My Cuts Don't Bleed

Eliza was in reception for three weeks before they sent her to basic training. She didn’t sleep at all in the first week. She was on the bottom bunk in a basement hall crowded with 39 other women. She tried to make friends but none of the other girls had any interest in getting to know her. They all thought they knew her story already. They all thought she didn’t deserve to be there.

Eliza didn’t enlist in Shield, she was recruited by Nick Fury. Growing up she didn’t spend her summers at camps for agent wannabes. Her bedroom walls weren’t decorated with posters of the Avengers. She didn’t read the gossip blogs or tabloids about all their drama. She didn’t attend a private agent academy. She had no intentions of joining Shield. and even after she got there she didn’t want to join.

When the sergeant finally called her name to hop on the bus and go to basic, she couldn’t have been more relieved to leave those girls behind who thought their parents’ money could buy them an agent title. Most of those girls would be sent home to start their life as a regular civilian, but not Eliza. She was determined to get into the Rat training program.

Basic training lasted 10 weeks. Halfway through it was clear that she would be accepted in the Registration Act Tactical Specialist training program. Millions of dollars would be invested in her and the Avengers themselves would help train her. She knew there were top administrators who were appalled by the idea of a female Rat, but Nick Fury wanted her and he vetoed all the nay sayers.

The Council reluctantly agreed to let Eliza join, but under one condition: she would be treated like all the boys. Nick Fury and the Avengers agreed to their terms, they wanted her to be tough and prepared like every other Rat.

“Since I am only female Rat, and since they didn’t amend any rules or procedures for me, there is no protection or support for me as a woman,” Eliza said when she finished paraphrasing all this for Steve. They were sitting in the grass on top of a hill overlooking the training facility.

“No one thought you needed it,” Steve said sadly. He was Eliza’s biggest advocate besides Fury. Before he even met her he knew he wanted her to be a Rat.

“Sometimes I tell myself I don’t need support, that I have protected myself my entire life,” Eliza said. It was true, she was like most orphaned foster kids in Brooklyn. She was tossed from house to house and attended some of the roughest schools in the country. When she started MMA fighting the idea that anyone would help keep her safe quickly died.

“But I guess it would be nice if I didn’t have to worry about my own peers attacking me while I sleep. It would be nice if I could have told someone what Xander was doing…” she mumbled.

“You could have told me,” Steve replied. His heart broke for her on that hill. He felt like all of this was his fault.

He watched the Rat initiates more closely than they thought. He saw Xander shove her around and whisper in her ear. He noticed the way he looked at her like she was a piece of meat. He knew what Xander was doing, but Eliza never complained and Steve never witnessed anything that would warrant starting an investigation against him. Steve was certain he would get to the bottom of it when Xander busted through Eliza’s door, but the administrators believed her when she said she tricked Xander into doing it. They were each sentenced to twelve hours of kitchen duty.

“What was I supposed to do? Call your assistant and schedule a meeting with you? Knock on your door during my free time? If I was going to ask anyone for help it would have been you,” Eliza’s adrenaline was starting to rush. She didn’t want to get frustrated with Steve, but he should have known better than to make her feel like she could have gone to him months prior.

“You’re not the easiest person to make contact with,” she said as she twirled a piece of grass between her fingers. The Rat training program was unlike any other because the Avengers spent a year on site working with the initiates, but the administrators kept the initiates separated from the Avengers when they weren’t drilling. The Council couldn’t afford to let their superheroes get too attached to anyone. If they knew Captain America took one of the initiates away from the facility they wouldn’t have been happy.

“Tell me about Xander,” he said after a long pause. Eliza’s muscles tensed up but she forced herself to relax. Her gut was telling her to lie her way of this, but her heart wanted her to tell the truth. After months of being tortured by Xander she finally had her chance to expose him, but she didn’t know where to start.

“You didn’t ask him to kick the door in, did you?” Steve gave her a starting point.

She shook her head. “I was laying in bed minding my own business. He had been drinking, and he had just walked away from a fight with someone else so he was pretty pissed. He knocked on my door a couple times but I wouldn’t let him in. Then he busted through, passed out on my floor, and the rest is history.”

