Budapest » [Clintasha]

Chapter Fifty-Eight: The Mocking Bird

I hated S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy.

It was like a lion's den, and every one of the pupils was carnal and carnivorous. Like animals, they could smell fear, and blood - like a predatory sixth sense - and I was rife with both: bludgeoned to a bloody pulp post-combat training daily, and sweating like a cornered nun after competing with them in athletics. They were keen minded and savvy in the ring; and I'd always end up pinned and defeated.

I was more out of my depth than a fish in the shark tank. And I floundered, and failed, and flunked in every class.

What were they expecting? If they'd conducted surveillance on me and excavated my past, they would've known I dropped out of highschool.

I'm not an academic. Never was. Maths made me narcoleptic, the sciences sent me to sleep, and even English was too formulaic for me. Track and field, that's where I came into my element; if there was a javelin to hurl, a discus to toss or a shotput to chuck, I would be top of the league table. And with my family life, I had a flair for running, it was in my arsenal of survival skills.

But still, they made me look like a rookie in the gym. I could barely bench-press eighty kilos, most students could do double. One handed.

Gymnastics, I could blag my way through: I used to hang with the acrobats at the circus - pun intended, I mean, these guys literally used to dangle from the trapeze in the big-top when they were chilling - and they'd get me to try and replicate their tricks on humid summer nights around the campfire for their amusement whilst the minstrels plucked their crude instruments. And some stunts I could pull off!

God, I miss those nights. Back then, my quality of life didn't depend on unorthodox sports. The autonomy of youth should be exploited before you become shackled to responsibility; but my childhood was governed by the autocracy of my father, I never tasted carelessness, and I only sipped at a smidgen of freedom.

The mats were where I was weakest. I'm not built like Captain America; I'm weedy, and too skinny for my own good; my mother used to prod me in the chest and rib that she could play the xylophone on my jutting ribs. Morbid, in retrospect; we were all malnourished besides my lumbering lump of a father. The killing joke - and starvation did nearly kill us - being we had to sell our farm foodstuffs to afford to live; so often we were left with scrap cuttings from the butcher's; rotten, flaccid, a higher fat and bone content than actual meat.

"Tap out!" I yelped, throwing my back, wiggling and writhing under Bobbi. "Tap out!" My drool and sweat was smearing like a Jackson Pollock on the laminate surface of the mat, a viscous trail of excretions, gloopy, wet. I felt childlike, dribbling the ultimate humiliation and signal of childish inferiority.

"Stop tapping out!" She hissed in my ear, her knee jabbing into the small of my back - the blow winded more air out of my gasping lungs - and my arm contorted immobilisingly: I could feel the joint of my elbow knotting and rolling, and the muscle fibres, stretching apart. "Roll over and you can take me! I'm going easy on you!" She punctuated her point with another stab of the knee, I spluttered and more flecks of spittle sprayed.

My face smooshed against the mat, I made an incoherent gurgling noise as I twisted, and grunted as her knee only buried deeper into my spine. I was sure she was going to dislodge a spinal disk at any moment, the curvature abnormal - seriously, how did those contortionists in their harlequin leotards tangle themselves up? Sweat filled the crevice-like creases of my furrowed forehead, and dribbled from my sopping wet strands. I winced as the salty concoction stung my eyeballs.

"Where's Maria?" I complained, breathless from the exertion of the martial arts. Bobbi was crushing my ribcage with her ruthless onslaught.

"Madripoor," was the monosyllabic answer. Unsympathetic.