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[ You are her but she is not you.

Small hands, palms like porcelain cups--too delicate to hold much. You stretch each finger slowly, one knuckle group at a time, carefully wriggling your pinky.

Good, you think. The feeling is still there, sharp and swift like razor wheels rolling across your nerves, but you're grateful for the pain. It's an honor to suffer for the burden of greatness. It's supposed to hurt, what they're doing to you. How they're changing you.

(This small comfort alone sustains you, bolsters your pride even as the effort to move your hands proves too costly. Your arms drop with a dull thud, touch cold metal.)

"Your latest modifications are performing beautifully, Shaolin." The voice sounds muffled, distant, though you know--can sense--that the speaker is just to your right side.

You try to turn your head. Can't. There's something keeping your neck in place. Probably best.

Blinking, you will your eyes to open. Shadows and shapes blur between the shutter-stop-motion of your eyelids. Your throat feels full of grit and fire when you open your mouth. You think you might be smiling, or at least, you're trying to.

(Hard to tell when every breath pushes your senses into an acid bath wash of pain. Covers everything, corroding the finer details.)

"We just need to run a few more tests.."

They don't ask if you're ready or able. It doesn't matter if you aren't. If you can't endure this, you have no reason to exist in this world.

White fire pushes through the tubes in your arms and lights your bones. You hear something crack, but you fade out of consciousness before you can taste the blood from the juncture of teeth and tongue.

--

Your hands are bigger now, though they're still weak. They shake as they grip into the side of the table, every ounce of strength devoted to keeping you (mostly) upright. Curled in on yourself, your eyes squeeze tightly as another shockwave emanates from your spine. Tears gather in your lashes, though you ignore them.

(Just a physiological response. Doesn't mean anything.)

When you open your eyes, you're staring at fresh blood on your drab gown, and the soft din of the monitoring equipment around you begins to escalate.

(You're not supposed to be awake yet. Not when they're still molding you. The operatory is dark outside of the glow of the machines around you, but you know it's not truly empty. They're be here soon, your makers.)

Dazed, short legs unsteadily try to reach the polished floors, wavering as bare feet touch cold. Wires and tubes pull taut in protest, restraining you like icy hands.

But you stand anyway. Take a step. The next electric spike rattles your nerves, makes you forget what it is to be upright. The ground rushes to meet you, or so it looks that way from here. Red blossoms from your nose as you crumple, and softly, so softly, you curse.

You need to get stronger.

--

You are no longer her (and she was never you).

A girl of no more than fifteen--if that--stands in the center of the arena, electrode stickers down the length of her arms, across her nape. Her head is down, her balance wavering as she shifts from heel to heel. There's blood trickling from the corner of a grim set mouth, splattering softly, softly on the white floor below.

Her last opponents lay in a broken mess to the side, three of them--each visibly older and larger than the girl herself--with scarcely a heartbeat between them.

(Just canon fodder. Probably Westies. She didn't ask.)

She stretches her fingers out, one knuckle group at a time.

"Very impressive, Sui Feng," a voice booms down from the observation deck above. She doesn't respond or seem to notice it.

"You can rest now--"

Her head lifts sharply, sterling silver gaze narrowed on the murky windows too high for her to reach. Sequestered in an otherwise featureless white room, she must look like a dark stain of red and black from their vantage point. ]

No.

[ It's said like a command, harsh and certain. She lifts her hand up, wipes the blood from her mouth on the heel of her palm, black hair sticking to her with a layer of sweat and grime. She's been fighting for a while. ]

I can do more.

[ There's a pause, stillness settling over the medical colloseum before machines break the silence. Bots move forward, gathering the corpses like unwanted snow. Pushing them to the corners.

"That's exactly what we like to hear," the voice says again, a section of the wall pushing forward and above to reveal the rest of the research facility.

Her next opponent--you--waits at the opening. Sui Feng smirks, a red-tinged expression, and meets your eyes. There's nothing but murder on her otherwise childish features. Mindless hate funneled into clenching hands.

She'll prove herself over your dead body. ]

[ The boy standing before her looks about her age, though his expression is a lot more hazy and vacant. Blond hair reaching past his shoulders, clothes torn not from the looks of slash marks but as if something had ripped them open from the inside. He's unarmed, but it's those who carry no weapons that are the most dangerous. ]

Must we fight? Can't we do something else?

[ He's not fully conscious, it seems. ]

There is nothing else.

[ The dreaming mind fills in the details, smooths out the gaps between them. It tells her that he's like her, a tool being shaped, and they're here to prove themselves.

