Prologue
“From childhood’s hour I have not been.”
-Alone, by Edgar Allan Poe
My throat felt like it was on fire the night I realized my father was never coming home, and I couldn’t breathe. I kept coughing and coughing, but my lungs and throat didn’t clear of the disease. After my trash can in my room was full, I managed to stumble to the one bathroom in the house and continue coughing and gagging into the toilet.
I was eight years old, living in Tennessee with my mom and newborn sister. That day at school had been a rough one, getting thrown around by bullies who made fun of me for the fact that my dad had gone out for cigarettes five months ago. I got home and asked my mom about it, and she just started to cry as if there were no tomorrow.
Based off of the coughing and suffocating, there may not have been a tomorrow for me.
My mom ran into the bathroom, tears falling as she pulled me into her lap and rubbed my back, trying to comfort me as I sobbed and coughed. She said she had only seen the disease manifest in children once or twice at the hospital. That it was usually romantic love that caused it, not platonic. She said it was only if the platonic love was so extreme that it could do this.
I didn’t sleep that night. I just coughed and cried.
In the morning, I heard my mom screaming at my dad over the phone. She was saying this was all his fault, that his son would die because he was selfish. I had never seen her so mad before.
Mom spent the next year saving up all of the money she could. She was working three jobs and only eating when she absolutely had to.
The teachers at school felt bad for me. They never yelled at me for disrupting class when I went into a coughing fit, and always let me go to the bathroom when it got too bad. I was exempted from PE and activities. But just because the teachers were nice, doesn’t mean the kids are.
To this day, I very distinctly remember when I went into a coughing fit on the playground, and EJ and his friends pinned me down, out of sight of any adults. They took the sleeve of a sweater and covered my mouth so that the disease built in my throat and block any way for me to breath. I blacked out from the lack of oxygen, then woke up in the nurse's office. I threw up several times, and didn’t stop coughing for a few hours.
It was only a week later that my mom took me and my baby sister to the hospital, having just heard about what happened. She checked us in and gave a doctor all of the money she had saved for the last year. The doctor and a few nurses got me onto a stretcher, and I was rushed back into surgery.
I stopped coughing after the surgery, but I also noticed that my heart felt empty. The doctor said that something went wrong in the surgery. That they were able to remove the disease, but they also removed all of my capability to feel love. Along with this news, they also told her that they discovered that I had a rare heart disease that had gone unchecked.
We didn’t have the money for me to go into another surgery, or get the proper medicine, so it reminded unchecked.
I spent my year of being nine completely empty, but at least not in pain. The bullying continued, this time for being emotionless instead of being to emotional.
When I was ten, Tony Stark appeared in my garage. For some reason, that jolted my emotions right back to how they used to be without triggering the disease.
When the water tower fell, I felt a whole new kind on suffocation. Drowning. I thought for sure I was dead, but Tony saved me. Both EJ and I had to get jolted by the Arc Reactor to be revived, almost killing Tony in the process.
The jolt had made my heart condition worse though.
Tony and his girlfriend, along with his best friend James Rhodes became family. We spent three years together before my life fell apart, and I was moved out to New York.