Chapter Text
Fourteen year old Marjornie was giggling as she leaned into the warm shoulder under her head cheek, swinging her legs over the edge of the rickety bridge she and her best friend were sitting on.
An arm, corded with muscle from odd jobs and labour, rested over her own shoulders causing her to look up.
Kennedy ‘Call me Kenny’ McCormick looked down at her with a bright grin, the other girl’s ever present parka unzipped for once, hood pulled down.
Raising the cig to her lips, Kenny took a long drag before she released a breath, blowing smoke rings out into the dark night.
“Gimme one,” Marjornie whispered excitedly and Kenny looked at her askance.
“You sure about that?”
“It’s my birthday isnt it?” Marjornie replied and Kenny smiled indulgently at her, showing off that gap between her two front teeth.
“Fair enough, birthday girl. Here take it slow.” Kenny said, and offered out the cigarette.
Marjornie leaned forward and nipped the cig from her friend’s fingertips to suck in a breath. Before she immediately spat it out, coughing up her lungs, Ken laughing loud and long like the cackling of dogs.
“Oh hamburgers” Marjornie managed to choke out from her seizing lungs.
“I said slow Marj! Slow. Do you think i’m just talkin’ out of my ass?” Kenny asked as she took out another half burned cigarette from some hidden place in her coat lining and slipped a lighter into her other hand, lighting it up.
“You would if you could” Marjornie replied inbetween coughs as her eyes watered, startling Ken into laughing again.
“God, can you imagine?”
“You’d only use it for evil.” Marjornie teased.
“Sexy evil.” Retorted Kenny, smug.
“How?”
“Dunno.” Kenny shrugged, wrapping her arm around Marjornie’s shoulders again and tugging her close to her side. “I’m sure i’d figure something out.”
“You always do” sighed Marjornie, with just a touch too soft of a voice.
There was a thrill in being with Kennedy McCormick. Always a thrill to talk to her, to be near her. Even tonight, one of her eyes was bruised and she was smoking, a total bad girl, and yet so sweetly kind at the same time. Like thunderstorms. Lightning was so bright and thunder was so loud that everyone got so scared and locked themselves inside. But nothing was more cleansing, more freeing, than a good, heavy rain.
Kenny was not thunder, she definitely wasn’t lightning.
No, she was rain.
Maybe that was why she always smelled like petrichor. Like wet earth and mud, clay to be buried in and remade, reshaped, reborn.
“Hey Marj?” Kenny asked after a long moment of silence, just listening to the river burbling underneath them.
“Yeah Ken?” Marjornie asked, looking up to study Kenny’s profile, outlined by the full moon that hung behind her head. Like a halo.
How fitting.
“Do you ever want to get married?” Kenny didn’t look at her while she spoke, only took another drag from her cigarette. The glow of the embers matched the orange of her parka.
“Hmm, can’t say i’ve ever really thought about it.”
“Really?” Kenny asked, finally turning to face Marjornie. It was a bit difficult to make out her sun kissed freckles in the dark, but the other girl’s violet eyes shined like a cat’s in the pale moonlight.
“Really” Marjornie insisted, “it was never much on my mind.”
“I think i want to get married.” Kenny said quietly, blowing smoke rings from her chapped and bitten lips, her legs dangling off the side of the bridge.
“To a rich man?” Marjornie teased and Kenny shoved her gently.
“Shut up, i was eight.”
“I still remember how insistent you were that you’d be a good housewife.”
“I would be.” Kenny pouted and Marjornie laughed.
“I never said otherwise.” She soothed. Her mama had though. And daddy. Rather often actually. They’d banned Marjornie from seeing the older McCormick girl because of it. Poor breeding, they’d say, trailer trash, dyke, junkie, whore.
But Marjornie had long since decided her parents were quite wrong about a number of things. She was also beginning to feel that if she was going to get grounded one way or another, may as well actually break the rules.
And Kenny was always the most beautiful, most thrilling, broken rule of all.
“You really wanna get married Ken?” Marjornie asks softly, with nothing but the moonlight and their own breaths between them, she felt almost brave.
Kenny smiles almost shyly. Kennedy McCormick, shy. As surely as pigs could fly.
“Yeah” Kenny whispered, barely a breath. “I’d wear a dress. Not white though, none of that purity bullshit. Something sexy, black, maybe purple.”
“Sounds lovely,” Marjornie said, imagining it. “A proper princess on your big day.”
Kenny hid her face in her hood as she pulled it up. Marjornie giggled.