A weak tool, too brittle, if he's forgotten his place.

She won't forget hers. (They'll never let her.)

Sliding a heel back, Sui Feng falls into form--though it's nowhere near as polished as her modern day presentation. ]

Prepare yourself. There's no honor in killing the defenseless.

[ So there really is no way... but at least, he had given the attempt. Fighting is not something he enjoys, but he's had practice. All under the guidance of his loving mother, the paragon of the restless gods...

He merely holds out his hands as a reply, half-hidden grey eyes now shining gold. There is no change in his stance, but he did not need that to fight.

After all, he's not the one fighting. Only a vessel for what lay within. ]

[ Already, tender and soft-fleshed as youth often is, she's learning the tactics of the assassin. Learning the patience of one, even if it's not yet transitioned into the cool calculation.

Her eyes widen briefly with the glow of him--surprise, perhaps--but quickly she tamps down that response as she shifts strategies. If there are other opponents like him in the future, she'd do well to drag this out--to test the limits and weak points of his model.

So she doesn't move, form held perfectly still aside the slight tilt of her head. ]

Nice parlor trick.

Parlor trick?

[ The question is echoed quietly, the voice of someone who isn't quite awake, but not lightly enough to be taken as someone unaware because of it. ]

I have not done anything yet.

[ He holds himself almost relaxed, as if not expecting to move. It wasn't necessary. ]

[It's a familiar thing, this pain. The needles that dig down deep, the rattle in his bones and the bright sparking lights, the ache of it exquisite and terrible and almost (almost) comforting. It's only the reactions that seem all wrong and for moments that stretch out over a dark horizon he's unable to discern even that. The feelings that come instead, the pride and the wanting, the words that are almost like encouragement rather than scathing and designed to cut, to wound-- how he wishes he could have claimed the same thing for himself.

But then everything shifts, again the unfamiliar merges with the known because all this cold clinical whiteness has a sense of home about it, the only kind of home he's ever been able to claim for himself. But it's both right and wrong, and the woman - the girl - standing there smirking at him now, all shadows and the redblack stains of blood-- he knows her. Something fills him then, and even as he knows what he's supposed to do here, he shakes his head.

He won't.]

I can't fight you, Ma'am. It wouldn't be right.

[But everything about this situation says he's going to have to, anyway.]

[ The omnipresent light (so sterile, so white, you can never hide from it--) shudders, shadows chasing across the walls in steel-shaded blurs. The perspective of the dream narrows, the circular walls creeping forward just enough to tease at anxiety.

A flash of something in the girl's eyes, a moment of confusion and then a wash of unbidden emotions--

Anger. Disgust.

Sui Feng's teeth set, grinding, jaw tensing.

Suspicion. Uncertainty.

She steps forward, the red-tinged mirth draining off her face for cool collection. Another step and her gait lengthens, though the height change--sadly--is fairly insignificant.

The adult woman, though she's not much taller, is definitively harder. The light catches the sharp angles of her face, harsh and porcelain like a mask.

Finally, the emotions cease their roil, ending with a note of...

Recognition.

That doesn't stop her from advancing, hospital gown giving way to the black and white robes of her uniform--the insignia is wrong, but it's just a dream.

Right? ]

I should've put you down the first time, dog.

[The world shifts, blurs, leaves him with a sick sense of vertigo even as the bright white edges sharpen up again around her elongating steps, the room seeming closer, colder somehow. There's a tightness in his chest as he watches her transform from something small and smirking into something more mature, more composed. More full of terrible cold calculation and a concealed violence he can almost feel.

He wants to step back, to move away, but he forces himself to do no such thing, to stand his ground with feet firmly planted and the loose stance of battle right there in him for all that he keeps his gaze subserviently lowered. He may not look into her face, but his body is a hard and waiting thing.

Head down, blond hair tipping forward to obscure the red sparks of his eyes but his mouth, it twists into something that vaguely approximates a smile.]

Maybe so. But you didn't.

[ The drumming of this searing, familiar pain in his joints is enough to make him cringe - but moreso than that, the impeding thoughts of feeling any semblance of proud to participate in this...it's definitely unsettling. This is a place he has spent years trying to forget, to bury in happier, brighter memories of protective walls and calming scripture. It hurts to remember this, remember being tied down and altered to fit another's needs, and upon watching the girl in front of him, stained with blood with coldness in her eyes, all he can think of was when he was in that position. Violent, volatile.

