Author's note: This chapter contains a trigger warning for self-injury and eating disorders.
We'd been prisoners in John Bodho's compound for twelve days. I had two cracked ribs, a concussion, hemorrhagic pneumonia in both lungs, a broken zygomatic arch, and second and third degree burns, some of which were chemical, to fifteen per cent of my body. I'd needed skin grafts on my back and shoulders, thirty-one stitches, and lost nineteen pounds. Hand had sustained second degree burns, several of which were infected, to nine per cent of her body, a ruptured spleen, a torn rotator cuff, a fractured orbit, and multiple contusions. She'd had a splenectomy, forty stitches, and lost twenty-two pounds. We were both severely dehydrated and malnourished. Coulson and Duvall had reached the ridge shortly after we'd been taken, and Johnson and Garrett had made their way back to base camp and radioed for backup. Bodho's compound was well-hidden, but they had eventually been able to find it using thermal imaging. Bodho and his smuggling operation had been shut down, but SHIELD didn't know if they were working alone or were part of a larger organization. This much they told me at debriefing.
What they didn't tell me at debriefing was that I would wake up screaming every night for twelve days straight. They didn't tell me that I would make a habit of getting dressed with my eyes closed so I wouldn't have to see all the scars. They didn't tell me that the smell of meat cooking would make me throw up. That I would flinch anytime someone tried to touch me, even Phil. That I would sleep with the lights on like a four-year-old afraid of the dark. This, they did not tell me.
The old Melinda was well and truly gone. Bahrain had broken her; Bodho had shattered her. I would never be that person again.
I hadn't seen Hand since the rescue, and while I knew she was safe, I still felt a palpable sense of relief when I saw her at debriefing. She cleaned up nicely; her torn, bloody clothing had been exchanged for a pencil skirt and blouse; her maroon-streaked hair was neatly combed, and she had on black framed glasses to replace her lost contact lenses. She even managed to look dignified with her arm in a sling. She'd spoken in stiff, clipped sentences, giving facts, nothing else, her demeanor cold and detached.
A few days later, Phil told me that she had taken a transfer to the Slingshot. She left without saying goodbye. I didn't mind. The person I'd seen at debriefing was a far cry from the Victoria Hand I knew from Bodho's prison, the dirty, disheveled woman who sat against the wall next to me and heard my confessions, who lay down beside me so we could die together. I hardly recognized this person, much less knew how to talk to her.
Since I wasn't on active duty, and wouldn't be for the foreseeable future, I had very little to do. Had I been strong enough, I would have spent my free time on the mats, sparring anyone and everyone I could con into going a few rounds with me. But as it was, I could barely get through a basic tai chi form, much less anything as strenuous as judo or kajukenbo.
Besides, I was tired, not I-need-some-coffee tired, but the filthy, pathetic kind of tired that seeps into your bones and makes you weigh a thousand pounds. I would lie on my back, staring at the ceiling for hours at a time, playing the old prison cloud watching game with the cracks in the plaster. Occasionally I would toy with the idea of getting up, maybe going to brush my hair, but it always seemed like too much trouble. It was easier just to lie on top of my scratchy, standard-issue blanket, letting the world go on without me.
A month or so after the rescue, I was washing my hands when I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. I hadn't seen my reflection since, well, since before Bahrain, and I barely recognized the woman staring back at me. Her cheeks were sunken in, her hair stringy and limp, and her dull eyes underscored by dark smudges. She looked pathetic, helpless, like a starving child. I gripped the edges of the sink until my knuckles turned white.
"You're disgusting," I hissed at the woman in the mirror. "Disgusting and weak. You should have died back there."
From then on, I washed my hands with my eyes closed.
In a pathetic attempt to take back some control, I started forcing myself to eat more protein and doing some light exercise, trying to get myself back into something resembling fighting shape. It was slow going at first; I could barely even do a push-up. But I developed a routine and stuck to it, taking comfort in its predictability. I started going to the gym three times a week, at night, so I would be alone. I wasn't anywhere near up to full strength; running more than half a mile on the track had me bent over, wheezing desperately, and my reflexes were completely shot. Sometimes I dreaded my workouts, dreaded finding that I could no longer do something I'd once taken for granted. But I went anyway, because it beat lying awake at night, seeing Bodho's sadistic grin every time I closed my eyes.
