Between Time- MCU

The room was deep underground.

The walls were lined with shelves of confiscated tech, prototype weapons, and scattered blueprints, stolen from SHIELD, Stark Industries, Wakandan outposts, and more. But in the center of the room was a sleek holographic display of one subject only:

ALEXANDRA MILLER.

Her profile spun slowly in midair. Video footage. Power readouts. Temporal anomalies charted along multiple timelines. Still images pulled from street cameras, Stark Tower footage leaks, even grainy satellite visuals.

"Her potential is unlike anything we've seen in decades," said the older man leading the meeting. He wore a plain black suit, sharp features lit by the blue glow of the display. "Biologically-anchored time control. Unaugmented. No relics. No tech implants."

Across the table, a woman in a white lab coat leaned forward. "We believe her abilities are linked to hippocampal memory processing and quantum elasticity. If properly triggered, she could become capable of temporal rewrites on a localized or even global scale."

"Rewrites?" the other man asked. "She could erase events?"

The scientist nodded. "Theoretically. Under stress. She's young. Still adapting. But if we induce the right trauma—"

"No," said the man in the suit. "She's too visible now. The world is watching. If we take her directly, we provoke Stark. Romanoff. Barton. Barnes. The Maximoff girl. And Fury."

He tapped a panel, and a second screen flickered to life, a series of classified documents recovered from old SHIELD black sites.

"She's her mother's daughter," the man said. "A legacy asset."

There was a pause as they all looked at the file, the woman in the photographs bore an uncanny resemblance to Alex, right down to her eyes.

"She's a wild card," the scientist said. "How do you suggest we proceed?"

A slow smile crept onto the man's face.

"With patience. And precision."

He turned toward the final screen, this one showing Alex, smiling faintly as she stood with Peter, Kamala, and Kate, recently captured during a news segment after a rescue effort.

"First we surround her," he said. "Study her routines. Exploit her empathy. And then... when she's tired, when she's questioning herself, then we make contact."

The screen flickered. A red dot blinked under the words:

PHASE 1: INFLUENCE.
Target Circle: Friends. Civilians. Non-Enhanced.

"Break her from the inside out."

Alex was in a bookstore near NYU, tucked into a quiet corner of the city she thought no one cared about. Her backpack was slung over one shoulder, and she had a stack of textbooks under her arm.

As she walked toward the register, a woman accidentally bumped her shoulder.

"Oh! Sorry," the woman said warmly.

"No problem," Alex said automatically.

They smiled, nodded, and passed like strangers.

But across the street, someone lowered a camera. The woman who had "accidentally" bumped her walked into a waiting van and closed the door behind her.

Inside, she pulled off a skin-colored mask and dropped it onto the seat.

"She took the bait," said a voice over comms. "Tracker confirmed. Proceeding to Phase 2."