Chapter Text
"To kill the monster, you become the monster."
- Alicia Clark, Fear the Walking Dead
. . .
The first time she kills someone it is an accident. She's in the room again, training. Not with the Ice-Man - like her he is one of a kind and is only brought out on special occasions. No, in this room there are men and women, taller and bigger and more human than her. Some of them she recognizes from previous sessions, most she doesn't. They are not like her.
A punch flies at her, aiming for the side of the head-
She is gone.
And back again in a moment, out of range of the fist and safe for a time at the other end of the room.
She is not afraid to be hit. It is part of the training. And nothing can hurt her the way her body hurts itself. But she knows that's not what they want. That the punches are supposed to miss. That she is supposed to get better. That she is supposed to hit back and not miss.
She is supposed to win.
And she's found it's easier to do what she's supposed to.
Besides, they are still the only ones who can fix her.
(promises, promises)
They haven't cured her yet.
She doesn't think they will.
But if she doesn't do what she's supposed to do, she knows they won't.
A man comes at her, she phases, runs forward, intending to run through and past him, out of danger. But something goes wrong a second in. It's unpredictable, you see, so unpredictable. The suit may help her control it but only to a point. And there are always surprises. She never quite knows when she's going to fade out; or in.
As is the case, this time.
Her cells harden and bones shatter - not her own for once. She hears them break, the sound bringing back memories of the branches her mother would snap to make mock arrows and swords for her to play with (she shakes them away - mothers have no place in the room). A squelch. The world around her is hotter than she remembers. And wetter.
Someone yells.
She fades out again.
And in.
This time she is a meter away, her suit is no longer pristine white. Her torso and arms are covered in a thick, wet red, like paint but darker, hotter. She turns around and It is on the floor. The thing. What remains of the man she's torn apart from the inside. It's no longer together, not completely. A torso here, a limb there. Intestines stripped and split apart.
It is a monstrous, monstrous thing.
She should feel horror. And perhaps she does.
But most of all she feels vindication.
Because this, this mess on the floor, this scene of gore,
this is how she pictures herself every day. When there are no mirrors to lie to her. When she doesn't look down at the body that once belonged to her and see whole, stitched together flesh. When she closes her eyes, not one part of her is whole or together. Not a part of her is human and alive.
When she closes her eyes all she sees is the physical representation of her pain, the way she should really look after being torn asunder day after day, year after year, hazardously fixed (not fixed, never fixed) back together seconds before another rupture - how can that not scar?
She looks at this dead man on the floor and wants to point, to shout. See! See? Now do you see? This is what I am, this is all that remains. I am this mess you grimace and look away from. I am this man.
But she doesn't and they don't.
And as she's escorted out of the stained room, training over for the day, she can't help but envy him, this man she's killed.
His pain, terrible as it was, came and went in an instant; but his colleagues saw and will remember the evidence of it for the rest of their lives.
Her pain, all the more terrible, comes and never goes. It will never be over. And no-one will ever see it but her.
. . .
A week after that, they take her out of the compound. It's not the first time. She's been on missions before. There is always something to steal, some sort of intelligence to be gathered. But it is the first time she will kill for them, on purpose. They don't give her a gun. They've seen that she doesn't need one. The target is a middle-aged woman with unremarkable features, the kind no-one ever remembers (she will never forget). She knows nothing about her other than where she will be and how much of a threat she might pose in fight (none at all).
Hero or villain.
Guilty or innocent.
They don't tell her and she doesn't ask.
It's simple, easy, over in nine minutes.
She hates every second of it.
(she doesn't)
Everything changes for her that day.
And nothing does.
. . .
She can't remember what she wanted to be, once upon a time. If she wanted to be anything at all;
('a hero', a voice whispers - but no, she won't think about that)
if she had plans or dreams.
What do little girls want to be when they grow up?
TV, when she's allowed access, says princesses and singers, and actresses and models; or more sensibly at times, vets, doctors, lawyers.
There is so much to be.
All she really wants to be is free.
Of the pain. Of the fear. Of the being real and not being real.
Of the shield, and the tests, and the blood that she almost doesn't see anymore, climbing its way up her arms like poisonous vines. What happens when it reaches the top? When there is nothing left of her for it to swallow?
(the first time she sees a photo of Hope van Dyme, with her perfect hair and her perfect clothes and her living father and her freedom, something boils at the center of her chest, something nasty and unfamiliar, not quite rage, not like the hatred and bitterness she feels towards the father but something else. Something more nauseating.
She stares and she feels and she knows.
Envy.
'You. I could have been you.
I should have been you.'
She closes the dossier, slamming it shut on the feeling before it can breed with the anger inside her and trigger something reckless)
None of that is possible.
What she is, what she's going to become, what she will always be,
is a weapon.
They make sure of it.
And if she is a very good one, the best,
Maybe just maybe, she'll be a weapon without pain.
What is a soul worth, after all, if she can't even feel it underneath all that pain?
…
"To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else."
― Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, The Price of my Soul