AT THE TRISKELION IN WASHINGTON, D.C, a thick cloud of fog was passing by - one that had been plaguing the east coast for days after the conclusion of the Battle of New York. S.H.I.E.L.D was operating on high-alert, seeing as they had just barely escaped the brink of annihilation from an other-worldly god, hellbent on forcing mankind into subjugation. 

Director Nick Fury sat mindlessly at his desk, his eye focused on nothing in particular. It was almost as if he was trying to wish away the fog - to wish away the remnant of a war that had unnecessarily taken too many innocent lives in a city with over eight million people. Suddenly, the director's thoughts were interrupted with one agent Phil Coulson walking briskly into Fury's office, holding up a glass contrivance that connected to a live recording on East 10th Street, more specifically the block where the Wolfe family resided.

"Sir, we seem to have a situation," Agent Coulson stated, almost noticeable twinge of urgency in his voice. The usual cool, calm and collected man seemed on edge. Whether it was because of the recent events, or of something else, Fury would have to find out.

He swiveled around in his chair to face the trusted agent. "Well, that doesn't sound good. What is it?" he replied with a suspicious raise of his eyebrows. 

"It's about the Wolfe's. Our team has been monitoring all known enhanced's very closely for the past week or so. Every weekday at precisely 4:05pm, Phaedra Wolfe walks down this exact street with her twin daughters on their way home from school. It's 4:17pm, and we haven't had a single sighting of neither her, nor her kids, all day."

The director let a built-up huff of air escape his lungs. "Let me see that," Fury said, taking ahold of the device and maximizing the video so that it appeared as a semi-tangible hologram, able to have a 360˚view of the street. He raised a hand, spinning the hologram so that it faced the apartment building that the small family of three lived in. 

That building had been their home for nearly ten years. 3,650 days of daily walks to school, the park, out to dinner, and then back home to watch cartoons. Although enhanced, they were still a family, which made this fluctuation increasingly suspicious to the two S.H.I.E.L.D affiliates. 

As Fury's meticulous eye scanned the outside of the apartment building, he reached the same conclusion as Coulson: the Wolfe's were nowhere to be seen. He zoomed in on the mailbox region inside the building, and the number belonging to the family was still unopened. It didn't take a genius to realize that something was wrong. 

"Have you called the kids' school? Checked their attendance at all?" Fury asked as he continued to survey the building. 

"Yes. Agent Hill called in as an aunt who was double-checking about pick-up times. The principle sent his regards and hoped that Calla and Corinne get well soon." 

"Dammit, Coulson," Fury sighed in frustration. He didn't want to believe the worst, especially when an enhanced family was involved. There were always two turnouts to this sort of situation: either they fled, or something terrible happened. He hoped it was neither. "Get Stark, Romanoff, and Rogers on the phone. Their vacation might need to be put on hold for a little bit."

-•-•-

There was only red. Red on the walls, red on the carpets, red on ten-year-old Calla Wolfe's pale face and dainty hands. Suddenly, her head felt like a barren wasteland. As her deep blue eyes stared holes into the two bodies at the tips of her feet, it was as if the world stopped, and the neurons in her brain stopped firing. 

The girl didn't know where she was, who she was, what color the sky was . . . what the thick crimson liquid imprinted on her hands and knees, was. 

Calla took a step forward, the empty expression on her mother's and sister's faces burning deep into her retinas. She wanted to look away. Oh God, she wanted too look away - but she couldn't. She was numb, frozen in place, and filled with nothing more than ethereal darkness. 

And then she remembered where she was; she was home. Her safe, beloved home situated in Lower Manhattan, just a thirty-minute walk to Central Park. She loved her home; it was where everything good in her life had happened, but now it's eggshell-colored walls were tainted with the scarlet brandishing of death.

She remembered who she was; Calla Wolfe, daughter of Phaedra Wolfe and twin sister to Corinne Wolfe. They were the only people who truly knew Calla, and vice versa. Every waking moment of her short ten years of life had revolved around them; as if she was a planet and they were the sun. Her daily walk to school had always begun with the girl latching onto her mom's hand and waking up a snoring Corinne who had begged for 'just five more minutes!'

She remembered what color the sky was; a beautiful dark grey, with the same fog that had been present for a week. She loved that sort of weather, the kind that your eyes could settle on without squinting, like a breath of fresh air. In weather like this, she would've - no, should've - been smiling, leaping for joy on the roof of her building that she loved oh, so much . . . even if the fog came from something so destructive.

Then, Calla looked down at her hands, and remembered what lingered on her ghostly-toned skin. It was blood - her mother's and sister's blood, that now soiled Calla's freshly washed bluejeans and purple sweater.

