A Taste of Vengeance

A young girl of seventeen stood inside a bare room. The room had once contained many things, especially books. The walls were alabaster and evidence of once hanging pictures scarred them. The wooden floors had scuff-marks left by the always present wheel chair, and the girl had the sudden urge to kneel down and run her fingers over them. They were a part of this room as they were a part of her.
The room was cold and bare, like her heart.

“Miss Bane?” a voice called. She turned her head to the side, dark hair falling in her face. “Is there anything else?”
She shook her head and the man left her standing there.

The girl had decided to clear the office of everything; to keep it seemed like a cruel reminder of her loss, but to occupy it seemed like a sin. The room smelled faintly of parchment and vanilla, reminding her of how her uncle had once smelled. He was the last piece of her, that man. But now he was gone, just like the others.

Turning quickly on her heel, she fled from the room, leaving the door wide open. The ghost of the past was strangling her by the neck now, wrapping his cold, deadly fingers around her throat and squeezing, making her feel the sensation that she was about to cry.

Many saw her fled, and one even came after her, only to have a door slammed in their face. “Ashlynn,” the dark skinned woman called, putting her hand on the door. “Please let me in. We can talk, I know-“ her voice broke, thick. “I know how it feels.”

“No you don’t!” The teenager screamed, falling in front of her bed, clutching her knees in front of her chest. Her voice had taken on a sound of hysteria, and she could feel the anger and the sadness bubbling in her chest like a volcano preparing to explode. The woman on the other side of the door could not here the trouble brewing in the room and persisted to speak.

Tears spilled over the girls eyes like hot geysers, and she bit her lip, drawing blood. The taste of metal in her mouth was almost comforting, but it did nothing as the feeling in her kept rising. Her hands began to tremble, and then the things on the nightstand began to rattle. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember what he had told her to do when these moments came onto her. She could do nothing at this point. The rage was onto her and all she could do was scream, causing the door to her closet to explode outwards, shattering the windows to her room, and causing the nightstand to explode into chips of wood.

I sat up abruptly, sweat pouring down my head and my back. My breathing was shallow and for a few long moments I spent my time gasping for air, trying to fill my lungs. The things in my small compartment were scattered everywhere as a result from my nightmare. Within moments there was a soft knock on the door. I was inclined to ignore it until I hear the voice on the other side say, “Agent Bane, are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” I silently curse myself when my voice cracks, revealing that I am anything but fine.
“May I come in, ma’am?” he asks. His voice is so polite and so sincere that I just mumbled back a positive answer before thinking about it.

I start to say ‘never mind’ but he’s already in and closing the door behind him, flicking on the lamplight. I turn my head down, letting my hair fall in my face in order to hide my tears. For some reason, he is the last person I want to see me crying. Weakness was no virtue of mine.

“You um- have very pretty hair,” he says awkwardly, sitting in the seat across from my bed. At this I can’t help but to tilt my head up, looking at him with tear stained eyes. I can see he’s struggling to say something, and once again the urge to know what he’s thinking overpowers any of my thought process.
“Say it.” He seems caught off guard and stares at me. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound rude. I can just tell you’re trying to say something, and I’d like to know.”
He smile slightly then. “Still not reading my mind?”
“I promise you, didn’t I?”
He laughed. “I suppose you did. What I was trying to say- or ask really- was do you have nightmares every night?”
I shook my head. “No. I only get them sometimes, but when I do… Well I’m sure you felt the shaking,” I muttered, gesturing to my things all thrown around. “When I do have nightmares, I tend to destroy the things around me, which is why I requested to have no one on either side of me… no offense.”
“None taken, ma’am. I do believe Agent Fury intended to follow you’re request, but then today…”

Ah, yes. There is was again. Steve Rogers was polite, if nothing else. He didn’t want to ask me questions he deemed rude, and it was clear that he wasn’t going to force me to tell him anything. He was old fashioned in the sense that he knew what boundaries should and should not be crossed, and that if someone didn’t want to explain something, they shouldn’t have too. The world needed more people like him.

“Are you asking a question?” The words left my mouth quietly. “Or are you simply stating something.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. I could tell that his blue eyes were on me again, but I leaned back into the wall, looking up at the ceiling.

The ceiling was plain and metal, with an air vent in it. I tried to count the different shades of silver while a silence passed between us, neither one knowing what to say. Somehow though, the silence was not uncomfortable. I felt as if having him there in the room with me, was better than the roaring sound of silence alone.
“What are you thinking?” he asked me. I glanced at him, to see if he was till watching me but he wasn’t.

The man in front of me was dressed in a simple white t-shirt and jeans. His biceps were cut and fine at the end of his sleeves, and I could see the taught muscle underneath the fabric. Dog tags were hanging at the end of his chain, and narrowing my eyes, I could make out that one was his own, and that the other was not. The other belonged to someone named James Barnes.

“Who is James Barnes?”
He was visibly started by my question, and looked down at his dog tags before taking one and bringing it over his head. He held it in his hands for a while, holding the necklace gently like a piece of treasure. His face took on a haunted wistfulness, and even before he began to speak slowly, I knew that this was not a happy story. No story from a heroes past was ever happy, especially for a hero like Captain America. The selfless, I find, are never rewarded.

“He was my best friend. We grew up together in Brooklyn. As a kid and even as an adult, I was scrawny, weak, and had so many health problems I probably should have been quarantined. Kids used to bully me all the time and beat me up, but I never backed down from a fight, even if it meant getting my ass kicked. I found the more you stood up for yourself, the less they wanted to punch you because you weren’t scared.

