"Now I see. The demon is me."
Lisa May Stark is so much more than the child she used to be when she and her father were kidnapped in Afghanistan five years ago. She's Iron Man's daughter, she's the Red Raven, she's, well, you know who she is...
father, have mercy i know that i have gone astray when i saw my reflection it was a stranger beneath my face the lament of eustace scrubb ─── the oh hellos
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new york, new york november 29, 2015 ( third person point of view )
Some people are born with it.
Pain.
They are destined for it as they are brought into the world and as they grow older. They live their lives as best they can, trying to keep inside their fear of what new dark pain might come next. They wake in each new morning, dreading who or what they might lose next. They go to sleep each night with tears staining their pillows and hatred for themselves sinking into their hearts. Some people just don't know how to survive it and some people just try to push it away from themselves. They hide themselves from the pain, and numb themselves to the misery. It's the only way that some people know how to carry on. It's only way the Starks know how to survive.
The girl of twenty has never felt more alone.
She's never felt more far away, more lied to, more despised.
It is all because of that despicable file.
God, why did she ever open that file?
Now she knows.
Now she knows all of it.
Lisa keeps her head ducked low and her trembling hands stuffed into her pockets as she moves through the dark New York Streets, trying to just disappear like she's always asked to. She buries her chin within the neck of her sweatshirt, rubbing her pale lips together in hopes of warming them up. It's raining again and the heavy droplets are icy and bitter, only made worse by the February air that feels so much colder than anyone could think possible.
Lisa got so close again; so close to talking to the boy, to-to him. His name... Peter. It's so hard to say his name now. She almost saw him again today. She stopped outside the tall brown-brick apartment building and she just couldn't do it. She still can't do it. There's too much anger, too much rage, and, frankly, too much hatred. It's been eating her alive for the past nine months, swallowing her up into this deep dark pit she knows she can't escape from. She just wants so badly to find a way to shut it out, to forget, to just not be this miserable being anymore.
But her stupid desires don't matter.
How can anyone escape from themselves?
All of her past, all of those horrible memories, all of that pain, it's led her to this. She had to know it was always coming to this. Everybody had to know that she was destined for this fate. Her own mother told her she wasn't going anywhere far in life. Reporters have said so many times that she was going to end up as all rich kids did: broken, lonely, a waste of space. Even her father said she was destined to lose herself to all of his problems. After all, the line between being Lisa Stark and being someone else has come dangerously close and she's not sure which side she'll choose to fall onto.
