A/N: This is the first fic I've ever written, so... Hooray! XD
Disclaimer: I don't own Captain America, Nick Fury, or any other Marvel character that may appear in this piece.
She hit rock bottom after the third month.
A body can only fall so far before it breaks– she had counted on this. The wind had blown past her, her hair whipping away from her face, creating a brown, feathered halo around her face. For those few seconds, she had known what it was to fly. And when the ground began to approach, she didn't pull the string that would release her parachute. She expected the darkness when it came, and greeted it with open arms.
She didn't expect to wake up.
The doctors called it a miracle; she called it fraud.
She'd tried something more understated. Four bottles of over-the-counter medication, all taken at once should have done the job. But her body had had no issue with the substances. The darkness didn't even come that time. Certainly it shouldn't be this hard.
Then she had had enough. This game had become redundant and she'd play no more. So, she taken the traditional route– a bullet through the head. And oh, the darkness was welcomed as an old friend when it arrived. She had let her consciousness slip away with a sense of euphoria. It'd taken too long to get here.
She thought she'd won. She thought she was finally done– that the world could no longer follow her.
But when she stood back up, a gaping hole through her forehead, the message was clear.
She couldn't die.
And she had one gargantuan mess to clean up.
-l-l-l-l-l-
Miriam Yager was a plain girl. She was neither short, nor tall, neither pretty, nor ugly. She wasn't outrageously smart, nor was she slow. Her face was one that you see, but can't quite remember when it came to it. Her hair was cropped to the shoulders and the color of nutmeg. Her eyes were her only striking feature; they were a bright, icy blue, but even they couldn't transform her into anything but the plain girl she was.
Perhaps, if her hair had been blonde, her stature a bit taller, and her legs a bit leaner, she would have been pretty. But they weren't, so Miriam Yager was plain.
She had never met her mother or father. Her father had gotten her mother pregnant, then fled. No one seemed quite sure how it happened, or what her mother had done for a living. Though, they were sure of one thing. Her mother hadn't wanted her.
She had given birth to the plain little girl as quickly as was humanly possible, and had put her up for adoption immediately afterward. The woman hadn't even held her new daughter, before demanding that she be taken away.
The social workers and foster parents had come and gone through Miriam Yager's life, leaving her without anything solid. The girls' homes and the foster homes had all blurred together, over the years. But there was always the mystery of her parents to keep her wondering at night.
When Miriam Yager asked the social workers about her parents, they would tell her the same awful things and the same awful stories about how she came to be. Her social workers never seemed to agree with her foster parents on anything, but if there was ever one thing that there were able to agree on, it was that her parents did not deserve to be parents.
Over the course of many years, Miriam Yager learned to hate her parents.
-l-l-l-l-l-
Her eighteenth birthday came as both a blessing and a curse.
It was a blessing because it meant she was free of "the system." It was a curse because she no longer had "the system" to support her.
Miriam Yager quickly became desperate for money and fell in with the wrong crowds. There were many people who would have predicted such events in her life. She was, after all, a "troubled child." According to society, it was to be expected the first time she was arrested.
As was per usual, Miriam Yager had been out late, trying fervently to find a way, any way to make a dime. She had been tired and cranky after nearly forty-eight hours of no sleep. And that man had been downright asking for it.
After her bail was posted by a sympathetic social worker, –though, not sympathetic enough to loan her a spare room– Miriam Yager had attempted to defend herself, explaining that the man had provoked her. And, while he had provoked her, he hadn't done it intentionally.
The man Miriam Yager had attacked was Shaun Carlton and he worked for very wealthy people. Miriam Yager, of course, did not know this. She had simply seen a well-to-do man in a suit, sitting in the not-so-well-to-do neighborhood.
It wasn't fair that there were people who had never wanted for anything. It wasn't fair that they had never wondered where their next meal would come from– if it would come at all. And he was just sitting there, reading whatever it was he had been reading.
That white-hot rage had coursed through her veins, turning her from a passive lamb into an enraged bull. If there was one thing Miriam Yager could not stand, it was the upper-classes, particularly those who walked about with their noses in the air, oblivious to the everyday struggles of the lower-classes.
It wasn't fair.
She had glared at him from across the alley.
He had demanded to know what she was looking at.
And then she'd snapped.
Oh, Zeus it'd felt good to shake him– to strike his face, to ram her elbows into his stomach and chest…
Miriam Yager had no regrets at the time, and as the police officer dragged her away from the upper-class man, she had called out, taunting him.
This wasn't her last criminal offense, by any measure. But it was the one that she would remember most and, in time, the only one she would come to regret.
-l-l-l-l-l-
Miriam Yager, despite her brushes with the law, managed to find a relatively stable job, working as a sales clerk at a clothing store. The pay was absolutely nothing to brag about and the whole place smelled like old, woolen socks, but it was money.
Though the cash flow was nothing more than a trickle, Miriam Yager managed to pay the right people the right amount and still set a bit aside. But it was enough. She managed to secure an apartment in one of the many sleazy neighborhoods. It was tiny, with a handkerchief sized living room, a pocket-sized kitchen, and a piece-of-lint-from-your-pocket-sized bathroom. Miriam Yager slept on the sofa.
Her living situation certainly wasn't ideal, but it was all that she had. And that was enough for her, for the moment. She was an individual soul who didn't enjoy or approve of dependency on another. She had learnt young that people weren't dependable or trust worthy. They always said they'd stay, but the second she turned her back on them… they disappeared faster than the starving devour a hot meal.
She had worked at the clothing store for just over a year and a half, when her first and only promotion came about. Miriam Yager was promoted from "sales clerk" to "sales associate." In all this time, she had yet to put down any sort of root or make any friends. She had acquaintances and colleagues. That was it. And that was okay.
It was on her way into work one day, nearly four years after her eighteenth birthday, that Miriam Yager's life changed entirely.