Good Morning, Sunshine

sitting up straight

~

Just inhale and exhale.

~

"Who are you trying to fool? Crying like this, lying and acting like you are the victim here but you are not.

No matter how hard you try to make me believe your little fairytale, I won't. It's all lies. You just want to stay safe, to keep consequences for your behaviour as far away from you as possible. But you can't. Because I know what happened and the rest of the team does too.

We saw the corpses.

We heard the people's cries.

We smelled the smoke.

We felt the pain.

We fought you!

You can not make us forget!"

Stark was yelling by now and pacing up and down the room, sometimes glaring at me, most of the time staring out of the window or at the floor or the ceiling.

When he'd finished yelling he was facing the window that was looking out on the city but suddenly spun around on his heels and ripped the T-shirt off his body.

On his exposed chest there were four long, parallel wounds, nearly scars. They had clearly been stitched up and they weren't new, nearly healed up in fact, but also not old enough to blend in with other scars on Stark's body.

I gulped bracing myself for words that would shurely come and trying to get rid of the acid taste of vomit.

"See this?" , snapped Stark. Of course I saw it. I was staring right at it.

"This was you!"

His words were loud but they sounded a thousand times louder to me than they'd actually been. Loud enough to make my body shake and my heart stop for a moment. Loud enough to make me gasp for air and to leave me shaking.

Someone sobbed.

It was me.

"But ... how? I could never do anything like this?" , I gasped, staring at the scars like they were venomous snakes, about to attack me.

"Let. Me. Tell. You. How" , growled Stark and with every word he took a step closer towards me until he stood right next to my bed, his legs pressed against the mattress, his body slightly bend in my direction.

"I was trying to get a kid out of there. I'd wrapped my arms around it but then you came. I hadn't heard you coming, I don't know what the others were doing. Probably trying to save lives. It doesn't matter, really.

You jumped at me from behind, your claws dug into the little body of the child, wrapped around my chest. Unlike me, it wasn't wrapped in a metal armour keeping it safe. It was dressed in primitive, woolen clothes, very vulnerable to your claws.

You took me by surprise. I accidentally let go of the kid. You didn't. You clung to it when blood was already staining the little body red.