“The people who didn’t stop beating me up though, well… that’s where Bucky came in. I can’t tell you how many times he found me getting the crap kicked out of me, and he’d come in like a hero, fighting off all the bigger kids and picking me up. Bucky was always the better looking guy, the funny one, the one who could actually talk to girls. I never was- I’m not good at that kind of stuff.

“All I ever wanted to do was to serve my country, when the war came. All the men around me were going off to the fight, laying their lives down on the line for the country. I felt like I had no right to not to the same, to not be able to be something. I didn’t want anything else… I just wanted to do something worth doing, not even if I was remembered for it. I wanted to serve…”

“But they didn’t let you,” I suggested after he had paused for a long time. He looked up, agreeing, “They wouldn’t let me. I was too small, too sick, too weak. I was never going to be the image of a soldier. I falsified my information countless times, trying to get in, but I was denied every time. Bucky insisted that it wasn’t a big deal, but how could I feel proud about myself? How could I justify it?

“After I had the serum injection, Bucky and I were doing our job as soldiers. It was one of the last few jobs, to take over the train and gain information. We were done, it had been so easy, as it had always been… and then…” he shook his head, clenching his fists. “When the cart exploded, we were knocked out of the door. I caught his hand, but barely. I didn’t even get the chance to pull him up before he slipped, falling hundreds of feet into the mountain.”

Steve was quiet for a long time, and all I could do was watch him. Goose bumps were raised all over my arms. The loss this man had felt was no less than mine of my family and yet… somehow he seemed a better person than myself. Somehow, Steve Rogers was worth feeling sympathy for. Here was a man, who was in all definitions of the word, brave.

The day Charles Xavier passed away, was a day I never liked to remember, and it was for selfish reasons. I remembered the way I explode, the way I hurt the people around me. I was a menace, and I was uncontrollable. Everyone had always told me I had my mother’s demeanor, but my father’s rage. But I wasn’t sure, anymore. There is no way my father could have been such a monster, such a danger and lost cause. I didn’t even feel bad for myself anymore, although the first few months I had let myself drown in self pity.

I could not imagine, the type of courage it took to keep going. But that was the thing about extraordinary people- they were rare, and when you came across one, you couldn’t help but want to stay away from them, to keep them untainted. Trying to fathom someone so magnificent was enough to give anyone a complex.

“Do you want to know the worst part?” he asked me, his voice thick with emotion. I didn’t want to answer, because I didn’t think I wanted to know the worst part. “I couldn’t even get drunk, afterwards. I couldn’t drown out the guilt, of watching him fall.”
I moved towards the end of my bed, raising my hand to touch him, but suddenly deciding against it. “Can I do something?”
“What?”
“Relax for a moment, okay? Don’t try and push me out, I’m not trying to read your thoughts. Just let me, alright?”

Never will I be able to understand what drove me to feel so desperate to erase his guilt. Perhaps it was that I felt as if some of my guilt would go away if I helped his, or that I simply wanted him to leave my room and pretend like we never had this conversation. It was true, that his sudden openness absolutely terrified me, and I wanted to bolt from the room, refusing to talk to him. I didn’t want friends, and I didn’t like friends. My solace was in teaching students, doing my duty as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent, and immersing myself into books. The fact that Steve Rogers was willing to give information so easily, to come to my room in the middle of the night after a night terror, made me want to run.

I closed my eyes and reached out with my own mind, feeling his instantly. It was the same tinge of warmth and bright life, but tainted by sadness and grief. He fought me for a moment, recoiling from the alien contact, but soon enough he relaxed and let me in. I ignored the parts of his mind where his stream of thought hummed into words. I went past the images that flitted by me in a blur and found the root of the problem. The grief.

Snatching an image that had floated past me, I replaced his grief with a memory, one that he had probably forgotten. I watched with him as the image of a little boy was picked last for the kickball team. The boy was thin and sickly looking, and no one wanted him on their team. No one but one taller and stronger kid, who insulted the others for making the sickly one look like an outcast.

I opened my eyes, letting go of his mind and watching his face. His eyes were closed, but I could see the serenity and the bliss smooth his features, his eyes fluttering under his eyelids as he relived the day he met Bucky. As I watched him, I briefly noted that his mind was unlike any other I had come across; it was absolutely pure. Most peoples mentality had tinges of darkness to it, places where jealousy, greed, deceit and hatred grew their dark, poisonous roots. My uncle had warned me of those very places, telling me I should not feed mine that he had found at early stages.

His blue eyes flittered open, looking at me with a whole new aspect. I shifted, trying not to show how uncomfortable I had become once again, realizing that I have offered to much friendship. “How did you do that?”
“I’m a telepath,” I say sharper than I mean to. I make no move to apologize for it, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.
“I had completely forgotten about that day… thank you.” I shrugged.
“You should really go to bed,” I suggested. “I have a feeling tomorrow we’re going to need all the strength we can get.”
He laughed then, looking down and shaking his head. I narrowed my eyes, irritated. “You’re about as good as making friends as I am talking to girls.”
“You’ve been talking to me for the past half hour,” I retorted, offended. It didn’t matter how true it was, having someone point of one of my biggest flaws- especially him, for some reason- really bothered me.
“Well,” he said, standing. Amusement lit his light eyes. “Maybe you’ll make the wonderful improvement I’ve made, ma’am.”
“Will you stop calling me ma’am?” I snapped finally. “I’m not your teacher nor am I your elder so just… stop it!” He started laughing then, shrugging his shoulders. “Good night, Steve!”
His eyes lit up. “Hey, you used my-“
“I said good night.” I thrust my palm out knocking him out the door, but not roughly and closing it behind him.
“That was a pretty cool magic trick,” I could hear him call through the door. I threw myself on my bed, exasperated. “Good night, Ash.”