She couldn’t meet the younger woman’s eyes, but she could feel the tears starting to build in her own. Raina laughed, shook her head, and kept her gaze fixed on the hardwood floor of her room.
“Childish,” the Inhuman woman murmured, speaking more to herself than to Skye. “It’s so… stupid. But I used to think-…”
She trailed off, angry at herself for allowing her walls to come down this way, for having been naive enough to have ever genuinely believed that the Mists would be enough to fix her… cleanse her… save her. She’d thought she was a grown up, but it turned out she was nothing more than a stupid little girl, still chasing fairytales and broken promises. She’d had a life, and she’d thrown it away. Now… without Cal, without her looks, without any sense of direction, she found herself crumbling. Her hopes and dreams of what her future might be had all been built on ash and mist. And now everything had fallen apart. Now, as always, as ever, she was alone.
“My grandmother used to tell me stories… about… a-about the Inhumans. And the Kree. She called them angels; said that once you became one of them, you were your true and most perfect self. I always pictured the Inhumans as this… huge, perfect family. No one was an outsider, no one was misunderstood, or imperfect… Afterlife was this great big Utopia, a safe place for people who were different. You went there… and you could make yourself perfect. Make a difference.”
She was quiet for a long moment, wrapping her arms around her middle as she continued to stare at the floor. She let out a soft, bitter snort of laughter, and a tear slipped down her cheek, wending its way through the forrest of spikes that disfigured her face.
“I used to dream about it. About coming here, and discovering my power. I thought I was going to be the next WonderWoman or something–that I would go through the Mists and then-…” She broke off briefly, angrily trying to wipe away the tears that were now falling uncontrollably, only succeeding in scratching herself and mixing blood into the saltwater.
“I was going to help so many people. I was going to go out, and find the other people like me… help them evolve, keep them safe.” It was all coming out now, she couldn’t stop the words. She’d held them in for so long–nobody cared, nobody would listen, nobody understood–and now they wouldn’t stop, she couldn’t hold them any longer, she was breaking and it was all flowing out and she couldn’t make it stop, she was loosing control, she couldn’t stop. “I just knew, I always knew if I got here, i-if I could be my true self, my Inhuman self-… i-it was supposed to be a clean slate, I could prove myself, show the person I really am, who I’m meant to be. I could be good. I was going to be good, so good, I would have been perfect, and they would have loved me, I could have helped!”
Raina buried her face in her hands, her whole body shaking with the force of her sobs as she doubled over. It was ruined. All of it. There were no second chances. No clean slates. She was who she was. This was her true self–ugly, broken, isolated. Unworthy. She was no hero. She was not good. She was this. This monster, this horror in the shadows, and even men like Cal, who had committed more atrocities than she could name, wanted nothing to do with her. Skye had turned the Inhumans against her, and she had nowhere else to run. Her mouth was full of the bitter taste of ashes, and her heart was heavy with memories of all the years she had wasted on this dream, only for it to become a nightmare. Everything she had done, all that hard work, all her plotting, and scheming, and clawing her way to the top, only to find out she was as ugly inside as she was outside, and that there was no way back. There was nothing but this. How could she have ever thought she would ever be the hero? She would never save the world, never help anyone, or fix anything. She couldn’t even fix herself.
idk ♱ i feel like... if she had ONE person in her life just come and sit her down ♱ pat her on the head ♱ tell her she's special and that it's gonna be okay ♱ she'd totally shatter ♱ and then maybe she could start over and start to be happy
I feel like Raina’s personality is pretty much the spectrum between: “I could be nice to you... but why bother? I’m better than you.” and “adjkleulslkdjs soMEONE PLEASE LOVE ME AND PUT MY LIFE IN ORDER!!! -breaks down into hysterical sobbing-”
So, I’ve been becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that Raina’s history is so terribly full of holes and just downright inconsistent. So to give everyone a better idea of how I play her, and to give other characters a chance to interact with her in the past, I’ve written out a rough outline of her history, drawing on things from the show, and story lines that were introduced, but never explained or fleshed out, including the Theta Brainwave Frequency Machine, her “grandmother”, “the freaks,” and Cal.
PLEASE NOTE: This is almost entirely head cannon. So yeah, at times, it might sound ridiculous, but the AOS writers just... dropped so many random things in there, and then just never spoke about them again? I’m just trying to piece things together, so that I can write Raina as consistently and well as I possibly can.
