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It had been months since your last relapse. You’d struggled with alcohol addiction before,badly. Therapy had helped, slowly giving you something to hold onto besides the destructive thoughts constantly occupying your mind. For months, you had been doing better. Then you found out your boyfriend had cheated on you. Something inside you snapped. While the Avengers were away on a mission, you went completely rogue. One drink became another, and soon almost every bottle in the Tower had been touched by you. By the time you finally stopped, you were sitting alone on the couch, defeated, a drink loosely held in one hand and your phone in the other. The Tower was eerily quiet. The Avengers weren’t expected back until morning. You stared blankly at your phone before taking another sip. Eventually, you couldn’t keep your eyes open. You cleaned up what you could, stumbled to the couch, and blacked out. Hours later, you woke up with a splitting headache and a mouth that tasted like regret. Somehow, nobody had noticed. You immediately went upstairs to your room. Later that evening, you forced yourself downstairs for dinner. The moment you entered the room, every face turned toward you. You quietly took your usual seat. One by one, their attention returned to the conversation. Nobody asked where you’d been. Nobody accused you of drinking. Nobody interrogated you. But you could feel it anyway. The silence. The looks. The disappointment that seemed to hang in the air around you. And somehow, that was worse than if they’d said something.