Suddenly, the initial shock that acted as a shield from realty, crumbled. Her hand traveled up to her face, connecting with a pool of tears that had fallen from her eyes, leaving streaks of red across her cheeks. Calla's lip quivered as she fell to her knees. "Momma," she choked out, with desperate cerulean eyes clouding with unshed tears. "Momma! Corinne!"

Callainched forward, tugging on her mother's and sister's clothes, hoping that the forlorn, panicked jolts would wake them up and wash away the blood splattered across their faces.

It was then that she finally understood the feeling that had been lurking in her chest for a decade. It was a regretfully familiar feeling - returning back to her like an old friend.

It began on Calla's first birthday, when her father was killed in a car crash caused by a reckless driver. She screamed so loudly that she damaged her vocal chords, and couldn't muster even a babble for close to twelve weeks.

The next was when her grandfather died from an undetected brain aneurism in 2006. The five-year-old cried mercilessly for two days afterwards, haunted by the indescribably anguish that no toddler should ever have to feel.

When Calla's interminable screams returned after her favorite second-grade teacher passed away from a long battle with cancer, her mother knew that something was wrong. Phaedra Wolfe had always assumed that only one of her twin baby girls was born with Wolfe-family powers, as Corrine had already shown immense progress with hers. She was able to wilt a lush patch of flowers in under a minute, with no more than a bead of sweat forming on her forehead. Calla, on the other hand, had shown no signs of possessing a form of death-force manipulation like her mother and sister had. And for a while, Phaedra Wolfe was disappointed that her other daughter wasn't a beholder of their ancient familial gifts - until she realized that Calla did, in fact, have a gift of her own. She possessed the "death sense," a form of precognition that forced her grandmother to ultimately end her life a handful of years ago. Then, Phaedra Wolfe felt nothing but fear for her other little girl.

So, as Calla stared down at her mother and sister with sobs racking her chest like thunderbolts, she understood why her mother always seemed to isolate Calla from making any close connections with people - from attaching her soul to others. It was because being lonely and safe was better than this, the feeling of empty, onyx nothingness choking her from the inside out.

Calla's eyes receded back into her skull, a lock of dark brown hair falling onto her face. She laid her head against her mother's bloodied chest, and a hand on her twin sister's cheek. "Please - Momma, Cory - please," the ten-year-old whimpered, but of course, no one answered.

Calla Wolfe was completely and utterly alone in the world, and an awful feeling was beginning to bubble in her chest. It was different from her death-sense . . . it was like injecting acid into one's veins, eroding away at the viscous lining until all that was left was the feeling of burning. And for a second, all she saw was black.

-•-•-

Hours seemed to pass within the blink of an eye, as the next time Calla looked up, it was dark outside - or at least as dark as it could get in the city that never sleeps. Those neon lights that once illuminated not only the streets, but Calla, too, were now nothing more than different shades of grey.

The girl's position hadn't changed, with one hand still holding desperately onto her mother and the other onto Corinne. Calla's tear ducts had eventually run dry, entering a state of involuntary drought, but her face still held onto the persistent red streaks that adorned her cheeks like the hellish Phlegethon river.

Her ragged breath increased as she attempted to sit up, fumbling from dehydration. Calla wanted to get up, to get the hell out of her home and never look back, but something felt wrong. Very wrong.

Her eyes trailed over to an entourage of potted plants atop her mother's bedside table. As soon as her eyes met them, their vibrant green color quickly faded to a sickly yellow with muddy brown spots as they had the life drained out of them. The plants had wilted, just like Corinne had been able to do.

Calla let out a mangled yelp as she pushed herself up against the wall, darting her eyes to the ground. "W-what?" she breathed out, her voice wavering terribly. Was is her who had just wilted those flowers? It couldn't have been . . . right? After all, her only ability was death-sense.

After a minute of peace and quiet, a voice began to swirl in the back of Calla's mind - a voice that quickly multiplied. Only, they weren't voices . . . they were something less than human. Her body turned frigid, like a block of pure ice. She desperately clasped her hands over her ears, willing the noise to just go away, but it wouldn't. 

Calla's eyes shot open, peering around her apartment to see if anyone was there. But she was alone, just as she had been before. There was only her. Her, and her dead mother and sister. 

As the girl went to move another piece of stray hair from her face, she jumped as her ice-cold fingers brushed against her face. Calla's hands shook as her cavernous blue eyes studied them intently. With a heart that pounded against her ribcage, she pulled her knees up to her chest. "What's happening to me?" 

