The universe was around you.

It was the feeling of feeling and not feeling, told and not told, that scared you the most. The way that your mind seemed in two places at once, inside your skull and viewing reality through your eyes, but also everywhere at once, in the plants in Africa, a chattering street in some remote corner of Asia, or perhaps it was a planet in a distant galaxy. It was often hard to tell, you had come to realise. Most civilisations on other worlds resembled that of what you had known for an eternity on Earth, bustling figures that walked on two legs, arguing about the weather, politics, religion and whatever else intelligent life could come up with.

You could feel a migraine ripping apart the back of your skull, the kind of migraine that came whenever you thought of these things, the energy, the blast, the beam of light that had threatened to rip apart the world and instead ripped apart your mind, scattering you into a thousand places at once. You didn't like these migraines, that's what you called them anyway. There was no prescription medication that could fix these sort of soul-splitting pains. There wasn't even a proper word in all of human or alien language that could accurately reflect and describe the sort of pain that you felt whenever your mind decided to wander, whenever you tapped into the split minds that composed your consciousness. Migraine was the best way you could normalize the pain, to deal with it in any sort of sane manner.

In a way, it was a sort of migraine. Every time you had an 'episode' as Banner liked to put it, you called him Banner anyway even though he insisted that 'father' would have been a more appropriate title, the pain resembled that of a migraine, though only a thousand times worse. You didn't like the term 'episode' as a means of referring to your migraines. An episode was like something you watched on television, an instrument of fiction that many watched for entertainment. The migraines were certainly anything from entertaining.

It wasn't like a television show, Banner assured you every time you expressed your disdain for the term. An episode was a word that could have many meanings and the definition that he was using related to the medical terminology in which a medical condition often presented its symptoms for a brief period of time and then went away.

No, you were firm that your migraines were not episodes. Banner had his episodes, whenever he would get a fit of anger and rip apart half of New York City. He didn't like it when you mentioned that particular detail, couldn't we put that behind us, he often asked? He was much better at controlling himself.

Control.

Banner could control his episodes, or at least by control, he knew when they were coming whenever his blood pressure spiked dramatically (in latent terms, whenever he got angry). But your episodes, your migraines, were different. No, they weren't the episodes that Banner got, you had not inherited any form of Banner's condition in your genome. His 'incident' happened several years following your birth. You had been born an ordinary human being on the planet Earth that was a part of a club that composed of over seven billion members (though it will probably exceed that number soon) and you were perhaps the least important figure in all of human history.

You couldn't control your migraines. You wished you could because then you wouldn't have them at all. Sometimes you would be sitting down and the pain would come, the feeling of your mind ripping apart, existing in not one or two, but a million different places at once. If this is what it felt like to be the universe, to exist in every permeable space of matter, to feel every heartbeat and every breath of the living and deceased from billions of years ago, to see empires that had lived, would live and currently do live all at once in the same time, then that was how your migraines felt.

You were vaguely aware of other voices around you. They may have been Banner's, or they could have been voices from some conversation halfway across the Milky Way Galaxy. There were some many voices, so many thoughts, so many souls and wants and desires all at the same time. If any of them, Stark, Odinson, Barton, Romanoff, or Banner were attempting to somehow reach you, it was futile. Part of your mind remained tethered to your vessel on the blue-green planet, to keep the heart and lungs functioning, but your consciousness, what made you, you, had expanded and faded into a larger background and was currently having a joy ride at the speed of light.

There was a loud ringing all around you and you assumed that your vessel, the vessel back on your home planet, was probably screaming. You didn't often scream during your migraines, though this one was lasting longer than the others had and it was particularly painful the longer they went. Sometimes you were afraid that you would simply fade away into the stars and silence of the universe during your migraines, that your consciousness would never return and your vessel would simply remain in a comatose state, always screaming until your vocal cords ripped in half and you choked on your own blood, ending the hell.