One night, after failing once again to run a mile in under nine minutes, I took the boxing tape off my hands and shredded my knuckles on the heavyweight punching bag. The pain barely registered; it was nothing compared to what I felt inside. Wiping off the blood for the benefit of posterity, I headed through the darkened hallways to the medical wing to scare up some gauze and antiseptic, preferably without anyone seeing me and sending me to the department psychiatrist.
As I was rooting through the supply cabinet, I noticed a grubby, half-empty bottle of isopropyl alcohol sitting by itself next to some surgical scalpels. That was all it took. The memories came flooding back, vivid flashbacks of blood running down my leg, skin sizzling from acid, coughing up water, the hiss of a blowtorch, Victoria's screams, and Bodho's mocking voice, Agent May, Agent May, Agent May. But I didn't feel like an agent. I felt like a failure, a helpless child who couldn't even run a mile at a decent pace. I'd let him control me, strip away my dignity and my pride until there was nothing left but a shell. I'd begged for my life. Begged. Agents of SHIELD don't beg. So what did that make me?
It made me a coward.
All the anger and fear and shame and a million other emotions I couldn't even begin to identify boiled up in my chest until it was all I could do to keep from screaming. On impulse, I grabbed a scalpel and desperately ripped it out of the sterile packaging. I yanked up my sleeve and sank the blade into my flesh. Pain shot through my arm, but it was my pain, done by my hand, not his. I caught my breath, gasping as I saw the blood filling the deep trench I'd dug in my forearm. The blood ran down my arm and stained my clothes dark red, but that was okay, because I chose to bleed. I pushed up my other sleeve and was about to slash open my right arm when a voice stopped me.
"Don't."
I turned around. A tall, dark-haired woman stood in the doorway of the supply room. I recognized her; it was Maria Hill. I knew her vaguely; we'd been in a few classes together at the Academy and had been part of the same task force a few years ago, but we'd never been close. Quickly, I slipped the scalpel into the back pocket of my jeans and hid my arm behind my back, praying she hadn't seen the blood.
"Don't what?" I asked, the picture of innocence, or at least I hoped so. She couldn't see me like this; she'd report me to SHIELD psych for sure, and that was the last thing I needed right now.
She approached me, walking slowly, her posture carefully non-threatening. "Can I see?" she asked.
"See what?"
"I'm serious, May; you might need stitches." Her voice softened, and she whispered, "Please."
Something about the way she spoke persuaded me to drop my guard. She wasn't being overly sympathetic or judgmental, and she was right; I might need sutures. Slowly, cautiously, I showed her the gash in my wrist, looking down, too ashamed to meet her eyes. Carefully, without touching me, Hill examined the cut. The laceration was deep, but I hadn't hit any major vessels or tendons, despite the copious amounts of blood that now soaked my shirtsleeve.
Hill gave a short nod. "It's going to need stitches. Sit down here; I'll get the suture material." She gestured to a brushed aluminum autopsy table that someone was storing in the medical supply room for reasons unknown. I hoisted myself up, leaving a red smear on the smooth metal.
Hill came back with some gauze, antiseptic, lidocaine, and a suture kit, which she laid out on the table next to where I sat. As gently as she could, she flushed the wound with antiseptic, and I fought off flashbacks as the saline stung my raw skin. She's not Bodho, I reminded myself. Bodho is dead.
"You know, I heard about what happened," she said, filling a syringe with lidocaine. "And I understand what you're going through now."
I snorted. "You've barely logged any field time, much less been tortured," I snapped.
"Not in SHIELD," she informed me calmly, unshaken by my outburst. "I was in the US Army. I spent my twentieth birthday in some rat-infested prison in Kandahar. My present was a split lip." She spoke matter-of-factly, but didn't meet my eyes as she loaded the needle and made the first stitch. She'd used so much local that I didn't feel it at all. "After the extraction team got me out, I took an honorable discharge and tried to readjust to civilian life. But you can't just go back to the way things were. That feeling of being helpless, it stays with you, no matter how hard you try and forget."