He clenches his teeth into a snarl, shoulders tense like he's ready to fight out of habit, like a Pavlovian response to this environment. ]

Stay back...! I don't wanna fight ya.

[ Because he (like her, and every other kid that's gone through this) knows all too well how things go in fights like this. ]

[ How many do they bring before her with these words? How many say things like I won't, only to awaken the cruelty within them when faced with the prospect of pain?

It doesn't matter what they want. What he wants--what she wants--they're inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

It only matters that they prove themselves useful.

Softly, then: ]

I don't care.

[ Blood spit to the side of her, she waits for the door behind him to close before she begins to move, bare feet silently padding a slow, predatory circle. ]

But you're lying. I can smell it on you. The blood. The fear. What a pathetic tool they've thrown to me.

[ Like a snake's hiss, the words hardly rise above the notes of a whisper but carry venom in their wake. Her hands clench again, fingers splaying out, held not tense but loose, ready. ]

[ Unlike others, Jack finds the sensations leading up to this moment where he stands to fight a child unfamiliar. He's never felt pain like it, and he never wants to. But in a part of him, there's briefly a question. He may not have experienced any of it himself, but he knows people that have. Some of them linger on the edges of his consciousness, too indistinct for him to latch onto, but that question in his mind is distinct enough for one person.

Had it been like this for Angel?

But the question disappears as it always does when he starts to doubt what he had done. He doesn't allow himself self-doubt, not in that area, and so when he stands facing a girl, he's almost glad for the distraction. He recognizes her just as distantly, but who she is doesn't exactly matter. Jack stares back at her and that murderous expression, but he holds his hands up with a half-scoff. ]

Woaaaaah there, kiddo. Slow your roll for a minute. Don't personally make a habit of hurting kids when I don't have to, so c'mon, you'll make me look like the bad guy here.

[ Where her recognition came in waves and staggered pieces with others, fathomless and difficult to grasp...

The icy snap of rage dawns with startling speed this time. She may not know who he is or even why, but without doubt, Sui Feng knows one thing:

She hates this man.

It's almost curious, this visceral surge of anger--the power that it brushes through her veins, the chaotic energy of twitching hands and bloodthirsty teeth. She's never killed because she wanted to, but because she wanted to be useful. To be worthy of the thing they'd made her.

And yet she desires nothing so purely in this world but to rend his flesh.

Her smirk widens, teeth bared like a scythe. ]

Don't worry.

[ She scans the room, the rubble of piled bodies, searching. Debating. Should she use a tool to carve him? No, that won't be satisfying. Better to use her hands.

Yes. Decision made, the girl begins to walk forward, crooked smile dramatized by the red-white contrast of her coated teeth. When she's just nearly in reaching distance, she offers a hand, palm up, small fingers open. ]

I'll see your miserable soul cleansed.

[Hanna doesn't move.

Not yet.

The bags under her eyes are decidedly more marked. She's tired, so tired. There's a lot happening.

But she doesn't know how to not fight. That's what they made her to be: the reckless one, the true tank, the relentless member of the team. How had she become the most fearsome one, when she looked the least of anyone's concern?

Mindless hate? Meet suicidal detachment.]

Go.

[A single word.

And then she rushes.]

[ One designed to raze the world, to light battlegrounds in shades of orange and red..

The other made to take in the shadows, siphoning life with well-placed blades and cunning hands..

Both incarnations of human anger. Different sides of a blade, destined to be nothing more than a tool in the hands of their makers.

The other girl advances forward, but Sui Feng does not move. Meets those deadened eyes with fearlessness, equally as reckless as the detachment mirrored back. Her skin begins to vibrate, the thrum of activating machines--

--and then the pain of them, washing against her in a tidal wave. They're not ready to be used yet, these mods, she hasn't fully integrated--

--doesn't matter. When the blonde seems imminently on her, she steps forward, her form flickering in and out of existence, the phase-shift unsteady and unstable. Dark mist loosely aligned into a human form races onward, pushes not at the girl, but means to move through her. ]

[Her eyes go wide, and Hanna begins to move, faster than imagined but not fast enough to phase in and out of this plane of existence.

Her body heat soars, waves of heat rolling off her skin like an oncoming drought. There's no way she can fight something that doesn't exist. She'd seen that with Travis, the master of illusion, forcing people to punch at nothing and fall down at everything.

All she can do is move from the shadow. If there's a place to move, a place to fall, a place to focus on reality, then there's a chance to escape with half a life.

Why Hanna even cares to survive remains a mystery.]

open | by design

OTA

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