You usually didn't see anything during your migraines, when your consciousness left your body and started exploring the stars. It was more of a feeling, more of a hearing that raced through your understanding. But you were aware that all of these sensations were beginning to fade and the voices of your friends, well most of them you considered your friends, were beginning to grow in strength, overcoming the chatter that you were observing halfway across the universe. You could feel the rawness of your vocal cords that were beginning to croak rather than scream because you had been using them so much and hear the hushed whispers that many were offering, though they knew they were falling on deaf ears.

And just like that, the parts of your mind that had ripped apart from your vessel collided with the part of your mind that had stayed inside and you fell to the ground in a trembling heap.

"Three minutes and thirty-five seconds," someone reported from around you, though your mind was still racing at a million miles a minute to assign a voice to a face. You kept your eyes closed, afraid that if you opened them you would still be halfway across the universe.

"That's impossible." Your brain recognized the voice of Banner. "Most of their episodes - " You visibly flinched at the word episode, " - last only for thirty seconds on average, the longest being two minutes. Sure, these episodes have been getting progressively longer, but the disparity between this episode and the others that preceded it are astronomical."

Astronomical. That was funny given the fact that you had literally been ripped apart across space and time, exploring the stars, like an astronaut. Though human astronauts that would explore different universes or even planets wouldn't come around for another hundred years at least, or at least what you had heard during one of your migraines from how many months ago.

"(Y/n), are you with us?"

You felt Stark's hand clasp around your shoulder, though you could sense the strain in his muscles as if he half-expected you to jolt from your position and shatter the whole building. You didn't want to get up from your spot on the concrete floor, it was rather comfortable. It was like time was frozen at this particular point in time and if you opened your eyes, time would start moving again and the clock would start counting down until your next migraine.

You could practically feel the anxiety pulsating off the man-child billionaire which was rather unusual because his massive ego allowed little room for any concern for other human beings. With a reluctant sigh, you allowed your weight to shift towards your wrists as you pushed yourself off the ground, opening your eyes and wincing as your pupils shrank to accommodate the harsh sunlight.

How does it feel to know that your sun is someone else's star in the nighttime sky?

A feeling of being small, unimportant, that was what the migraines often left you feeling. You were unimportant on Earth, sure, that was the fate that awaited every human. But to explore the universe, or at least to feel the sensation of all existence running through your mind, to hear the chatter of trillions of souls and the massive expanse of time that had hosted all sorts of life, to know you were nothing more than a pixel on a much larger picture, left you feeling even more hollow and empty than before.

Those around you, the Avengers as they called themselves, were perhaps more important than you were. At least half the human population could point them out in a picture. You stayed out of the picture, out of any of the fights or missions or whatever the hell they were called. You were a liability as the man with the eyepatch put it. It was especially worse given your relation to Banner, as you were the weak link to his armour that he often wore, to prevent his green friend from showing himself. You were a tactic that the enemies could use to explore, to set him off and pose a danger to the others.

Your eyes met Banner's for a moment and you could have sworn you saw a flash of concern in his eyes, but it faded just as quickly as it had come and you began to realise that you may have imagined it. You were a laboratory experiment in his eyes, especially after the incident that had ended up starting the migraines in the first place.

The incident had left you with other things besides migraines, though you dared not explore the other things. The man with the eye patch was insistent about that. And even when you tried out the other things, it often left you with a migraine the following hour. You called them your 'friends without benefits.' Others may have referred to them as powers, similar to what the Avengers had, though they could usually access their abilities with little repercussions. You, on the other hand, usually had your mind shatter every time you tried to light up the room.

But that was a thought for another time.

"I'm fine," you muttered, looking at the trashed laboratory behind you, various medical instruments having been incinerated during your migraine. Your 'friends without benefits' usually activated during your migraines. It was hard to control them when your mind was floating halfway across the universe. "Sorry that I wrecked the place," you responded with a grim smile directed at Banner, half-expecting him to turn a shade greener from the sarcasm laced in your words. "I'll try not to do that next time."

