ᴍᴀʀᴠᴇʟɪɴɢ ʏᴏᴜ「 ˢᵒᵏᵉᵉᶠᵉ 」

𝓿. 𝘔𝘐𝘙𝘙𝘖𝘙𝘚

Waking up with a gasp, she immediately looked at the clock. She'd slept for around seven hours, which was a record. She was a self-diagnosed insomniac—never being able to get a full night's rest unless she was sedated or heavily medicated, not two things she enjoyed.

In all her sleeping hours she was plagued with haunting dreams or memories of a past she had no recollection of. Blank faces and hollow words, empty and real threats, a family and friends.

She swiped the cold sweat from her brow. Tonight had been a particularly bad dream—it was how she got the scars on her body, or how she imagined she got the scars on her body.

Tony said her missing memories were most likely a failsafe that was to protect her younger self from trauma. But she'd always believed that there was something more to it, life wasn't as simple for her memories just to vanish. And Tony should have known that.

Staring at her forearms, she didn't wish for it, but the dream came back to her. It made her grip her bedsheets and bare her teeth. In dreams you can't really feel the pain of the imaginary, but her dreams made the sting come alive.

She was sitting in a chair, thick ropes tying her hands and ankles to the chair, wrapping around her midsection for extra support. She remembered struggling, fighting the ropes until they cut into her skin leaving burning and bloody marks on her pail skin.

But the self-inflicted rope burn was the least of her problems.

The blurry face of a man in a dark robe placed his hot hands on her, and the burn was so much hotter than the rope burn. And he left his hand on her arm longer, before moving it to another section of her body.

She thought that what made it worse was that she could smell her burning flesh. It made her all queasy and nauseous, but just as she had the urge to throw up from the stench and pain, it all went away. With a gust of wind and a bucket of cold water.

There was a faint ringing in her head, an accented voice that told her she was dead.

The utter lack of hope.

Sophie always woke up then, she made herself wake up.

She'd slept through the whole dream before, or not the whole dream, just a bit further than the feeling of the lack of hope and she didn't sleep for a week after it. She probably wouldn't sleep a week after this dream either.

Throwing off her blankets and preparing for the day, because why the hell not, it was already three in the morning, she winced at the cold ground. She mentally noted that she should invest in indoor slippers.

Picking out a clean version of the clothes she wore yesterday, she switched out of her sweaty night clothes and stared at herself in the mirror. Back at home she didn't have any mirrors in her bedroom, and she had a special mirror in her bathroom that only turned on when she touched it—and she only used it to do her make-up. If she wanted a full body view of herself, she went into her parents bedroom, but even then, they had their mirror in a position where she could walk in, see herself and continue walking out.

Contrary to what people might expect of Tony Stark's daughter, she hated looking at herself. Sometimes in her reflection she saw that girl from her dreams; a victim, a broken girl. Other times she saw a monster; a villain, someone who deserved to be tortured as she had. Though there were times when she just saw a void; a waste of space, someone easily forgotten.

That was the real torture from her dreams and not knowing who she was, she supposed. She'd never know if she was the victim or the villain.

So she stopped looking in mirrors, to stop seeing the girl she undoubtedly was.