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There is a girl.
She goes by a nickname as her first name, but most people don’t call her a conventional name at all. They call her destructive. They call her dangerous. They call her death.
Her name is Alesiana Cabrine Cormander. Her commander calls her Lesia. Her best friend does as well. Her name is Lesia Cabrine Cormander, and she is perhaps the unluckiest person alive.
She is cursed.
You see, Lesia Cormander was born with the blessing of the Void, one of the Entities that gave powers to humans. The Void has no followers. It is shunned by mankind. It rules chaos.
And Lesia does as well.
Lesia is unsettling. She moves too fast. She moves too precisely, too deliberately.
She moves with purpose, too much purpose, she is blessed with the destitution she creates in her wake.
He can tell you of Vegas. Her inhumanity. The monotony of her voice when Khio fell. Lesia does not know how to be human, and part of her does not care.
Militaristically, she is a godsend. Her precision is unmatched. Her birth was a blessing. Her birth was an accident. When her parents brought her to be registered in the Chicago database, she never saw them again. Something about an accident. Something about condolences. Something about a necessary sacrifice.
Lesia takes these words to heart when it’s convenient for her commander to tell her to. It’s the last accident she will ever be connected to. For their sake, she thinks.
Her commander is a kind man, in her opinion. He’s only ever broken her nose once, but he gave her a few days off afterwards. He let her spend time with Pattrick, and he gave her power. Positions of power. It’s what she was born for, he tells her, as he pushes a weapon into her hands. “Go,” he says, “Make me proud.”
She never does.
When she leaves, when she runs, when she hides, when she becomes a coward, an accident, a freak of nature, for the first time in her life, there’s a taste of wind on her tongue and something like a freshness in her heart.
She’s free. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s free.
She will not stay that way forever
Lesia Cormander is her father- her commander’s creation. He knows this. He doesn’t tell anyone else. He sees the way they squint at her, like she’s familiar, but he knows exactly who Lesia is.
And she knows who he is - he can tell from the upturn of her lip. But, she doesn’t say anything, and maybe Lesia’s not the terror she thought that she was. He doesn’t say anything, and maybe she’s not the monster she thought he was. Lesia is sixteen to her twenty years, but the wordless way she obliterates hunters tells her that she’s seen things past her age. Lesia makes the temperature drop in a room, and yet she wears a jacket over her starched uniform. She doesn’t sleep in the common room with everyone else. She typically keeps to her quarters unless it’s her turn for kitchen duty, or a fight breaks out.
She unsettles him.
But the first time she absolutely decks him when he asks her, quietly for some training, she sees her smile for the first time, and somehow, the room gets warmer.
They talk that night, and Saph finds them somewhere between Chicago and Nowhere, between him telling her that Roman never should have laid a finger on her, and her telling him that it’ll all be worth it when she storms back into the Programme to clock him in the face.
When Saph finds them, Lesia is laughing, and it’s a strange sound. It’s not a pretty one, for starters, but it’s a laugh nonetheless. Saph is startled, first of all, and asks Havok if Lesia is feeling alright.
“I think I’m sticking around,” she says.
When dawn arrives on Knowhere and hell has broken loose, Lesia finds Havok. She trusts her with her life, by now. She’s her captain, not her commander. She’s her friend, foremost, Lesia thinks. As Lesia closes her eyes and waits for death that she’s certain is to come, she grabs Havok's wrist, face shoved into the dirt. She finds Havok’s hand, and her last conscious thought is how she hasn’t touched someone in months.
When she finds Havok again, soundproofed and silenced and utterly disheveled with blood, Lesia finds her hands and tries to patch him up stop the bleeding she’s not a medic what does she do and Havok?
Havok tells her that it’s alright.
And Lesia does not understand.
Lesia does not understand how a mess of her own making, an accident, can be so alright with the terror of humankind, Wreaking Havok. She doesn’t understand how it could be okay with anyone, and the words tumble out of her like a fountain unclogged.
The fountain unclogs too quickly, and she cries into Havok’s shoulder, breathless and confused.
When Saph comes and leaves again, she is still trying to understand how it’s okay.
Because she is angry, for the first time in a long time.
No, she’s not just angry, she’s hurt. She’s betrayed, and she won’t feel like that again until Christmas.
Right now, Lesia Cabrine Cormander does not know how she feels, and Havok rubs her shoulder and tells her that it’s alright.
And she doesn’t understand.
Lesia stays awake at night, and thinks of Commander Sartorious.
She stands at attention, staring into space as he tells her that one day, her hair will grow white streaks as her power grows. He tells her to try and not let that happen. It’s dangerous, he tells her.
She will stand over his form, arms burning, with white streaking through her hair.
But she doesn’t know that yet.
When the first strands of white appear in her hair, Rishi finds her and asks her what’s wrong as she stands in front of the mirror muttering. She’s angry, and maybe scared. Ser tells her that it’s alright. She’s just stressed. And for the first time, Lesia considers that maybe, just maybe, it’s too much.
She shakes the thought out of her head and reminds herself that this is her duty.
She was born for this.
When Christmas draws near, she stares at Gabby, breaking onto the deck with her eyes blazing and her hands at the ready, she snaps herself next to Gabby. She wonders how a person could do this.
Oh, here comes the hurt, the betrayal, and maybe just a touch of agony as she stares at Rishi, stepping on the Void to go down to ser, Her breaths race through her lungs, and she runs her hands through the braid she knotted into her hair.
And she screams.
The Void crackles down her arms, and she snaps her fingers.
Someone dies.
Havok gasps from his spot where he stands, trying to get to Rishi, but she stands still. He watches from his perch as Lesia kills a man without touching him, shattering his body apart with chaos, and his stomach churns as a frown does not appear on her face. Lesia’s eyebrows flatten out, and Havok is afraid of Lesia.
When Lesia reappears from the common room that nobody had entered, Saph shooing them away after Lesia toppled the Christmas tree, she’s missing at least a foot of hair.
And there is white on the ground.
Alesiana Cabrine Cormander will learn as she is told that she stood and laughed over her father’s body that white is dangerous.
And maybe Roman was right all along.