heroic, it felt messy and terrifying and stained with everything she had taken to survive, and she hugged herself not because she was cold, but because she was afraid of what she would become without a cage to blame.
Somewhere above the city, metal was flying and heroes were rising and a war was beginning that the news would one day replay in dramatic slow motion, but Lucy was already disappearing into alleys and broken streets, a third survivor no one would mention, a ghost Hydra would pretend never existed. Her file would be buried, her name erased, but the hunger in her chest would follow her wherever she went, whispering that survival always costs something, and for Lucy, the bill had only just begun.