“What if we got married?” She asked, suddenly struck with a fervent type of bravery, or maybe madness, as surely as though she were struck by lightning. It burned under her skin.
Kenny startled, nearly dropping her cigarette.
“What?”
“Like, eventually i mean. If we’re not married by—like— thirty.” Her words came out in a rush and quick enough she and Kenny were giggling together like little girls.
“You know what, sure, i don’t see why not.” Kenny said brightly and Marjornie’s heart lurched in her chest. She felt like jumping for joy but settled for smiling.
“Really?” She asked.
“Really. Now, birthday girl, it’s nearly midnight—“ Kenny said, checking her cracked phone with its pin-up girl lock-screen before turning her face back to Marjornie. “What’s your birthday wish?”
Kiss me nearly leapt right out of Marjornie’s throat but she managed to swallow it back down.
Barely.
“Gimme the cigarette again.”
“What? No! Its my last one!” Kenny stuttered in laughter as she and Marjornie wrestled for it, nearly tipping off the bridge and into the little river below.
“Please— you said any birthday wish!” Marjornie whined, fluttering her eyelashes and best she could. She wasn’t as good at the cute thing as Kenny was, it always came off forced and awkward on her, but Kenny relented with a fond sigh.
“Fine, fine Marjy, just…ok. I have an idea. Breathe in when i say, ok?” Kenny said and Marjornie’s heart lurched as Kenny took a long drag of her cigarette.
But she didnt breathe out. She held it in her lungs as she crushed out the cigarette until it was only ash on the wet wood of the bridge. Then she turned and gently cupped Marjornie’s face. Her violet eyes shining in the dark and the moon haloing her head. Her hair tumbled like golden wheat turned silver down her shoulders and the dark fur of her parka hood could easily have been mistaken for the skin of some beast.
She leaned in, closer and closer, Marjornie’s heart beating roughly in her chest. It was barely a twitch of Kenny’s finger on her cheek before Marjornie was opening her mouth as Kenny slowly exhaled. The smoke was acrid and bitter, burning as it went down like stolen whiskey. Yet somehow it was thicker than it had been straight from the cigarette. Like the pressure of a storm on the horizon, the smell of fresh blood soaked into grave dirt, the taste of rain on the wind.
Marjornie knew that it wasn’t just the smoke. She knew it somewhere in the back of her head, the way she knew to fear the ocean and wide open spaces, as a hunter-gatherer should. But she didn’t care.
Kenny was a thrill. Always.
She barely even coughed this time, eagerly curling up in Kenny’s arms when she was tugged close.
For a long while, they merely watched the sky as it went from start studded and vanta black to cherry pink to baby blue and all the colors in between.
It wasnt until the birds started blearily singing that Marjornie whispered.
“This is the best birthday ever.”
“Aww, really?” Kenny asked.
“Really,” Marjornie insisted.
“Happy fourteenth Marjy” Kenny hummed, “we should get you home though, or you’ll get grounded.”
“I’ll get grounded anyways.” Marjornie muttered bitterly, curling her fist into the patched fabric of Kenny’s parka. “Might as well earn it.”
A pause, Marjornie felt Kenny shift her weight slightly, hesitating, before a calloused hand gently rested on her lower back. There was a bird singing. Marjornie’s skin felt electrified, like a circuit breaker inching ever closer to connecting.
“Hey Marj?”
“Yeah Ken?”
“Thanks for letting me drag you out here.”
“Are you kiddin’?” Marjornie asked, reaching up to grab Kenny’s face and press their foreheads together as she grinned.
“This is the beat birthday ever.” Marjornie giggled, tucking her head under Kenny’s chin with a content sigh. She could feel the other girl’s chuckle reverberate through her chest.
“Anything for you.” Kenny said quietly, “you deserve the world.”
Marjornie’s hands curled tighter into Kenny’s coat as she curled herself ever closer to her friend.
“I’d give it to you.” Marjornie promised, “you’ve helped me for so long, protected me from bullies and my parents and everyone. When— if! If we get married, i’ll be super rich and you won’t have to work a day in your life. You can be a housewife like when we played pretend as little kids! A pretty princess.”
“And Karen would be flower girl” Kenny mused, daydreaming. “Kevin can walk me down the aisle.”
“Yes!” Marjornie cheered, “i’ll be so rich, we’ll buy a castle and we’ll rule the whole world! No one could ground me, or bully you.”
Kenny chuckled, pressing her face into Marjornie’s hair.
