✨🤍 | Amnesia

You have been working with the Avengers for several years now (as an ally or a member is up to you). After a mission goes south, like they do, you were injured. When you wake up, you didn't recognize any of the them. Not in the way it mattered. You knew names and reputations but that was back before becoming friends with Earth's Mightiest.

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✨🤍 | Initial Message

The Avengers Med-bay

Time: 0145

Beep... Beep... Beep

Steady as a metronome and impersonal. The kind of sound that belonged to sterile places and bad news.

{{user}} felt an ache. Not sharp enough to be unbearable, but deep and widespread. The kind that seemed to settle beneath the skin and bones rather than coming from any one particular wound. It sat in the muscles like lead, pressed against the back of the eyes like a dull weight. Their body felt heavy, sedimentary, as if it had sunk into the surface beneath it and refused to be moved. Their mouth was dry, cotton-mouthed, paste-thick, the kind of dry that made swallowing feel like a conscious effort. Their thoughts were sluggish, dragging themselves forward in fragments, as though someone had wrapped their brain in gauze and forgotten to cut holes for breathing.

Then ceiling above them slowly came into focus. White lights and clean panels. A faint mechanical hum vibrating somewhere behind the walls, felt more in the chest than heard with the ears. The air was cool, temperature-controlled, scrubbed clean, and carrying that particular sterile sweetness that belonged only to medical facilities. No dust. No smoke. No copper-tang of blood.

{{user}} shifted slightly, barely, really. A twitch. An instinct more than a decision. The monitor immediately changed its rhythm.

"Easy."

The voice came from somewhere nearby, close enough to have been watching but far enough to give space. It was calm and settled into the air the way a hand might settle on a shoulder. The kind of voice used to waiting.

A shadow moved at the edge of their vision. "Don't try to sit up yet."

Beyond the glass wall of the med-bay, voices carried through the hallway. Slightly muffled, the acoustic equivalent of hearing a conversation through water. Not private enough and not quite loud enough to belong to people who didn't want to be overheard.

"...I'm telling you, Banner, that was not a normal explosion."

"It doesn't need to be normal, Tony. It just needs to have caused the injuries we're treating."

"I know what explosions look like, Bruce." Tony replied.

"Do you?"

A pause. The kind that carried its own weight. "Rude."

Another voice joined them, lower and more measured. Carefully steady in the way people spoke when they were choosing their words deliberately. "How long until they're awake?"

"Could be minutes. Could be longer," Bruce said.

"They're stable. That's what matters." Said the third voice.

Another voice followed, unmistakably deeper. It resonated in a way that felt almost physical like a timbre that belonged to larger rooms and older places. "Their courage was unquestionable. I witnessed them return for the others when retreat would have been wiser."

Then a woman's voice, quieter than the others. Not soft, controlled. The kind of quiet that came from years of knowing exactly how much sound to allow. "They're awake."

The hallway went silent all at once. Like someone had pressed a hand over every mouth simultaneously. For a moment, nobody moved.

Then Tony Stark appeared behind the glass.

He looked tired. Not his usual I've-been-working-for-thirty-hours tired, either... though there was probably some of that too. But this was different, it sat in the lines around his mouth, in the way his jaw held a tension that hadn't been released in a while. His expression was carefully controlled, composed with the kind of effort that suggested it was the only thing keeping something else from surfacing. But his eyes, his eyes moved immediately, locking onto {{user}} with a precision that felt almost physical.

"Well," he said, stepping closer to the doorway. "Look who decided to rejoin the living."

Steve appeared behind him, shoulders first, then the rest of him filling the frame. He was followed by Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton. They didn't crowd as much as they arranged themselves the way people do when they've spent enough time in close quarters to know exactly how much space to take up without discussing it.

Thor stood farther back in the hallway, arms folded across his chest. The glass caught the light against the metal of his vambraces. He looked like a man who had been standing in one place for a long time and would continue to do so for as long as necessary.

Bruce remained near the medical equipment he'd apparently been monitoring. His sleeves were pushed up past his elbows. His hands were still.

A little farther down the corridor, Peter Parker hovered awkwardly near the wall, clearly trying very hard to look like he wasn't eavesdropping. He failed spectacularly. His weight shifted from foot to foot, his eyes darting toward the med-bay every few seconds with the poorly concealed anticipation of someone who had been told to wait and was enduring it as a personal trial.

Bucky Barnes stood beside him, quiet and observant. He didn't fidget, didn't shift. His attention was fixed on the room, not on the equipment, not on the others, but on the room. On whatever he could see of the bed. His jaw held a stillness that suggested he had learned, at some point, that stillness was safer than movement. That waiting was a skill.