Her thoughts ceased as fast-approaching footsteps seemed to creep closer and closer to her apartment door. It's them - she thought - they're coming back to kill me, too. 

And in that moment, she wasn't scared anymore. She would be with her mother and Corinne, and everything would simply stop. Except that wasn't what happened; not in the slightest.

With a forceful crash, followed by the lingering echo of metal, the door to her home was thrown open.

"I don't hear anyone; maybe they really did just pack up and leave. Think about it - if your home was almost just destroyed by a maniacal God, why would you stay?" the girl heard a deep feminine voice say from the the living room. Calla was coveted by the confines of her mother's bedroom, still not having left the sides of her and her sister. It offered the girl a twisted sense of comfort, despite them being anything but alive. It felt like they were still here - that they were only just sleeping. 

"Without packing up any of their belongings? Not even their family pictures?" a separate voice said, but a softer, masculine one.

"All I want to know is, when did we become Dora The Explorer and company? Fury just as easily could've asked a few agents to do this," a final voice said, this one holding a more sarcastic tone than the rest. Calla tried to remember all of the voices she had heard in her short life, but these people didn't match any of them. She was still trapped in place, paralyzed from fear. Perhaps it wasn't a fear of the voices in her living room, rather a fear of the world in general. Terrible people and things existed out there - the fate of her mother and sister was obvious examples of that. What would the people in her living room do to her? Where would they bring her? 

"And as soon as we find this family, the sooner you can go back to doing whatever the hell it is that you do, Tony," the woman responded. 

"I'm gonna go check the bedrooms. You two check the balcony and the kitchen," the softer male voice said, and Calla's heart began thump louder and louder as the heavy footsteps approached the room she was in. 

As the door creaked open, Calla felt a surge of anxiety run coldly through her veins as she quickly hid behind a dresser. After a moment of excruciating silence, the man let out a pained wince. "In here," he called out. His voice sounded regretful, almost like he cared. 

Calla heard the two other people trail in, muttering explicatives under their breath as they met the mangled corpses of Phaedra and Corinne Wolfe.

"Dammit," the formerly sarcastic male's voice said. Why were these people so affected by the deaths of people whom they didn't even know?

"Wait . . . Fury said the mother had two girls," the other male responded.

"There wasn't anyone else in the kitchen, living room, or balcony. Do you think whoever did this took her?"

As Calla muffled her breathing with her elbow, she listened in on what the three were saying, wishing that they would just go away. She didn't want to be around people. People were bad. People hurt other people. People couldn't be trusted - at least, not anymore. 

The girl sunk her head between her knees, envisioning herself anywhere else. For one second she was in Hawaii, making sandcastles on the pristine beaches. For another second she was in London, visiting Big Ben and walking throughout the streets. Calla shut her eyes, covered her ears and tuned out the rest of the word; so much so that she didn't even realize the clement set of footsteps coming her way.

"No," the woman said softly, turning around to face the two men. "No, she wasn't taken."

As Calla's head snapped up from her knees, her gaze met that of a redheaded woman with deep green eyes, holding an unreadable expression. The woman seemed cold and emotionless, but Calla had been the recipient of that look from her mother many times. This woman wasn't cold and emotionless.

Suddenly, Calla was surrounded. The redheaded woman, a man with sandy blond hair and a strange metal shield, and a man with black hair and a goatee, all stood around her. Each pair of eyes swirled with different emotions, and it made Calla nauseous. Too many people, too many people, too many people.

"Please," the girl managed to choke out, fighting back the tears that pooled in her eyes. "Please just go away. I promise I won't say anything, just please don't make me leave."

"Don't worry," the blond man spoke softly, careful as to not frighten her anymore than she already way. "My name is Steve, and this is Natasha and Tony. We just want to help you."

"I don't need your help. I want to stay here, with my momma and Cory," Calla replied as her lip quivered. 

Natasha took a small step forward, causing the girl to inch backward. "You can't stay here, but we can bring you somewhere safe."

Calla didn't trust them. How could she, after all? Her mother was dead, her sister was dead, and the ten-year-old was left with nothing and no-one . . . but a though prodded incessantly at the back of her mind. Where would she go?

"Come on, kid," Tony said, holding a hand out to the wary girl in front of him. "You'll be okay. You can come with us."

-•-•-

this was so extra, I'm so sorry. I tried to make it as brief as possible, but I got carried away. I also hate how this turned out, rip. I just feel so bad for my bby, I want to give her a hug.

also, I'll get into whats up w Cal's powers in chapter 1! it'll be a lot better, I promise.