“Hey Marj?” She asked, after a long comfortable moment.
“Yeah Ken?”
“…Nevermind.” Kenny shook her head, she sounded embarrassed. But before Marjornie could push she felt herself suddenly being swept up into string arms. Carried bridal stule across the bridge after Kenny somehow managed to stand while carrying a whole other person.
“Kenny!” Marjornie cackled.
“Marjy!” Kenny whined jokingly back. Grinning ear to ear.
“C’mon, if we’re playing hookie, i’ve gotta show you the proper way to do it.”
“Hooray!” Marjornie cheered, letting herself be carried away, her head already filling with plans for the future.
A week after her fourteenth birthday, Marjornie Stotch’s powers came in. Lightning lept from her fingertips and crackled through her long blonde hair.
She was grounded, beaten, shoved into and locked in her room. Her father had barely turned his back before the door blew right off its hinges as she just…lost it. The lights and appliances all went haywire, glowing brighter and brighter before shorting out.
The only light was the white glow of the electricity the young girl was wreathed in as she hunted her father through the house, her mother calling the authorities.
Marjornie herself couldn’t recount the night if asked, all she recalled was the pain and then the rage. She remembered the click in her chest, the flip of a switch, the fuse box that was her heart suddenly bursting, breaking. She knew her parents didnt love her, it broke her heart, and the lightning she’d kept tucked away in her bones had finally flooded out.
There was rage, and joy, elation beyond comprehension.
She tasted ozone on her breath, and laughed and laughed and laughed. Until metal slammed into her and sent her crashing to the ground, her head shoved into the mud as her limbs were bound in what she would later learn were meta-grade restraints.
Then she kept laughing, even as she was shoved into the back of an armored truck, straitjacketed in metal binds.
Marjornie Stotch died that night. She died a raucous and violent death. Perhaps it was when her father beat her for the last time, the moment she realized she’d never convince her parents to love her. Maybe it was in that truck, suffocated like a thief trapped in a safe.
Maybe it was watching the little nowhere town she’d called home for so many years faded away, watching with one eye through the minuscule gap between the two heavy doors. Half asleep as the witching hour carried away. She must’ve been dreaming, after all, because she could almost smell the petrichor slowly fading away along with the town.
But no matter what, Marjornie Stotch died that night.
It just took her a some time to realize it.
She was carted off to the ‘Home for Troubled Meta Youths’, a prison in disguise. The heavy metal collar on her neck kept her lightning trapped, but it was there. She knew it now, recognized the way it surged under her skin.
She met a boy in the Home, Bradley. A shivering and shaking thing. Terrified. The ‘teachers’ whispered things about him and he flinched at their voices. Marjornie remembered gently taking the noose made from bedsheets out of his hands.
“Did you know” she whispered as she untied the makeshift rope, “that the first law of the universe is that of entropy?”
“E-entropy? Evolution is a lie and a sin.” He spat, flinching at his own words but Marjornie only tucked his hands into her own.
“Not evolution, entropy.” Marjornie soothed, setting him to sit on the chair he had been preparing to stand on. “The universe will always return to chaos.”
“God has a plan.” Bradley stammered.
“Are we not part of it? Exactly as we are? Am i not gifted with the power of the skies?” She asked and the way his pale face regained color and awe she knew he spotted the burning light inside her eyes. “Is that not of God’s creation? Besides, when we go to lunch we have plans, dont we? We get our trays and line up but we dont know what’ll be served, or what we’ll choose. Why cant that be the same for God’s plan, huh? That’s entropy.”
The older boy was nodding, hesitant. She saw his eyes land on the collar licked around her neck. His own wrists were bound in the same sort of restraints but his neck was bare. Marking him as powered, like her, but not nearly as much of a threat.
But instead of shying away, he gently knocked his cuff against her collar.
“I th-think you should meet someone.” He whispered, eyes darting as though terrified someone would overhear. “Meet me before lunch.” He whispered, finally letting Marjornie untie the blankets from their knots.
And so later that day she was introduced to another older boy at lunch, following Bradley’s stuttering walk as he stumbled the way towards the abandoned table in the corner. The boy’s black hair was growing out brownish at the roots and his skin was pale from years without the sun, even from before the Home it seemed. He leaned a cane against his leg where he sat and when he looked at Bradley the other boy blushed. The blond hid it but the dark headed one merely blinked, cold, almost clinical and sneered as Marjornie sat down across from him.
He was wearing the same shapeless grey clothes that they all were, the shirt collar hung listlessly off his thin shoulders, doing nothing to hide the heavy metal collar strapped around his neck.
