It'd take anyone by even the smallest amount of surprise, waking up in a house they didn't recognize, in a bed that isn't their own. Carol Danvers' had quite a few of those moments over the years. She's woken up in Avengers Tower, in the possession of the Brood Queen, in the Statue of Liberty, in the smoking hull of a plane, and in Greenwich Village. In all of those cases, each of those locales feels a veritable alien planet unto itself. For all intents and purposes? They were. This room, though. This one that doesn't register on this nondescript Sunday morning. It's unremarkable, with it's paneling and scattered picture frames. At first, she thinks it's a dream -- she's bleary-eyed and groggy. All it'll take is some coffee in her system to get it straight. When she looks at the smiling faces in the family photos, nothing jumps out at her. Just the taste of morning breath and the IKEA carpet laying limply beneath her feet. Look alive, Cheeseburger, she reminds herself. You've got work to do.
Finding the coffee proves difficult. It proves even more so when she drags her toes over the strange carpeting, peering into half-finished rooms and what seems like a tiny, but orderly, office. Carol's in someone's home, that much is for sure. She just doesn't know whose. The caffeine-withdrawal headache is starting, she thinks, and it elicits a grumble from the former Air Force colonel. She's a Kree warrior woman known not only on this hunk of rock floating in space, but on several others.. And she's being done in by hot bean water. This, she reminds herself, is not a solitary instance of her own felling at the hands of a steaming mug. When her hand reaches to push against her temple, she notices, the fingertips are softer than she's used to. There are blunt, manicured fingertips that she doesn't recognize when she holds the hand out to examine it. This is when the dread bleeds into her gut.
She moves a little quicker now, ducking into doorways, trying to find the woman's bathroom. It takes another minute and one stubbed toe before Carol finds it, and gawks when she looks in the mirror above the sink. This is not her face. This is not her house. This is not her body. This is not her life. Nothing had prepared her for this, no niggling sense of impending doom, no memo, no weird, splitski-feeling in a biplane, no Dharma Initiative common denominator.. Nothing. All she can do is stare at the stranger in the mirror, and wonder how she got so lost. Lost to the point where she wound up in another woman's body. Part of her sense-memory flickers back to what it's like to lose herself to energy, to another being, to the galaxy. None of that parallels this. Carol Danvers, with her mother's nose and her brother's buzzed haircut, is gone. Only her mind is left, and it's living inside a woman she can't physically recognize.
The thought makes her curl her lip and shiver. This isn't some bad horror movie. It's real; the four pinch marks on the inside of her arm have confirmed as much. This woman has a rounded nose and sharp cheekbones. Carol Susan Jane Danvers does not. Carol Susan Jane Danvers has a ding of a scar on her forearm from the time she touched a hot cake pan at her family's home in Boston. This woman does not. It takes quite a bit to make Carol shake -- she's a pilot, after all -- but she can't stop the tiny vibrations of the fingertips that both are and aren't her own. Where am I? Who am I? Sparks don't come when she calls for them, that familiar tingle of connection to something bigger and cosmic. She is cut off, on a figurative desert island in.. Where is she? Ah.
Carol spends the next hour pacing in her (her?) pajamas: a Stanford Physics tee (she's in San Francisco, it seems) and a pair of flannel shorts that are, admittedly, worth a little bit of praise in terms of comfort. This is a situation, and according to the iPhone she'd picked up and snooped through, she has approximately ninety minutes to solve a bit of a second, ancillary dilemma by association. Professor Cara Davies, the owner of her current face, it seems.. Is giving a lecture on Black Holes and extreme astrophysics. Cute. For a split-second, Carol almost thinks she'd be able to pull it off. Stay humble. Cheeseburger.
She decides against it. Instead, she's got some work to do.
Cara, if you're in there, or out there somewhere.. I'm gonna figure this out. A beat. No answer. If I don't, I'll get you a new carpet for your bedroom. Deal?
Finding the coffee proves difficult. It proves even more so when she drags her toes over the strange carpeting, peering into half-finished rooms and what seems like a tiny, but orderly, office. Carol's in someone's home, that much is for sure. She just doesn't know whose. The caffeine-withdrawal headache is starting, she thinks, and it elicits a grumble from the former Air Force colonel. She's a Kree warrior woman known not only on this hunk of rock floating in space, but on several others.. And she's being done in by hot bean water. This, she reminds herself, is not a solitary instance of her own felling at the hands of a steaming mug. When her hand reaches to push against her temple, she notices, the fingertips are softer than she's used to. There are blunt, manicured fingertips that she doesn't recognize when she holds the hand out to examine it. This is when the dread bleeds into her gut.
She moves a little quicker now, ducking into doorways, trying to find the woman's bathroom. It takes another minute and one stubbed toe before Carol finds it, and gawks when she looks in the mirror above the sink. This is not her face. This is not her house. This is not her body. This is not her life. Nothing had prepared her for this, no niggling sense of impending doom, no memo, no weird, splitski-feeling in a biplane, no Dharma Initiative common denominator.. Nothing. All she can do is stare at the stranger in the mirror, and wonder how she got so lost. Lost to the point where she wound up in another woman's body. Part of her sense-memory flickers back to what it's like to lose herself to energy, to another being, to the galaxy. None of that parallels this. Carol Danvers, with her mother's nose and her brother's buzzed haircut, is gone. Only her mind is left, and it's living inside a woman she can't physically recognize.
The thought makes her curl her lip and shiver. This isn't some bad horror movie. It's real; the four pinch marks on the inside of her arm have confirmed as much. This woman has a rounded nose and sharp cheekbones. Carol Susan Jane Danvers does not. Carol Susan Jane Danvers has a ding of a scar on her forearm from the time she touched a hot cake pan at her family's home in Boston. This woman does not. It takes quite a bit to make Carol shake -- she's a pilot, after all -- but she can't stop the tiny vibrations of the fingertips that both are and aren't her own. Where am I? Who am I? Sparks don't come when she calls for them, that familiar tingle of connection to something bigger and cosmic. She is cut off, on a figurative desert island in.. Where is she? Ah.
Carol spends the next hour pacing in her (her?) pajamas: a Stanford Physics tee (she's in San Francisco, it seems) and a pair of flannel shorts that are, admittedly, worth a little bit of praise in terms of comfort. This is a situation, and according to the iPhone she'd picked up and snooped through, she has approximately ninety minutes to solve a bit of a second, ancillary dilemma by association. Professor Cara Davies, the owner of her current face, it seems.. Is giving a lecture on Black Holes and extreme astrophysics. Cute. For a split-second, Carol almost thinks she'd be able to pull it off. Stay humble. Cheeseburger.
She decides against it. Instead, she's got some work to do.
Cara, if you're in there, or out there somewhere.. I'm gonna figure this out. A beat. No answer. If I don't, I'll get you a new carpet for your bedroom. Deal?