Resilience | ✔

Chapter Twenty-One

T/W: blood

Marley had never, ever seen as much blood as she had in the past three weeks. Nothing even came close. She saw blood when she got the occasional bloody nose and on her period and sometimes when the Avengers came back on missions. That was it.

These past three weeks? She was surprised she was still alive, she'd lost so much blood. That was the scary thing—it was hers. She had a good stomach for blood, but there was something panic-inducing about watching blood spill out of a cut on your side, watching it drip onto the floor. Knowing you couldn't begin to stem the flow until hours from when it was made.

Her clothes were always wet somewhere. There wasn't a single thread that hadn't gotten blood on it. She was sure she smelled awful. The only upside, if you could call it that, was that getting her period—which she'd had last week—introduced her to the new experience of not wearing any sort of hygiene product. She'd always wondered what it would be like not to wear a pad or tampon and just bleed freely into her underwear (and then jeans). This was not the way she'd imagined it happening.

Most of the blood ran into the drain in the middle of the bathroom floor. She rinsed it away as best she could with handfuls of water, but the cement had picked up some of the color and was now tinged pink. There were a few splotches of dried blood that she didn't feel like trying to scrape away.

It didn't look like any of her wounds were infected—not even her wrists. Her wrists were what scared her the most out of all her wounds. She'd always been protective of them. She knew that slitting them crosswise wouldn't cause her to bleed out—thank you, a traumatizing Tumblr page—but getting them harmed in any way still scared her. And now they'd been shredded by the handcuffs. They were always bleeding. Not a lot, just seeping. Her skin was mottled and bruised and raw, and in the right light, looking at them made her nauseous. She was sure it would scar. If she didn't die first.

She rinsed them out every morning and every night, keeping them clean as best she could. She did it with all her cuts and scrapes, and it seemed to be working. But she knew it was only so long until one of them was infected. Until Jackson rubbed dirt into one of them and let her die a slow, fevered, painful death. She wasn't sure how infection worked but she was pretty sure that even a small infection could kill her. Or maybe she'd just assumed from reading The Hunger Games.

She was sure she smelled awful, too. That much blood smeared around on your clothes, mixed with weeks of sweat and grime that trying to bathe in the sink with handcuffs on didn't really cut through—yeah, she probably smelled like a dead body. (She felt like one too.) The hand soap had given her a rash the first time she'd washed her hands, so she steered clear of it, which meant she was one smelly girl.

There were two things she was glad of in this hell. (Well. More than that, but they were the only two she wanted to admit.) If it was possible to be glad of anything.

One was that he hadn't broken her nose. He'd made it bleed a few times, made it feel like he'd broken it, but it had stayed intact. She'd always been insecure about her nose, and she didn't want it to grow back crooked.

The second thing was that he hadn't knocked out any of her teeth. She was terrified of losing teeth. Oftentimes she had nightmares where they fell out and she woke up in a cold sweat. There was something scary about knowing that you only got one set of teeth for your entire life. (Okay, two, but you lost that one really early on.) And that correlated with her fear of the dentist, which had sparked when she went to get a cavity fixed and to numb her mouth, they stuck a needle into her mouth and she could feel it but it didn't hurt—just thinking about it made bile creep up her throat. She could only imagine what this time spent here was doing to her teeth.

But she hadn't had any punched out, so.

So.

She stood in front of one of the mirrors, watching blood slide down her chest from a slice on her collarbone and seep into her bra. She'd ditched her shirt to examine the full extent of Jackson's mostly-fist-driven assault from today. He'd used his knife sparingly this time—the sharp one. She'd felt it scrape her collarbone when he used it.

She shut her eyes briefly, but that image stayed fixed in her mind. Blood. So much blood. It was horrifying, in a way, that she just thought about these things now. Earlier on, she'd repeated them, over and over. Jackson punched me. He punched me. He punched me. He beat me. Disbelief disbelief disbelief. But now they were just fact.

She had to get out of here.

She opened her eyes and watched the blood—warm, wet, sticky, crimson—stream over her skin.

Everything still hurt.

A Stark doesn't give in.

She had to get out of here.

A/N: lol wassup