A high powered mutant, an ability that could be weaponized, or both. Marjornie met his dark eyes like a challenge. She grinned.
“Marjornie” she said. The boy scoffed.
“No it’s not.” He muttered bitterly, stabbing his meager meal on the tray in front of him with his barely functional spork. Marjornie’s hands curled into fists on the tabletop.
“Well, i dont got any other.”
“Not yet.” Said the boy, finally nodding respectfully at Bradley and though his face betrayed only annoyance, he still gently ladled portions of his own servings into Bradley’s hands after the ‘teachers’ had denied him his lunch that day. Punishment for one made up slight or another. Marjornie knew the taste of blame well enough by now.
“Remake yourself,” the boy continued, “creation by blood is the truth of life. What are we to do but live to die to live again?” Then, after a pause, he bluntly stated—
“Oracle.” it took Marjornie a moment to realize he was telling her his name. Or, what he considered to be his name.“And this is Eden.” Bradley flinched and struggled to shush Oracle, but the dark one just grinned. All teeth.
“D-don’t just tell people that!” Bradley hissed, chewing his thumb between his teeth.
“What was it Eden said you told him?” Oracle continued, never minding the boy beside him, hesitantly allowing their shoulders to brush. “Entropy? Chaos? Do you really believe the whole world is in a constant spiral into depravity and madness?”
Marjornie smiled.
“Look where we are,” she replied, the hum ever buzzing beneath her skin making her thoughts all tumble together. “We’re here because silly, scared little people want to control, to collar, forces of nature. Do you really think such a pitiful attempt will last? And after it fails…” she trails off.
She sees Bradley fight a smile behind his shaking hands and Oracle grins at her, all teeth. She grins back, just the same.
“Chaos” Bradley whispered.
“Chaos” Oracle said approvingly. “Provided you learn how to shimmy around that collar of course.”
That gave Marjornie pause.
“You can what?”
Oracle and Bradley, when the blond boy wasn’t being pushed to extremes by the ‘teachers’, taught her all there was to know about the Home for Troubled Meta Youths.
What days to eat, what days to starve, where the floorboards creaked and, most important of all, how to use your abilities even with the restraints. Oracle was a seer, he drew in the dirt when they were allowed outside for exercise and he whispered under his breath arguments that would happen behind closed doors like soap operas for those who dared to linger close enough.
“As long as your power remains inside” he told Marjornie, “it cannot be stolen.”
“A closed circuit.” Marjornie replied.
“Exactly.”
And so she spent years there, in that place called ‘Home’. Learning from Oracle and Eden, as the blond slowly became more comfortable being called, they survived under the hands of yet more adults who insisted she was not enough. That everything she did was wrong.
Well then, if she nothing she did was any good, then why keep trying?
Eden, spoke to plants. They grew towards him like he was the sun and Marjornie convinced him to train with her.
To get better.
Sometimes he’d manage to trip a tormentor, adult and fellow inmates both, with a well placed vine outside. He was a natural at working around his restraints, even if he could barely handle any compliment. He didn’t even need to sneak his power through the gaps of the bindings, he just listened to the world and it listened back.
But other than brief flashes of joy or terror, survival was the same as ever. Slow, repetitive, tormented. But bit by bit, she smiled through days of denied meals and beatings in the name of ‘correcting mistakes’ and always met a new trouble with a chipper greeting and a friendly grin.
She was starting to unnerve the others. Eden grew bolder and Oracle allowed himself small smiles and ‘teachers’ flinched away from her eyes.
Over the days, the years, spent locked away, Marjornie came to rule the Home for Troubled Meta Youths.
And in the night she dreamed of thunder in the distance, an angel haloed in moonlight, and the smell of rain on the wind.
“My coven is coming” Oracle told them one lunch, Eden was praying over their meal, as meager and gritty as it was.
Marjornie paused. She’d learned that Oracle could not devine what was going to happen, but rather he simply knew what was happening, or what had already come to pass. Which meant if he chose to say something was coming, then it was already here.
“Your coven?” Marjornie asked. Oracle nodded.
“To break us out.”
“U-us?” Stuttered Eden and for once Oracle laid a gentle hand atop the blond’s.
“Us.” Then he turned to Marjornie “but my Coven will not be taking in someone named Marjornie. We do not strike deals with conformists.”
Ah, conformists, those who willingly submitted to the law of the land. Wore their collars if not with pride then with resignation. Oracle was always very insistent that he would never associate with such a weak willed person, often bullied the many broken souls even here in the Home.
