To anyone on the outside, anyone who didn’t know who that young woman was walking down the street, they would have seen nothing but a beautiful lady. A bit cold, yes, but beautiful. Glowing and intimidating and superb as she strode over the pavement in four-inch stilettos as though she were walking in tennis shoes. The red dress she wore accented every curve and clung close to her skin, the material perfect against her toned body.

        She held her chin just a bit higher than being perfectly level. She was confident, as she should be. She knew that the people on the street noticed her. They noticed her movements and her beauty.

        They were pitiful and shallow. But they were not her interest today. She had travelled for hours upon hours to get here. A place she never thought she’d return to. At least, not by her own will.

        But it was her will, wasn’t it?

        Her eyes were void of any warmth. Ever since that close encounter, the fear coursing through her when she saw that sheer drop in Stark Towers . . . Ever since she’d heard that argument between Bucky and Steve and they hadn’t come to speak to her after she’d yelled.

        Lithium was here for unfinished business. Business that only the memory of Iris had given her the courage to carry out.

        It was courage, wasn’t it?

        Lithium wasn’t sure, but dressed in her old attire, she was certain the man she was meeting would recognize her tonight.

        And he would never see anyone else again.

        ~~~

        “ ‘Leste?” Steve called out gently as he knocked on her door. That morning, he had gone to find her, but she had already departed while everyone was asleep. “Celeste, can we talk about this? I know you’re upset, but . . .” He sighed, unsure of what to say. Would any combination of words make her see that they hadn’t meant to upset her? “Celeste, please just let me in so we can work through this. We’re a team. We need to act as such.”

        “She’s not in there, Steve.” Her voice was smooth and even, but there was a sliver of concern in Natasha’s eyes, her arms crossed. “She left last night.”

        “What?” Steve asked, staring at her in disbelief as he turned to her. “You didn’t say anything? You didn’t STOP her?”

        “You didn’t see the look in her eyes, Steve. She would’ve cut my throat open,” Natasha said with utter conviction, returning his stare. “Whatever she’s going to do, it’s something she needs to get just get out of the way and move on. Sometimes you just need to lose yourself in order to find who you are again.”

        “She could be in danger!” Steve exclaimed, genuine worry washing over him.

        Natasha merely shook her head at him, pinching the bridge of her nose briefly before meeting his gaze again. “She is far more dangerous than anything she encounters right now, Steve.”

        ~~~

        “Where do you think you’re going?” Bucky asked, watching as Steve finished suiting up, grabbing his iconic shield off the floor. “You can’t play hero with everyone all the time.”

        “We don’t abandon our teammates, Bucky. I didn’t abandon you and I won’t abandon her,” Steve replied evenly.

        “She’s in a dangerous place, Steve,” James retorted, his voice flat. “Both physically and mentally. You don’t know what she’s capable of right now.”

        “So?” Steve asked, looking Bucky straight in the eye. “It was the same with you.”

        “You’re not going alone,” Bucky answered. “We’re a team.”

        ~~~

        Lithium’s thoughts came slowly. Not stalled, but even and calculated. Her mind was utterly clear as she stood outside the hotel room and knocked quietly on the door. She’d intercepted a call about an hour ago. Inside this room were three men. One of which had placed a call for a prostitute to arrive around this time. Lithium had intercepted the young woman in the lobby, paid her double than she was promised for her services and sent her away.

        The poor woman would’ve wound up either dead or an experiment had Lithium not done so. And now they were expecting a beautiful woman at their doorstep.

        They weren’t prepared for beautiful and deadly.

        ~~~

        “How do you even propose we find her?” Bucky asked as they drove.

        “The cell phone Stark made her has a high-accuracy GPS active at all times,” Steve replied. “In case Hydra ever found her and took her prisoner, we wanted to make sure we could find her and bust her out. It’s the same for all of us. To keep Hydra out, the GPS signal is only accessible from Stark’s technology or one of the other phones. Get yours out and get a lock on her.”

        ~~~

        Just six seconds after the door had opened, the man with his hand on the doorknob stared at Lithium, his expression morphing from shocked to lusty. It had taken him a few seconds to realize who she was, but that didn’t surprise her. He was the one to work with her the least. A nobody. Worthless.