Raina was born in the slums of New York City, where she lived with her mother. Her father died when she was three years old. And while she has no memory of him, she does retain memories of the numerous men her mother continuously paraded in and out of their small apartment--whether the woman was a prostitute, or just loose, Raina can never quite keep straight. She has vague memories of the situation being abusive, of her mother’s substance addiction, and the apartment that was her childhood home, but it’s not something she thinks about very often. Her mother left the apartment one day when Raina was five, and never came back. That was where they left things, and she doesn’t like to talk about it.
When she ran out of food, Raina took to the streets. When she couldn’t beg a few coins or a bite to eat from sympathetic shop keepers or tourists, she would steal. She learned how to make herself invisible, how to garner sympathy when that failed, how to make her body tremble or faint, her eyes fill up with tears, and her tongue work to get her in or out of any situation. In short, she learned to lie.
About a year after she started living on the streets, she was kidnapped. A man in a suit offered her something to eat, and instead drugged her, and sold her to a branch of HYDRA, along with eleven other girls her age.
Here, her memory gets... a little fuzzy...
Raina was born in New York City. She never knew her parents. She has been an orphan for as long as she can remember. She was sent to live with her grandmother when she was just an infant, and when she was six, she and her grandmother moved to Thailand, and Raina was enrolled in a special all-girls-school. The “Viper” Program, the other girls called it. Eight different houses of the same school, twelve girls per house. They were taught to dance, to speak multiple languages, to draw, to be lady-like, to be intelligent, to be manipulative, to be women, to kill.
Raina excelled in Hydra’s programming, quickly rising through the ranks. The woman she thought to be her grandmother, was none other than Madame Hydra herself, who’d taken a special interest in nurturing the girl. It was she who discovered Raina’s Inhuman origins, and who told the girl about how special she was, and that it was her destiny to join with this ancient race of super powered beings, in the hopes that the girl would one day lead HYDRA to the Inhumans.
But this dream would never come to pass, as when Raina turned 8 years old, SHIELD found the base HYDRA was using for the program, and shut it down, liberating the surviving girls.
When Raina was taken into SHIELD custody, she was put through the Theta Brainwave Frequency machine, to unlock the memories of her life before HYDRA had attempted to program her, with the hopes that knowing who she had been would help to counteract the damage done. SHIELD worked to suppress the girl’s memories of her time in the HYDRA houses, but she still retained memories of her “grandmother” and everything she had been told about the Inhumans. Her newfound skills also remained with her, though without the knowledge of how she had acquired them, Raina simply dismissed her training as natural abilities.
SHIELD ordered that the girls be taken to separate foster homes around Thailand, and it was Agent John Garrett (later revealed to be a member of HYDRA) who brought Raina to her “new home.” Garrett however, recognized that Raina might be useful in the future, and so the agent kept tabs on her, tracking her so that later, when she had grown, he might be able to draw her back into HYDRA’s fold.
Raina stayed in her foster home for almost a month, before she finally ran away. Then it was back to living on the streets, begging and manipulating people until she encountered a group of teenagers, who took her in and started to raise her. She and the gang lovingly referred to themselves as “freaks,” having come from all walks of life, and found themselves at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. They were con artists, thieves, street performers, thugs, monsters, and madmen--a strange, but tight knit pseudo-family, with nothing and no one else to rely on.
It was in Thailand where Calvin Zabo (Cal Johnson), first met Raina. He first noticed her begging on the streets, then again at a bakery near his apartment, and a tailor’s shop a few doors down, convincing the store owners to give her food and material for clothes. The girl’s talent and resourcefulness in the face of her situation impressed him, and he found himself keeping an eye out for her wherever he went. So he couldn’t exactly say he was surprised when he caught her trying to pickpocket him one day, and instead of calling the police, made her show him to the other “freaks” and offered the group a home with him. Cal endeavored to raise them properly, educating and providing for them as he would have his own children, taking a particular interest in mentoring, and completely spoiling, Raina.
Cal first discovered Raina’s Inhuman origins when having a conversation with the girl about how she’d first come to meet the other kids in what Cal jokingly referred to as their “little cult.” Raina told him about how her “grandmother” had always told her that she was special, because she was made by the ‘blue angels from the sky,’ who had come to remake the world. Cal recognized the story as that of the origins of the Inhumans, and confirmed that it was true, but misunderstood what the child was trying to tell him, and made the assumption that all of the “freaks” were abandoned Inhuman children. From that point on he made sure to educate them all in their “origins,” which only served to strengthen Raina’s obsession with evolution and her destiny to become something truly special.
