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Skuld remembered. She remembered that her parents had promised they would play with her one day, and so Skuld had waited for hours with her toys all lined up. It was one of her few memories before becoming orphaned like many other wielders of her time were. They ended up being too wrapped up in their work and completely forgot about it by the end of the day - that is, until a tearful little Skuld showed up in their room and climbed into their bed with them. Their broken promise had made her sad, but she knew it would be alright. There was always tomorrow.
She clutched her cat plushie and brought it close to her chest as a stinging sensation began to bloom.
Skuld remembered. She remembered all the times during her young life she was told that she would be special, exceptional. It rang throughout her head when strange men were escorting her to the castle’s showers, telling her she’d better wash up before closing the door to grant her privacy. She didn’t know much about herself at the time, but she had an inkling that it wasn’t out of sudden kindness they had allowed her this. She was their star subject, their next breakthrough, and they wanted to preserve her as much as possible.
She had overheard one of the apprentices complaining of her smell a few days prior. Her grandparents’ old farm had come to mind, where she would sometimes help them care for the livestock. That process was nowhere near as clinical - her grandparents always treasured each animal as an individual, invaluable life. She felt more like a factory animal by comparison.
Skuld remembered. She remembered when she stepped into the shower for the first time since arriving there. The light stung when it met her eyes, after however many days of being confined to that dark cell. Her vision had grown blurry, and when she first saw herself undressed, she prayed her eyes were just playing tricks on her. There were incision marks - ones on her chest, stomach, legs, and probably other areas she wasn’t able to reach as easily. The largest one, on the left side of her chest, was met with a nasty sting when the warm water hit it, and she remembered crying out as she watched it become an inflamed red.
Skuld remembered. She remembered how, for so long after she had escaped from that fate, being able to undress or shower with the lights on had become a feat in itself. She would sometimes trace her fingers over her marred skin and see visions of herself tearing open, of rot pouring out from every orifice on her body that could bleed. Sometimes she would be overcome with nausea afterward, sometimes she would wind up emptying her stomach contents until she was heaving up nothing. There had been one night where she was startled by the sound of a familiar voice, and in the corner of her eye, she spotted white hair.
“Here, let me hold your hair for you, okay?”
He was gone as quickly as he had appeared. It was far from the first time Skuld had been assailed by these phantoms of her old friends, and far from the last. She always told herself she would be prepared for the next one to come, as though she were going to pin them down like preserved butterflies.
“I should have when I still had the chance”, she would think to herself derisively. That was what eventually led her to going out and buying herself the cat plushie. She wished more than anything that she could still speak to her Chirithy, but she hadn’t felt the connection to them in a long time. She knew that they were most likely not of this world anymore. And even if they did somehow make it to another time and were thriving there, they had most likely found another wielder.
Skuld remembered. She remembered the fear she harbored when she was first told that the end of the world was coming, and of the great burden that the new Union leaders were to carry on their shoulders. She remembered how she trembled when she stepped into that pod and said her goodbyes to Ephemer, how all of the tension for their future and every gentle lie the two of them had told their friend to keep them from worrying too much dissolved into tears spilling down her cheeks. That day, despite it all, she was sure that everything was going to turn out all right.
And here she was, now. Alive, her body and heart mostly in-tact - by every definition of the word, she would certainly be considered “all right”. She had no friends in this time who remembered her, or would probably even believe her if she told them her tale. She had no Chirithy to absorb all of her woes and worries before going to sleep each night. She had no answers for what those men had even wanted with her in the first place, no justification for why she had been left permanently scarred aside from the idea that she was some sort of exceptional, mystified being in their eyes. But she had turned out “all right”.
If her memories had been part of the reason they took interest in her, they could keep them, for all she cared. In fact, she sometimes had thoughts of going back to that place and asking if they could extract her memories from her body. Whether they would keep them in a box or some kind of petri dish, it would be of no concern to her.
She knew she couldn’t. But it was a nice thought as she began to fall asleep with the cat plush still in her arms. Be it she had happy and vibrant dreams of her old companions or the visceral, ugly ones of being Subject X, she would awaken with the same ache inside her chest anyway.