ᴛʀᴏᴜᴠᴀɪʟʟᴇ | 𝐖. 𝐌𝐀𝐗𝐈𝐌𝐎𝐅𝐅 [ ɪ ]

| ᴘʀᴏʟᴏɢᴜᴇ |

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𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

𝓽𝓻𝓸𝓾𝓿𝓪𝓲𝓵𝓵𝓮
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On a warm October afternoon in Denham Springs, Louisiana, a teenage girl laid curled up in a fetal position on her bed, her entire body racking with sobs. She was flooded with so many emotions all at once - none of them positive - that they overwhelmed her and she was finding it difficult to breathe. Guilt because of what she'd done. Anger that she had been unable to control herself. Despair, frustration, depression, self-loathing - the whole she-bang.

As Sage Rhonwen cried helplessly in her bedroom, Denham Springs High School was on fire. Something that she was responsible for. The fire department were sending all their best men to try and put it out, but Sage knew that if she had not been able to put it out herself, they wouldn't be either, and odds are, some of them would die.

As she tried to calm herself down to no avail, she recalled the events that had led up to her deadly outburst. She had just been trying to get to her next class - AP US History, a class that would be her favorite if the teacher wasn't so slow - but of course, the same group of "popular kids" just had to go out of their way to torment her, something they seemed to take great pleasure in as they did it often.

Because of the frequency of their pestering, Sage had grown accustomed to it. She was an easy target, after all. In spite of the fact that she had excellent grades, was the captain of the girl's water polo team as well as the swim team, and was, in every sense of the word, the perfect student, she still managed to stand out for all the wrong reasons. She wasn't "girly" enough, she didn't fawn over boys the way the rest of the girls at her school did (initially, she had told herself that this was just because all the guys in town were assholes, but as it turned out, she just didn't like guys at all), and she preferred to keep her circle of friends small, partially because everyone else was, quite frankly, exasperating, and partially because the thought of having such a large friend group overwhelmed her.

Quite frankly, Sage couldn't care less what they thought of her, but this time had been different. This time they had struck a nerve. This time she had snapped, and if Sage hadn't been hard on herself before, she certainly was now.

Of course, most teenagers tend to be pretty hard on themselves, but the average self-doubting teen was nothing compared to Sage Rhonwen.  This was mostly because of her aunt and uncle, whom she had come to live with after she had watched her father get brutally murdered right before her very eyes at the mere age of thirteen by an organization she would soon come to know as HYDRA, as they had drawn their symbol on the wall of their small apartment in her father's blood.