Over the years, as Cal became more desperate to piece together his own family, he again began experimenting with the super soldier serum he and Jiaying had developed. When Raina was about twelve or so, she started to help Cal with his research and redevelopment of the serum. They weren’t able to successfully recreate the drug until she was fifteen, and they were able to improve upon it and first brought Hyde into his fullest fruition when she was sixteen. The more Cal experimented with the serum, the more his mental stability deteriorated. Some of the cult kids, recognizing the danger in the situation, fled. Others stayed and were eventually killed or left for dead. But Raina had fallen deeply in love with Cal, and did everything that she could to make herself useful, and to give Cal some form of stability in their lives. For years, Raina was Cal’s accomplice, doing everything in her power to protect him and prevent their separation. She aided him in his search for Daisy, but as she grew up, she started to become more interested in her Inhuman origins.
She started experimenting on herself and then on others, trying to develop a formula to expose her Inhuman DNA with no success. And then, when she was 25, she was approached by a man in a suit, who informed her that someone named “The Clairvoyant” was interested in her work, and she was offered a position as the head scientist of an organization calling itself The Centipede Project. Thinking that this Clairvoyant would be able to tell her her future if she ever met him, Raina accepted.
Cal was furious. When Raina told him of her plans to go and work for the Clairvoyant, Cal--enraged that she was “abandoning” and “betraying” him--threw her out, and cut off all contact. Raina did what she could to keep track of Cal, occasionally doing what little she could to ensure he was healthy, safe, and free, but she didn’t hear from him again for almost four years. It broke her heart.
Raina worked diligently for the Centipede project, making and breaking whatever alliances she had to in order to move ahead. Her goal was to reach the Clairvoyant, and to ask him her question. But she stole a good amount of research on the Extremis serum the Centipede soldiers were injected with along the way, and did everything in her power to assert herself as the powerful, manipulative woman she knew herself to be.
(THERE. That’s everything I’ve come up with based on all the information we’ve gotten about Raina. Hope you like it, hope it makes sense. After this point, Raina’s story follows cannon... at least it does for a little while, but that’s a totally different kettle of fish.)
ooc: I’m going to do something I REALLY probably shouldn’t do. But I wrote this drabble a while ago, and hey, why the hell not, it’s about time I posted it.
Under the cut for triggers and length. TW: violence, abuse, and… well… Calvin Zabo, being Calvin Zabo.
“You’re being pathetic. It’s been twenty years, you’re acting as if it were only twenty minutes! I mean… I know you cared for them, of course you did, but it’s time to heal, and move on. It’s not as if you need them anymore. Not when you’ve got me.”
It was the first time he ever hit her. Really hit her. The slap caught her, full force across the cheek, the flat of his hand connecting hard against the side of her face. The blow was so terrifically staggering, it sent her reeling to the floor, where she sat, stunned, and stared up at him through wide, uncomprehending brown eyes. She held up a hand, a confused, hesitant gesture, half reaching for her stinging cheek, half warding off another terrifying blow.
‘He asked,’ she thought, dazed, as she felt one of his hands wrapping tight around her throat as the doctor hauled her roughly to her feet. ‘He asked… he wanted to know. He wanted honesty… there are no secrets between us…’
Raina let out a noise somewhere between a squeak and a sob as she felt herself being slammed backwards into a wall. The doctor was holding her several inches off the ground, leaving her to choke, squirming piteously, her fingers clawing uselessly at his hands as his grip tightened. Just at the moment where she was convinced that this was the end—that she really had pushed him too far this time, and that he was going to choke the life out of her—he let go. But she barely had time to drop forward, gasping, before his fist found the back of her skull.
The girl cried out in fear and pain as the doctor’s fingers twisted sharply into her hair. She kicked uselessly, squirming as he dragged her by the scalp up the stairs and into the bedroom. She could feel her hair tearing slowly away from its roots, coming away from her head in stinging, bloody clumps, and still he would not release her. Raina had never seen the doctor in such a state—he was beyond angry, far beyond the point of words. ‘He’s going to kill me,’ she thought wildly, struggling to grab onto the stairs or the banister as the older man forced her up the steps. ‘He’s going to bash my head against the wall! He’s going to drown me in the tub!’
Instead he half dragged, half carried her into his bedroom, and stood her up in front of the mirror, so that she strained and bent awkwardly, forced to stand on the balls of her feet, her neck and head being pulled back one way while her torso and legs arched in the opposite direction. With savage movements, the doctor tore the clothes from her back with one hand, until she stood quivering, naked in front of the mirror, and unable to look away. The doctor twisted her hair, hauling her up and up until she screamed.