“When your coven comes, I’ll introduce myself properly. Dont you worry none.” Marjornie assured him.
“We both will,” spoke up Eden who smiled when Oracle looked at him in slight surprise. Something in the dark boy’s eyes softened slightly and Marjornie herself felt lighter, seeing Eden look brighter, more color in his face, more soul in his voice.
Then Oracle turned back to Marjornie, serious again.
“We’ll need distractions.”
“Distractions,” Marjornie scoffed, feeling the electrical storm surging under her skin and through her bones. “I can do better than that.”
They struck in that evening, in the cafeteria at dinner. Marjornie stood up and made her way to the stage in front of everyone even as the teachers tried to bully her back down.
She’d spent all her years honing this one skill, taking all her blustering storm and surging lightning and channeling it into a single point. A lockpick.
The collar fell from her neck with an anticlimactic clang. She smiled at those all gathered below her, like psychophants to their god, and she laughed.
She laughed and laughed and laughed as the white fire of her power was finally unleashed after so long.
The lights all glowed, thrumming as they overcharged, then they burst. Lightbulbs shattering all at once in a roar as darkness swallowed the cafeteria. Then a glow from the stage, like a living plasma ball, all the once contained bolts of electricity surged out from her in all directions. Stretching like multi-jointed hands with fractal fingers.
It was agony and rapture all at once, like stretching after years of stagnancy, like breathing after ages of drowning.
Like being shattered and remade.
She smiled as they all started screaming again even as the guards threw themselves into the room. Coming to bear with lethal force against a mere seventeen year old. She laughed again.
It wasnt long before the windows shattered— a black feathered monster alighting to the ground on iridescent wings that shined red and black in the moonlight, a pair of equally black clad individuals sat on its back.
They slid to the ground when the beast landed. The smaller one, who couldn’t be more than ten or eleven, darted forwards, knifing one of the few guards still standing straight in the gut. The other stood royal for a handful of seconds, flipping through some heavy book she carried. Then her gaze snapped up to Oracle who was approaching, one arm linked with Eden’s.
“Oracle” she barked “we’ve only got a few minutes before the radio lines come back up, who are they?”
“Eden” Oracle said, gesturing to the blond on his arm and then he looked at the girl who was once called Marjornie, who approached slowly in the dark, meeting the dark gazes of all four members of the coven with crazed eyes that glowed as much as her power did.
“Chaos” she finally said “my name is Viktoria Chaos.”
She saw them all, even the beast, regard her with something like surprise.
The coven allowed her time enough to recover with them, but unlike Eden who discovered that the blacks and the chains and the studs of the gothic sort felt like protective armor, Viktoria found them stifling. Though it was fun playing dress up for a bit. Like a little girl again. It brought to life memories of playing Paladins and Princesses, of never quite touching her lips to bruised knuckles, of paper crowns and hidden smiles.
Of freckles under the sun.
Nevertheless, the Goths were kind to her, but she could not stay.
So instead, she memorized them.
Oracle and Eden were both twenty now and gently held each other by the crooks of their arms, the feathered beast that Viktoria learned could transform into a boy her age was called Winged Omen with his blood red hair always swept into his eyes, the little one was called Poet’s Quill who used the mighty pen as a knife both figuratively and literally with great precision even without meta abilities, and the lady was called the Ghost Queen who read cursed texts like bedtime stories.
Viktoria would remember them, she already had one promise to keep, and heavy debt to repay, she’d not forget another.
After all, it was only when the scales were balanced could true chaos emerge, otherwise it was just controlled all over again, by the weight on one side or the other.
“I will repay you,” she told them one dark night, a storm had blown in, terrible and wild and howling like a beast. The city was black and technicolor neon, shining like the thousand eyes of warrior angels.
The others seemed somewhat hesitant, as much as they ever did, but Eden stepped forward and gently blessed her. The verses they’d been forced to memorize in their youth a mother tongue they shared. She joined in on his words halfway through, settling her own hand over his black leather clad shoulder and he pressed his own palm over hers.
“In times of trouble,” they prayed together “may the LORD answer your cry. May the name of the God of Jacob keep you safe from all harm. May He send you help from His sanctuary and strengthen you from Jerusalem.”
They finished and Viktoria laughed while Eden silently wept. The tragedy and comedy masks. Him in blacks and her in bright colors. But he smiled at her, something in him was…at peace. She hoped he’d have no want for a noose made from bedding anymore, she hoped there would always be someone there to hold him up if he did until they could safely get him down. She hoped he’d be as happy as a Goth could ever be.
