Chapter 22: The Quiet

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WARNING: This chapter contains mentions of sexual/domestic abuse and child molestation. Please read at your own risk. This chapter is also longer than many of the other ones and it's pretty heavy.

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Hour 14

Farah jolted up in her bed. She looked around frantically and she realized she was just having a bad dream. She groaned and put her head in her hands. When would these nightmares stop?

Instead of Malia plaguing her dreams, last night it was Pietro and Wanda never coming home from their mission. You could probably say that Farah has fears of abandonment. She checked her phone and saw that it was around 6:00 AM. She sighed and decided she would go for a run.

She put on some leggings, a sports bra, and a thick sweatshirt. Farah assumed it was going to be pretty chilly out since it was early. She walked down the lonely hallway where her friends generally were and sighed.

It was crazy to her that she would be calling the Avengers her friends. If someone told her this is where she'd end up six months ago, she probably would have laughed in their face.

She ran her hand along one of the hallway walls, deep in thought. Farah found herself missing Malia right now. For the longest time, it had just been the two of them. Malia was never great at making new friends and Farah only ever needed one. As she got older, she found that to be less and less true, but she never wanted Malia to think she was abandoning her. Kind of how Farah has felt her whole life.

Sure, Farah had her mom growing up, but they were never exactly close. Her mom was constantly working to pay their bills and Farah was usually with Malia. It's part of the reason she doesn't speak to her that much. Farah considered calling her to ask about her father but she realized she would then have to explain that she was living with the Avengers, and she didn't really want to do that.

The majority of her abandonment issues stem from her father. She had hoped that maybe he had just never known about her, but there was always this dark feeling inside Farah that maybe he had known about her, and just didn't care. Her father definitely wasn't the last person to leave, either.

Her mom had boyfriends growing up that Farah had gotten close to, some maybe a little too close. One of her boyfriends, Adam, had actually tried to sneak in on her in the shower one morning. Farah was nine years old. He had slowly opened the shower curtain when he got hit in the head with a baseball bat by her mom. Apparently, her mom had been suspecting he was a creep for a few days, and it turns out she was right.

Adam was not the last man to try to touch her inappropriately. He had never laid a hand on her, but others had. One of those being her grandfather. It wasn't until she went to college that Farah realized what he was doing was wrong. She lived pretty close to her grandparents and whenever she went over to their house, he would always take her into their garage to show her model trains.

Everything was normal until she hit puberty. Farah had always been pretty busty, even when her breasts were just starting to grow. When she turned 13, Farah's visits to her grandfather's garage started to change. She would stand there looking at his model trains and he would stand next to her, gently putting an arm around her. He would rub her back and then slowly touch her breast. He would occasionally venture to her ass.

Now, at 13 Farah was uncomfortable with this, but she never told anyone about it. She thought that was just how it was supposed to be, that it wasn't wrong that her grandfather had kept doing that to her. Farah thought she was in the wrong for not liking it. He kept touching her like that until she went away to college. This is the other reason why Farah never wanted to visit home.

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