"Did you ever …" I glanced down at my half-sutured wrist.
Maria shook her head. "I stopped eating."
"Anorexia?" I asked.
"Not really," she replied, as she continued stitching. "I didn't count calories or weight myself obsessively. It was all about the control for me." She looked away. "It was bad over there, May, really bad. And afterwards, I felt like my body wasn't mine anymore. So I took it back by controlling what I ate and when. But these things, they have a way of backfiring, and pretty soon it was controlling me. Eventually it was all I could do to swallow a spoonful of applesauce. The doctor at the VA used to give me this glucose solution through a shunt in my arm three times a week. He did everything short of putting a tube down my throat." She paused, and I saw her bite her lip. "It was awful. I felt horrible and disgusting and I just wanted to die."
"So what happened then?"
"Well, a few months after I got back, I met Molly Pendragon—don't know if you've heard of her; she's this battleaxe from Recruitment. Anyway, she stopped me on the sidewalk and told me she had a job offer. She said we could discuss it in the diner across the street. So we sat down at a booth, and she ordered me some soup and a milkshake, even though I must've told her half a dozen times I wasn't hungry. Told me to eat it, every last drop, and that when I was finished, we could start talking. I was terrified, absolutely terrified, but Molly's not exactly someone you want to disobey …" She tied off the last suture and reached for the gauze. "It took me an hour and a half, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done."
I was reminded of my long conversations with Hand in the prison cell, each of us confessing secrets we never would have told anyone else. Maria was trusting me with her past, and I felt strangely honored. Maria Hill, the tall, strong, ambitious Maria Hill, and the hardest thing she'd ever done was drink a milkshake and eat a bowl of soup.
"So I started at the Academy two weeks later," she continued. "Moll mentored me, got me into therapy, made sure I ate enough. And eventually I noticed that I could just pick up a bowl of macaroni from the cafeteria without thinking about it. It really freaked me out at first, but then I guess I just realized that starving myself wouldn't fix anything." She picked up a roll of gauze and began wrapping my wrist. "And you know what? Neither will this."
We looked at each other, a pregnant pause filling the room. I broke the silence.
"You're not going to put me in therapy, are you?" I asked.
"Nooooo. I value my neck way too much to try that."
The old Melinda would have laughed, but I just gave a slight smile and reached for some leftover gauze to take care of my raw knuckles.
"There are people at SHIELD psych I can recommend," she said, her voice carefully neutral. "No pressure, but the offer's on the table."
I didn't reply.
She changed the subject. "Want to go grab something from the cafeteria?"
"It's the middle of the night," I pointed out.
"There are usually leftovers."
"Okay." We got off the table and began walking towards the door, but I could feel the ache building up in my chest again, and I stopped and grabbed the doorframe, my breath catching in my throat.
Maria turned around. "You good?" she asked.
I nodded, frighteningly close to tears. But that couldn't be, because the new Melinda didn't cry.
"Come here, sweetheart," she whispered, and pulled me into her arms. I let her, thinking that it had been so, so long since anyone had done this for me. I buried my face in her shoulder and let the tears fall, my shoulders shaking, as every emotion I'd been keeping bottled up since long before Bahrain came to the surface. She held me, making soothing noises and stroking my hair. We stayed like that for a long time, until I ran out of tears and pulled away. I felt raw, exposed, and regretted letting her see me like this.
"I'm sorry," I whispered, ashamed.
"You've got nothing to be sorry for. You'll be okay; I promise."
"That's what everyone keeps saying."
"It's true. I'm all right, aren't I?"
It was much the same thing Phil had told me after the rescue, the same thing everyone had been telling me for the past two months, but it carried more weight coming from Maria. She had been through the same thing, and felt the same way afterwards. And now, here she was, one of SHIELD's rising stars and well on her way to becoming a level 9 agent. Maybe if she could recover, put herself back together with duct tape and safety pins, so could I.
"Really?" I asked.
"Yeah. It takes time, but you'll come through."
People had been telling me that since I got back. But for the first time, I believed it.