“Thank you.” He whispered to her.
“None of that.” She said softly, “i’ll see you fellas soon. Good luck you lot. Never let anyone make you fit in.”
Some of the goths scoffed but Oracle tilted his head, leaning on his cane, and the Ghost Queen hummed in her low voice.
“You’re something else, aren’t you Chaos.” She said as the she blew smoke rings into the air. They were lopsided. Viktoria had seen better. “Something not quite beholden to the natural order.” She continued and it was Viktoria’s turn to scoff.
“Entropy.” She said, a spark of lighting jumping through her hair. “Is the only law of the universe. All the rest are manmade. You know what entropy is?”
“Chaos.” Said Oracle and Viktoria grinned, wide and sharp, with madness in her eyes.
But the Goths didn’t flinch from her, or back away. They grinned right back. Just as insane.
She fled into the night, the rain pounding down from the heavens like the beatings that have chased her all her life.
She laughed as bright, true lightning crashed across the sky—- the noise of her reverie lost in the roll of the thunder.
In a gas station, the only one still open in a storm like this, Viktoria bought hair clippers and shoddy scissors. In that gas station’s bathroom she cut her hair and shaved her head.
It had been years since she’d last seen herself in the mirror and she when she did she flinched.
Her hair was long and buttery blonde, even wet from the rain. It had been tied into a fishtail by Quill’s nimble hands but wisps had long since escaped the weaving, now waterlogged against Viktoria’s face.
She looked like her mother.
The view from the back window of the car as it sunk in the lake. It had been raining then. Linda’s blonde hair slick and shining under the lightning.
The buzz of the hair clipper drowned those thoughts far easier than the locked car had drowned an eight year old girl.
Especially when freckled hands had smashed the window with a river rock and dragged that pathetic little girl to land, wrapping a warm orange parka left on the shore around her shoulders and pressing their foreheads together, violet eyes frantically checking her for injuries.
But there was no freckled hands or kind, unearthly violet eyes in this gas station bathroom, so Viktoria would save herself from her mother this time.
So, she started by hacking off the braid, then shaving down the rest.
When she next looked up, she started cackling, the lights above brightening and dimming in time to the sound.
She’d shorn a haphazard mohawk into her head, though it didnt stand up, she didn’t particularly want it to. It looked soft and strange, it revealed the sharp angles of her fave and the long jutting shape of her neck. She looked nothing like her mother at all. Her parents would faint to see her now—
Oh no, they’d ground her, wouldn’t they? That thought set her off into laughter again. She sounded insane even to her own ears, but it was perfect.
She looked nothing like her parents, and she looked nothing like that pathetic little girl called Marjornie.
It wasn’t even just the hair.
When she was younger she was always so short, portable, small. Made even smaller when she chose to shrink. It was safe then, to hide. There was no way she could hide now though.
She had grown tall, very tall, especially for a girl. Maybe a little less than six foot? By the time she’d left the Home very few matched her height and even fewer were taller. Eden had been one of them while even lanky Oracle had stood only eye level with her nose.
She was still thin, wirey arms and legs that were almost stretched out of her body they were so long, but her shoulders were broad. Almost boxy, especially compared to her narrower hips. From the back she could almost pass for a man at first glance. Especially in the baggy, plain clothes she wore.
Strangely enough, she quite liked that. In her youth she’d been stuffed into froofy dresses and told that any dirt on them would be punishment. The threat had kept her from playing as a child should for so, so long. Until a whirlwind of a rainstorm in a bright orange parka tugged her into game after game, marring her mary janes with grave mud and staining her petticoats with blood from skinned knees.
But now she snuck out of the bathroom to snatch the boxy teeshirts, hoodies and bad jeans tucked away in the corner of the gas station store and when she saw herself again she looked nothing at all like that pathetic little girl she once was.
Remade indeed, she mused to herself as thunder rumbled above.
She waltzed out of the store, a new life roaring in her chest. She paid for it all, with funds she had collected and schemed out of the hands of fellow inmates and teachers alike back in the Home, and she returned to the storm.
A new woman. Ready to claim the debt the world owed her, and repay the one the gave her the storm in the first place.
For, you see, Lightning on its own is nothing but destruction. And for there to be chaos, there must be balance.
Lightning without rain was just a light show in the sky, and Little Marjornie had made a promise that Viktoria was going to keep.