“But why? Why did he come bother you?” Steve pressed on.

“Because… because…” she tried to say more. She wanted to say more, but her bottom lip quivered and words failed her. Telling a truth like this is hard.

“Eliza,” Steve held her hands tightly between his, “tell me what he wanted. I need to know.”

“He wanted to sleep with me,” her whisper was almost inaudible.

Steve heard her but he couldn’t respond right away. He had suspected this for weeks but he didn’t prepare himself for what to do when Eliza finally admitted it.

“He wanted to have sex with me!” she wasn’t whispering anymore. “He came to my room and he kicked my door in because he wanted to force me to have sex with him!” She was almost ecstatic. She had carried this burden by herself for more than year, and now that it was coming off her chest she could barely contain herself.

Steve squeezed her hands and she calmed down. He let her catch her breath before asking anymore questions.

“Did he force you to…” he couldn’t finish his sentence.

“No. He was hammered. He didn’t put up much of a fight so I didn’t fight him harder than I had to. I threw him to the ground and dragged him out of my room.”

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Eliza wanted to tell him more but didn’t know how much he wanted to hear. Steve wanted to ask more but didn’t know how much she wanted to share.

“You and Xander knew each other before Shield?” Steve finally broke the silence.

“No, that’s just a rumor,” Eliza knew what he had heard - that she knew Xander when they were in high school. She didn’t know if Xander made that up or if people just assumed because they were both from Brooklyn. But while Eliza was living on the streets Xander was attending a private boarding school for kids that aspired to become an agent of Shield. “I met Xander on my first night at Basic. He was friends with someone else in my platoon and we would all hang out in the rec center.”

“I liked him a lot,” she smiled at the memory of what Xander was like before he turned sour. It had been a while before she felt anything for him besides anger. “He was the popular cool guy, but I refused to be like all the other girls drooling all over him. We were friends for a while, I knew he wanted more but he never tried to make a move.”

“So Xander admired you, he wanted to take things slowly,” Steve said when he sat down. Eliza nodded. Steve was so smart and intuitive. He could tell where this story was going, but she continued to tell it.

“I had fun at Basic,” she laughed at Steve’s confused expression. No one ever says they have fun at Basic! “It was a lot of hard work, but it was so much more rewarding than what I was doing before Shield. I had friends and I was proud to know that someday I would fight for something good.” She was bitter about Shield at first. The only reason she agreed to go through training was to avoid prison for MMA fights, but once she got through reception she enjoyed herself.

“I behaved like a typical initiate during Basic. I got drunk every weekend and hooked up with a lot of people,” she blushed, she didn’t mean to say that. What would the chivalrous Captain America have to think about her sexcapades? But he didn’t care. He had seen it all already.
“Xander was jealous, but he wasn’t aggressive or mean. He had to step up his game to win me over. I was used a lot as a teenager in the Underground so one night stands were no big deal to me, but Xander was special. If I was going to go there with him I didn’t want it to be another drunken hookup.”

“He was my boyfriend for two months before we slept together for the first time. He was my first boyfriend, the first person I was ever truly intimate with,” the blush was returning to her cheeks. She was embarrassed to confess all this to Steve, but he didn’t judge her.
“Did you love him?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. I think I was starting to fall in love until…” words were escaping her again. She was doing so well, but she was getting to the painful part now.

“Eliza, what happened?” Steve encouraged her to go on before she shut down. He had tried so hard to learn the truth from her for weeks and he was not going to let her fear get the best of her this time.

“Until the night I healed him,” she whispered. The world became silent as her mind took her back to that fateful night.

A long sigh escaped Steve’s lips. He could tell that Xander was harassing her and he worried that had tried to assault her, but this was much more complicated than he anticipated.

“He tore a ligament in his knee one day when he jumped out of the back of a truck. He was in so much pain, his entire body hurt. He gets really bad migraines, but they would go away after we had sex. Neither of us thought it was more than endorphins or whatever…” Eliza could barely go on. She felt so dirty telling Steve all this. She didn’t care what many people thought about her, but she didn’t want Steve to think she was a slut.