"There is nothing remarkable about this," he hissed at her, his dark eyes burning like hot coals in the darkness. "Look at yourself. Look! What exactly is so special about what you see? There’s nothing but a woman there. A stupid little girl, just like every other scrawny, stupid little ape girl bumbling across this godforsaken planet! What makes you so special? What makes you so goddamn important? What gives you the right, the audacity to speak about things you couldn’t even begin to understand! You are not the only bitch with a cunt. You just so happen to be the one I decide to turn over every now and again, and that’s something I could do with any woman. You’re no different from any other common beggar-whore roaming the streets.”
One of his hands found her breast, and he gave it a sharp squeeze, digging his nails into her supple flesh. Even as he spoke, there was a small part of him, screaming at him to stop. 'She doesn't understand,' he found himself thinking helplessly. 'She's just a child. And she worships you, it isn't her fault. Don't say any more, don't break her, don't be so cruel.' Only he found, as he had been finding more and more often as of late, that he could not stop. It was as if someone had cut the wires between is head and his body, and he was being forced to watch and listen, as if he were no more than a marionette, being tugged and spun on the strings of his fury. There was blood welling up in small beads beneath his fingernails, and dripping slowly down the girl’s chest. She’d stopped sobbing, but the tears still ran uncontrollably down her face as she stared up at him through the mirror’s reflection. And he wanted to stop. Knew he had to, or risk shattering her completely. But the words kept coming, poison pouring from his lips, and she was soaking up every syllable.
"Listen to me, and listen well. You are nothing. Understand? Nothing. Not a child, barely a woman, not my daughter, and never my wife. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in you that could hold a candle to either my true wife, or my little girl. My two-month-old infant had more brains, talent, and beauty in her little toe than you could ever possibly hope to possess even if you lived until the end of days. So don’t you ever EVER presume that you are or ever will be to me, or anyone else, more than what you are, you stupid, worthless, ugly little street rat!”
He threw her to the floor with all the savage strength of his rage. Raina scrambled to her feet, and struggling to cover her breasts and her sex with her small, shaking hands, she bolted from the room. She never met his gaze, but the doctor caught sight of her expression in the mirror—her wide, dark eyes shining with tears, and filled with an expression he’d grown much accustomed to seeing looking back at him from his own mirror. Shame. Fear. Disgust. Anger. Self-loathing. And not a trace of the little girl she had been.
'She's nineteen,' he thought dully, watching her disappear down the hall. ‘She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand. Christ, what have I done? She’s just a child…’
The old woman’s eyes were still wide open, her lips twisted into an evil, angry looking snarl. Rigamortis already setting into the joints, stiffening ligaments and the muscle. Her hands curled like choking vines, one around the rungs of the banister, the other scratching at the wall. And she was… twisted. Broken, bent at angles along the stairs, her neck facing one way, her legs another, her torso another. She must have had a dizzy spell. A coughing fit. Slipped. Fallen.
"Grandma?"
It wasn’t her fault, the little girl tried to tell herself, as she ran past the body, up the stairs, and into her room. She didn’t even know this woman, not really. Just a neighbor. Just a nice woman, who’d come to take care of her, when mommy had gone away. Just some nice, sick old lady, who’d given her food and clothes, sent her to school… She’d never go to school again. It was school’s fault. Yes. She could have been here. She should have been here, not learning stupid numbers, and playing with snot nosed brats. She should have been here. Stopped this, somehow. Maybe they would have gone to the zoo, or the park instead… there weren’t any stairs at the park…
But she wasn’t waiting around for the police, or child services. Not again. No please, not again. Backpack. Where was her backpack?!
"It’s not my fault. I-it’s not my fault… It’s not… not my fault, itsnotmyfaultitsnotmyfaultitsnotmyfault!"
The night before, she’d lain on the couch, eyes half closed, and listened to her mother and her new boyfriend fucking and shooting up in the kitchen. Again. Some time around two, the door to the apartment had opened, and not been closed. But it was cold, and she was too tired to care, so she’d curled up in a ball under her little red blanket, and buried her face in the cushions.
When the sun came up, she was alone. Bored, hungry. Too short to reach the cabinets or the refrigerator, she’d started digging through the piles of fast food containers, carefully avoiding the old syringes that littered the floor and stuck out dangerously from under every garbage heap, while she looked for something to eat.
Her mother didn’t come home that night, or the next. In fact, she never saw the woman again. Abandoned, is that the word for it? Forgotten.
She still panics when she wakes up alone. And she hates being left behind.
