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Luo Li grips the edges of the sink in front of her and wills herself not to throw up.
Chest heaving, bile burning at the back of her throat, she tightens her grip until her split knuckles scream in protest. The faucet’s running, but it’s still pink-tinged water circling the drain.
She feels—strange. Sick, almost. Her skin’s stretched too thin over her bones and it’s like one wrong move will have her tearing open at the seams.
She’s cold, too. Really goddamn cold, which doesn’t make any sense, because for a while now—for days—she’s had this heat building up inside of her. Like someone struck a match against her ribs and tossed it into the pit of her stomach, and it’s been eating away at the kindling there. Fear, sadness, regret, all of it steadily turning to ash.
Maybe that’s all it is, she thinks, staring wide-eyed at the rivulets of red dripping down the sides of the sink basin. Maybe she’s burned up. Hollowed out. Maybe this—this sinking, sucking cold she can’t shake—is just what’s left of her now.
She buried her dad this morning.
She—her fucking dad, she had to stand there, surrounded by god knows how many people she’d never before in her life, all of them crying, or consoling each other, or offering their condolences to the grieving widow—her mom, god, fuck, her mom was crying, ugly crying, the kind of awful, hiccuping sobs that don’t stop even when you can’t catch a fucking breath—and she had to stand there and watch them lower that casket into the ground and shovel dirt into the hole until swallowed up everything and—
Luo Li gasps, and gasps, and she wants to cry, or scream, or break something.
Except she’s already done that.
Her knuckles smart at the reminder, fingers flexing instinctively like that doesn’t just make it all so much worse. She needs—she needs to pick out the glass shards. Disinfect it. Dress the wounds. She needs to do that because she needs her goddamn hands.
When she finally raises her head, she stares at her reflection through the bathroom mirror.
A half dozen fragmented versions of herself stare back.
There’s blood limning the jagged pieces still lodged in the mirror frame. Her blood, from her worthless fists. Blood in the basin, too, because she stuck her ruined hands under the tap for a few seconds before the overwhelming urge to vomit had her doubling over the sink and clutching onto it for dear life.
She doesn’t remember her fist slamming into the mirror. She doesn’t remember it breaking apart so easily. She doesn’t remember that first shock of pain, or the way she must have pushed her hand harder into the mirror, smearing blood across its splintered surface and lodging shards deeper into her skin.
What she remembers is the moments before. Her flinch as she saw herself in the mirror for the first time in days. Blue-black bruises smudged beneath her eyes. Sallow skin. Her hair a tangled mess, strands of it clinging to her forehead and cheeks with sweat, or grease, or both. Her, but not her. A version of herself she didn’t—couldn’t—recognize.
Luo Li—but fatherless.
Luo Li—but without Wang Nuo Nuo at her side.
Luo Li—but broken.
The realization, the reality she’d been trying so desperately to deny, crashed into her all at once, and she—
Snapped.
Luo Li has spent a lot of her life angry. Angry at bullies twice her size, picking fights because they expected no resistance from the pint-sized girl with the sweetheart face. Angry at her parents, for looking at her and seeing a girl before they saw a person. Angry at society—at the world—because it dared to dictate how Luo Li could express herself.
She’s been angry. She’s been furious. She’s raged and railed against any and everything that stood in her way.
She’s burned white-hot and brilliant, lit up from within by sheer, incandescent fury.
This is the first time it’s turned her cold.
She isn’t stupid. Nice, E-Soul—neither of them benefited from attacking the research team and sabotaging their expedition. They barely benefited from attempting to cut down a competitor prior to the start of the tournament.
No, someone else was pulling the strings. Someone Luo Li can’t touch as she is now.
What she needs is power. Authority.
What she needs is Trust.
Breathing in shakily, Luo Li releases one hand from its death-grip on the sink and reaches up towards the mirror. The blood has only just begun to dry, tacky and sticky on her fingers. It’s easy enough to swipe a finger through it and paint a line across the mirror. The glass cuts into her skin, but it’s fine, she barely notices. Just appreciates that it gives her more to work with as she starts again from the opposite side, tracing a wobbling, streaky line perpendicular to the first.
When she’s finished, she clutches at the sink again and lets herself simply look.
The bloody X she’s drawn sits directly over her reflection.
A promise.
A threat.
I’m going to tear everything apart to find you, you fucking bastards. I don’t care what it costs me. I’ll throw aside my armor and my pride, my goddamn morals.
I’ll kill the hero in me to do it, if that’s what it takes.