“Xander spent the night with me. When the bells went off in the morning he got out of bed and his knee was completely fine. He thought it was a miracle, but I knew what I had done. I didn’t think I could do that, up to that point my power wasn’t very strong. Maybe it was because I was never seriously injured, but all I ever healed were bruises and broken fingers, and even then it didn’t happen overnight. The thought never crossed my mind that I could heal someone else.”
“Xander didn’t tell anyone what happened. He thought that he healed himself!” Steve and Eliza both laughed.

“But I trusted him and I told him what really happened. He didn’t believe me at first, and I wasn’t completely sure, so we took his pocket knife and cut my palm, then we watched as the skin closed up and the wound disappeared. That was the first time I made myself heal.”

“How do you do it?” Steve interrupted.

“I don’t know. That’s like asking someone ‘how do you move your arms?’ And I’m not limited to cuts and broken bones. My colds and headaches never last more than a few minutes, and I can sober up on command. That’s why Xander came to my room the night he busted my door. He was wasted by the time you sent the message about the ropes course. He was going to make me fuck him so he would be sober in the morning,” Eliza’s tone made the hair on Steve’s arms stand up.

“After I healed his knee he wasn’t so tender. He wanted to have sex every night, he was always pulling me into a closet or making me do a quickie in the dorm. When I tried to tell him no he said that I was being selfish because I can heal myself and he can’t. A couple weeks after we realized what I can do we were still fucking but he wasn’t healing. He was belligerent, but I didn’t know why he wasn’t healing. I was worried that I had lost the power to heal myself, but he pushed me down the stairs and broke a couple ribs. By the time he caught up to me at the bottom my bones were as good as new.”

A tear formed behind Eliza’s eye. She didn’t realize how depressing the situation was until she vocalized it to Steve. She felt stupid, she felt ashamed for making herself a victim. Steve took a breath and was about to say more, but Eliza spoke up first.

“If I don’t heal him whenever he wants he will report me to the administrators,” Eliza mumbled hopelessly Steve’s body tensed up at the mention of the legislation.

“I told them it was a terrible idea. I told them it wasn’t fair, look at how much it has hurt you!” he thundered. Now the tears were streaming down her face. Steve tried to comfort her but she didn’t want him to touch her.

“What could I do but figure out why all of a sudden I couldn’t heal him anymore? The only thing that made Xander different from the other guys I had been with was that I cared for him on a deeper and more intimate level. I didn’t just fuck him, I made love to him. But the intimacy died when he started forcing me, and that’s when he stopped healing.” She wiped the tears from her eyes and sighed.

“Eliza…” Steve put his hand on her knee and she could feel his pain for her.

“So from then on I couldn’t just lay there while he fucked me. I had to open myself up… make myself vulnerable and be intimate with him so that he could be healed.”

She expected more tears to escape, but none formed. She felt like a stone. Telling Steve everything relieved her of some of her burden, but it also made her come to terms with what Xander had done. It was real. She couldn’t deny it any longer.

“We broke up during precamp. I thought it was done, I didn’t think he could be such a monster, but I was wrong. He doesn’t make me do it every night, but whenever he is sick or injured he comes to my room. I don’t even try to tell him no. I hate to do it, but I know he will tell on me for hiding my ability. All I can do is hope he doesn’t change his mind and turn me in anyway.”

Steve was speechless. He was not prepared for this. How could he have been so blind? But he wasn’t the only top agent in Shield oblivious to the abuse happening in the dormitories. He had to come up with a plan, had to think of way to get Eliza out of that trap without exposing her superpower. It would be easier said than done. It was unbelievable that she had gotten so far in Shield without anyone knowing.

“I have to tell Bruce,” he said. Eliza heard him but didn’t respond. She was too numb.

“I have to talk to Bruce,” he repeated. “He will know what to do.”

Eliza was scared. She liked Dr. Banner, but could she trust him? Could he really keep her safe from Xander and the Council?

“Just trust me on this one, okay?” he pleaded, “Bruce can help you.”

Eliza nodded. And with that simple gesture she sealed her fate in the hands of two Avengers. Most humans would feel safe, but Eliza could sense the strings coming undone at Shield. She could only hope the Avengers stayed together long enough to get her out of there.

Notes