"There might not be a next time," Banner insisted, taking a step closer to you. "That's why we're doing this, the monitoring, the experiments. If we can minimize the rapid shift in your brain frequencies every time one of your 'episodes' occur, we can delay how long they last and eventually stop them from happening at all."

Any onlooker may have viewed this as a fatherly gesture, the way that Banner often labored hours studying your brain waves and patterns to decipher the mysteries behind your migraines, to explain how you could exist in two places at once without leaving the room. But you knew him.

It was an obsession, the same obsession that had ravaged his mind when he had labored hours on end to decipher the 'Super Serum' or whatever the hell it was called, whatever they had used on Rogers that Banner was certain lay with gamma radiation. And looked where that had turned out for the two of you.

His obsessions were dangerous, you knew that. You think Banner knew it too but convinced himself otherwise, assuring himself that he was driven by a parental instinct to protect his offspring. Whatever helped him sleep at night.

"I just want to go to sleep," you muttered, pretending to rub the fatigue out of your eyes, though you weren't exactly a star actor and this wasn't a movie, so you really weren't convincing anyone. Banner opened his mouth to interject and so did Tony, but the look that Barton shot their way shut the two men-children up. You brushed past Banner, noticing the slight wince as your skin made contact with his. It might have been out of fear, though it was most likely surprise. You weren't exactly the friendliest towards him given the history between the two of you; it had probably been ages since the two of you had even hugged. Thus physical contact, even by accident, was probably enough to set him off.

Banner cast one last look at you as you stood by the entrance of the laboratory, your gaze occasionally flickering towards the New York skyline outside that was offered by the lovely Stark Tower that you temporarily lived in. The look was different from the ones he often gave you, the ones where he seemed not to be analyzing you but what was inside of you, your 'friends without benefits' and your migraines. You weren't an experiment to him in this look that existed between the two of you, though you weren't sure exactly how he was perceiving you at this given moment.

"Your - " You were certain he was about to say episode, but given the flash of annoyance in your eyes, he changed his vocabulary. "Your migraine," he repeated, "lasted a lot longer than usual. I know you don't like talking about what you feel during those times, but your brain activity seemed a lot more rapid and inconsistent with other readings in the past. Was there anything different, something that we should note?"

You felt your tongue flatten against the roof of your mouth. "No," you muttered and spun on your heel, walking out the door and signifying you wished to discuss your migraine no further. You were certain that there would be plenty more in the future that you and Banner would happily note.

But the truth was, this migraine had been different. You thought this as you entered the mess of your room, sitting down on your bed and rubbing your temples, trying to clear out the hollow feeling that still echoed inside your skull, your consciousness having reconnected with your mind but yet not entirely fused. You didn't think it would ever be the same as it was before the incident.

You weren't sure if the difference was what had caused the increase in the duration of your migraine, but it was the only detail that distinguished this one from the countless others before.

Usually whenever you had a migraine, it was like your consciousness ripped from your skull and started exploring every nook and cranny of space and time. Usually, you were the one reaching out, floating as a silent observer to the life and happenings of the universe without anyone to notice you.

You weren't sure who, or what planet, or even what year it had been, but as your consciousness had torn across the universe at the speed of light and time, you had frozen for a second, trapped by a consciousness that had sensed your existence, ripped you from your travels and frozen you for a brief moment. You were sure that you were being examined, though not in the way that Banner did with his objective curiosity. There was more sentiment, more emotional curiosity with this consciousness than Banner's scientific attitude.

But the moment had passed and you were released. It had been so brief that you weren't even sure if it had even happened in the first place. Your migraines often messed with your sense of perception, it could have been a figment of your imagination for all you knew.

But you were sure that someone, something had been there, had sensed you for the first time.

And that was all the more frightening.