𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐀𝐃𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐒𝐄 | ❝The world's watching my every move. Might as well give them the performance of a lifetime, right?❞
In which saving the universe was the last thing the Avengers expected to do, but the dust has sett...
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NOWADAYS, RILEY HATED ADMITTING when she was afraid.
It wasn't the type of thing people associated with her, the type of thing people wanted to associate with her. When they looked at her, they wanted to see a symbol. A token. They looked at her, and they didn't see Riley. Not at first. They would forever see her as Valor before anything else. It was the name she gave when she first introduced herself to the world, and it would be the name that went first on her grave.
The word itself meant a lot to her. It was her valor that kept her heart beating. Not her village, not her powers. It was her. Her drive, her spirit. It would always be her. The one person she could always rely on.
That didn't mean she never got scared though. It meant she had a lot of motivation to keep living, even when she probably shouldn't.
But there were times she got scared, and when she was, she liked to close her eyes.
Closing her eyes brought comfort. Because she didn't see darkness. She saw nothing. She learned this when she asked Fury about his blind eye several years ago.
"Do you ever get scared when you look through your bad eye?" Riley had wondered. She couldn't have been any older than eight of nine. She was following him around HQ. Fury's little shadow, his precious protege.
"Why would I get scared?" Fury often entertained her questions for the only reason of valuing his sanity. Agent O'Dair was terribly annoying when ignored, as he discovered early on.
"Because when I close my eyes, I always see the dark, and I hate the dark," she said, only to hurriedly add, "Not that I'm scared of the dark! Cuz I'm not! And if Barton said I was, he's full of shit! I just don't like the dark. It's totally different."
"Well, I hate to burst your bubble, Agent, but I don't see the dark. I see nothing."
"Isn't that the same thing?"
"Not even close," Fury said. "In the dark, there's no telling what's there. But if all you see is nothing, what do you have to worry about?"
"So... if I close my eyes, all my problems go away?" Riley wondered.
Fury stifled a laugh — which wasn't much of a laugh, technically. It was more of an enthusiastic sigh. "Something like that," he said. "But if you want to stay in the game, you've got to keep both eyes open."
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