Captive

Raven

She could've gotten ready in fifteen minutes if she really wanted to, but the fact that she hadn't showered in four days was really getting to her. The water felt nice, so she stayed in the shower for probably way longer than she needed to. She hated being in this state of mind, when she tried to heal herself when she was like this it just made old wounds open again, literally.

It was like her body was just rejecting her every command, so when she got out of the shower and saw her body in the mirror it was kind of a shock. Old bruises that she got years ago scattered her body, old scrapes and cuts along her arms and legs. It had never really gotten this bad before, and she poked at one of the bruises on her left wrist, knowing immediately where it came from.

She wiped away the tears starting to appear in her eyes, and quickly got dressed, ignoring the bruise. All the others she probably got from falling, it was just that one. It was easy enough to just dress in one of her old dresses, back from when things were kind of okay. Back when she had friends, sort of.

"Raven come on, stop being such a sore loser, just do that invisible shit you do!" Her friend James said as he took a drag from the joint that they were passing around the circle. It was her friend Kyle's birthday, and he had taken her out earlier and they stole some money to buy the drugs for his 'party'. It was just the four of them, Kyle, James, Kristen and her, sitting in James' beaten down apartment.

She rolled her eyes and laughed, "Alright, but I get two hits of the good stuff," she said, pointing to the LSD tablets that were in a bag on the corner of the table. Kristen let out a laugh, smoke emerging from her lips as the laugh turned into a light cough.

"Ray, seriously, you're the best when you're on the cubes man," Kristen said, coughing up some more smoke. James' arm went around her shoulders as he took the blunt from her hands and took yet another drag.

She looked over at Kyle who was staring at her with his eyebrows raised as if saying, we'll come on then, do it, and she sighed again before concentrating on her hand and watching it slowly disappear from thin air. She had been practicing more and more, and this time her whole arm went invisible as well. The sound of James whistling broke her concentration, her arm reappearing in an instant. "Hey Ray, come here a sec I wanna show you something," Kyle said, standing up and motioning her to follow. The two of them went into the other room, leaving James and Kristen alone.

She could tell that Kyle was surprisingly sober, all he had were a few cigarettes and a beer or two so far. Although she knew that as the night carried on, he would go more and more intense. "What's up?" She asked, taking a seat down on the bed.

"Alright so you know that job thing that I got?" He said, kind of awkwardly standing in the doorway. One side of his mouth was turned upward and she knew that he was nervous, it was one of the little quirks that he had.

"The one that you lost after a week? What about it?" She leaned back, still keeping a close eye on him.

"Well I know that you're the one who actually gets the money for all this shit ha know? So I got you somethin' special." He held up his finger before she could say anything, and he began walking over to the night stand by James' bed. "I just wanted to show you how much you mean to me." He leaned down and reached under the bed, pulling out a medium size box with a ribbon tied around it. He walked around to where she was sitting and placed it gently on her lap.

"It's your birthday today Kyle, not mine-"

"Sh, it's fine just open it yeah?" He urged her with his hands and she laughed, her own hands moving towards the small bow. She untied it and pulled the ribbon off, opening the box to reveal a white day dress, and she gasped slightly, pulling it out of the box and holding it up. It had lace up at the top of the chest and over the shoulders, a printed pattern leading to a pink and blue lace-like printed pattern down at the bottom. She looked over at him with a confused expression.

"Why would you...." She trailed off, her eyes wandering back towards the dress. "Why?"

"I wanted to get you something special, just to show you how much you mean to me Ray."

'Just to show you how much you mean to me Ray.' His words echoed through her mind as she looked at herself in the mirror in the dress. It hurt to look back through her old clothes from those times, mostly because she wasn't proud of her decisions. She had been with them for only three years out of her life, but they were some of the happiest memories she had, at least the ones she remembered.

It wasn't often that she thought back on the days she hung out with those three, but whenever she did usually even more scrapes and bruises seemed to appear. It was just one of those days. One of those ones where you think back on previous things you did in your life and the wounds hurt almost as much as they did back then, except in her case they actually did hurt, physically.

There was a knock at the door, reminding her of why she had even put on the dress in the first place. She falsely smiled to herself in the mirror, walking out of her room to get the door. She opened it to find Steve standing there. He looked tired, as if he hadn't got much sleep in the past few days. "You alright there cap?" He nodded, but his eyes widened when he took a look at her closely.

"What the hell happened to you?" He gently pushed himself past her and closed the door. His hand grabbed hers and pulled her arm up closer to his face, and he examined the bruises and cuts running up her arms.

"Steve I'm fine really, these are old." She gently pulled her arm away, reluctant to tell him exactly how old they were. She had already come clean about the invisibility thing, and coming clean about the weird healing thing, doesn't sound too appealing. "Let me just put on some deodorant then we can go okay?"

"How old are they?" She flinched, how did she know he was going to ask that?

"I'll explain it all to you eventually okay, just... Just know that I'm seriously okay right now, no one had touched me since you last saw me," she let that sit for a few seconds before remembering how Bucky carried her into bed the night before. "Except maybe Bucky, he picked me up and put me into my bed yesterday."

"Why?"

"I'll explain it later, " she waved her hand at him, "Okay seriously though, let me just put on some deodorant then we can go okay?" He nodded slightly, a pondering look on his face. He knew that she wasn't telling him something, she could feel it. "We going anywhere special or?"

"No, just thought maybe we could walk in the par or something, figured we'd just do whatever you'd want to do."