        As soon as it registered in him who she was, her self-control diminished and she bristled -- literally.

        Metal spikes rose like hairs out of Lithium’s skin, thin as needles and nearly invisible except for the glint of light. Lithium took aim at the man whose name she couldn’t even recall, only those green eyes that had judged her for so many nights and days. With a swipe of her arm through the air, the metal needles flew from her skin, lodging deep into him like tiny bullets.

        The shards of metal caused small spurts of blood as they pierced his neck, chest and abdomen, shredding his skin, his trachea, his internal organs. He lived in agony for only a split second before his own blood seeped out of his veins and arteries, a nearly instantaneous death, his heart one of the damaged areas.

        Lithium hadn’t even touched him. She hadn’t needed to.

        His two ‘friends’ whipped their heads towards the doorway as their co worker fell to the floor. The unfortunate man hadn’t even had the time to scream.

        Lithium closed the door behind her, firmly, but not slamming it. She didn’t want to attract any unnecessary attention. The metal still stood on end out of her back as she strode towards them. She wanted them to see what they’d made of her.

        A very dangerous, very deadly woman.

        She would feel no remorse as she tore them to shreds.

        ~~~

        "We need to find this woman," Steve insisted to the bellhop after they'd stormed into the hotel. This was where Bucky's phone had tracked Celeste's signal to. Steve held up his own phone, a device he'd fought with for hours trying to figure out.

        A device Celeste had helped him learn to operate when they weren't training.

        On the screen was a picture of himself alongside Celeste. His expression was one of confusion as he watched her, almost in awe and tinged with adoration, and hers a perfect smile as she watched the lens. She'd called it a 'selfie' and Steve must've looked at it a thousand times after she'd stormed off last night. It brought him a little solace to believe that perhaps he really had known the woman in the picture, and it gave him hope that he would find her tonight.

        She still existed, didn’t she? Or had she merely been a flicker of a being that existed in between the moments where Hydra dominated her life?

        ~~~

        “Y-You’re marvelous . . .” He muttered from where he sat, frozen as he watched her stalk him. The second man was already dead and on the floor, his blood irreparably staining the carpet. “Absolutely insane, but marvelous . . .”

        Lithium barked a laugh as she vanished behind him again. “I am beautiful and deadly. But you . . .” She snarled as gripped his neck from behind, her small needles pricking against the delicate skin underneath his jaw. “You are a monster. Destroying people so that they fit your ideals. Breaking people so effortlessly. You have no conscience. Not a care in the world. Do you care now, Darling?” The needles extended from her palms further, just enough to draw blood. “Do you care now what happened to your little experiments? Did you even care when you killed Copper? Did you care at all when you slaughtered Iris?”

        “I had nothing to do with that!” He protested as the metal extended deeper into his skin, now starting to prick into his muscles, tendons and deeper into his veins. “It wasn’t my decision!”

        “But could you have stopped it! You could’ve prevented her death, couldn’t you? You could’ve kept them from killing her if you had wanted to!” In the distance, somewhere down the hotel hallway, she could hear Steve calling for her.

        “Pierce-!”

        “Don’t tell me about Pierce! Pierce is dead!” She could hear Bucky as well now. Their voices were getting louder, closer. “You could’ve fought to keep her alive, couldn’t you?” Lithium was starting to lose her control, the sharp metal digging deep enough that her hands were starting to be bathed in his blood.

        “Celeste!”

        “Lithium!” Their calls were clearer now.

        “Yes-! But she deserved to die-!” Suddenly, he coughed, and the action caused him to thrust forward, his neck impaling deeper against the needles, the bits of metal extending from the startling movement.

        Lithium let go of him as he stopped breathing and his heart stopped pumping. Slowly, she pulled away, watching his deceased form.

        “So did you,” she muttered.

        “Celeste!” Steve threw open the door, and in that instant, Lithium leapt from the eighth-story window, all fear gone as she plummeted to the pavement below. Instinctively, the metal protected her, her natural armor causing her to leave a small crater in the sidewalk where she landed.

        Lithium laid there for a while, the voices of her comrades calling for her, panicked when she didn’t answer them. She didn’t care. Part of her had died when Iris had, and with that gaping hole, it was starting to rot the rest of her, from the inside out.