Agent Hill believes in the system. (agenthill) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2012-11-29 21:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | agent phil coulson, john blake, maria hill |
Who: Maria Hill, Phil Coulson, and John Blake.
What: Maria remembers Madripoor. It isn't pretty.
Where: John and Maria's apartment.
When: Thursday night.
Rating: R for torture, heartbreak, and other bad stuff.
Status: In progress.
There are bright pops of color on the blank canvas—
"Please, please, just let me down, just for a minute, my arms– I can't—"
They strike sensitive parts of her body with a thin bamboo cane; her sides, the backs of her knees, the soles of her feet, and the skin burns for hours and hours and days and days and she's still ashamed to admit she screams when they rip her fingernails from her body–
Strokes and speckles against a white background, unidentifiable shapes and no particular pattern. It's almost like a painting—
Maria jolted awake from where she'd been dozing in the corner of their living room, gripping the knife in her hand. It had been at least a two days since she'd slept. Since the marks had first appeared, all over her skin. Half of her fingernails were missing, and some of the wounds kept re-opening, though she'd tried to dress them.
—but the paint is all shades of crimson. Vibrant, at first, darkening as it dries. Smears and droplets of blood are the only colors that decorate the bare white walls and floors of a small cell. There's no paintbrush. No gallery.
Only her broken body, maimed and torn from the explosion of a landmine—
"—You are no one to them. You are no one to them. You are no one to them—"
As she repeats her own history like a mantra, she begins to write it in that same strange language she's created. She chews into her fingernails and scratches at her skin to get to the only ink she has. She writes a novel of herself in one beautiful horrible color—
Her body ached. Her arms felt like they were going to fall off. She'd lost weight. She was covered in cuts and bruises. The things they'd done to her in the dreams... they were real. And it was becoming more and more difficult for her to tell dreams from reality.
—it's not the cuts that bother her, because she tears up her own skin for the only usable ink to tell her story, but what comes after. They shower her with something acidic, something that stings so badly it makes curl up into a ball and sob, a pathetic shivering mess, and the physical pain isn't the worst of it. It's the shame of what they've done to her; Maria Hill, a once unstoppable force, someone who never knew how to be weak, and they've twisted her into a barely-recognizable shadow of her former self—
John wanted her to go to the hospital. He'd pleaded with her, begged her, but she wouldn't, couldn't let him touch her. Because what if he wasn't actually there? What if this... this whole reality was something she'd created as a coping mechanism? What if she was still in Madripoor right now, screaming for help, never to be rescued? What if he was actually a guard, wanting to take her for more torment? She couldn't trust him. Couldn't trust anyone.
—she has to use her teeth to pierce her skin, because she can't forget who she is (because if she does she'll break completely, and she can't allow herself to do that, even in this place) and the only way to remind herself now is to write, write, write. And it really is a different kind of pain when she does this, because it's a pain she can control, something that's hers in a world where she does not make her own choices—
She had no idea. The lines between her dreams and the waking world were so far blurred they might as well have been erased, and her mind couldn't hold that much.