Rockette

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Infirmary : Campus Grounds : Canis Dorms. - P.R.C.U. Campus.}

Take On Me #3.049: survival.

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_{Interaction(s): katja. - @Zoldyck & rory. - @webboysurf & harper. -@Qia}

Previously: sugar.

They don’t question where she has been, not that she would have any answers to give.

Her guard resumes, only the one, as her state of mind was still under suspicion, and now inquiries had turned towards what she had endured, gleaned from the Trial’s foundation and the evidence spelled out in her simulated tortures: the injections, the experiments, the Hell she had proclaimed as her eternal rest. Amma denies it all, refuses to spare the tale of her fears and the memories she cannot repeat, many clipped and hazed, many burdened by terrible pain and a ringing in her ears she cannot diminish. Every time she tries, a terrible roar sounds, a bellow of a netherworld creature, the screech of a beast - a monster - that pleads for an end that will never come.

Though still encouraged that she attend therapy regularly, Amma had been discharged temporarily under a probational period courtesy of Jim's direction that she was permitted to participate in classes and the excursion planned by various members of Blackjack. Further suggestion had been given that she return to the infirmary for a final observation- there was more talk of her blood, something uttered about anomalies that Amma had heard before, but could not recall where such admissions had been stated under a blanket of cold fog. She had sent a text to Katja, her first attempt at their agreed friendship, inquiring if she would accompany her to the mainland to shop. There are many notifications gone unanswered on her phone, the group message and numbers left unsaved, and another that loomed over her heart, where she had read it the day before over and over again, failing to recognize the hitch in her breath and the boiling panic of life rent asunder. That lingering fact that they were not allowed to see him siring anger and want. A desire she could not label, a horrid circumstance of fate too in knowing she was close and yet incredibly far away. Amma couldn’t spare her thoughts then, and she could not do so now, especially with another text left open-ended with gratitude spun heavily in a digital font. She had stared at the message for so long it was permanently inlaid through her mind, and whilst she did not answer him back at all for the entire day -

Amma had returned to his room under the whisper of midnight.
She had woken up before him the following morning, before his alarms, and noted the peace upon his brow, the lax features allowed with a moment of simplicity, the mask of many and all slid away under the ethereal glow of moonlight. His hand clutched against her scarred fingers, the canvas of her past and her pain somehow lesser with the way he held onto her through the night. An anchor to dispel the nightmares she had found him swept under once more, only this time he had not woken up and she could bring herself to do so again.

Now she clenched said mobile betwixt her fingers, the smooth casing warm beneath her cinched gestures tucked away into her pockets, black pants belted over her inked hips, a snug and fitted blouse of grey with long sleeves to ward off the Autumn chill with her mane of black hair pinned half up, the remainder left to smooth against the curve of her back. Katja had met her outside the infirmary where she later confirmed everyone would be meeting up at the ferry that would transport them to the mainland.

"I've never been allowed on the mainland before, this is a first." Amma provided, her attempts at conversation relaxed, courtesy of the actual rest she had been able to achieve the last couple of nights.

"Well, shame your first experience with the mainland happens to be this shithole." Katja chuckles softly to herself. "But I guess it does have its charms. How you feeling about that though? To finally be let off the leash, so to say?"

"It's not complete freedom, watch list and all that, I have to be back later today for a final evaluation. But, it's something..." She uttered, a lock of hair twirled around her index finger as they walked.

"I fear complete freedom isn't in the cards for any of us in the immediate future. Guess that just means we gotta make the most of the moments we're given and enjoy them to the fullest."

“I suppose,” Amma rejoined softly, unable to deny the truth of her words, the moments given with the midnight hours where something she could not name had bloomed upon whispers and clashing blues. The sudden vibration of her phone pulled her attention elsewhere, rapid-fire messages scrolling across her screen where her brows plummeted, confusion laced through her features as she stopped, sudden whorls of scarlet bidden to the fringes of reality that lanced through the ground. Quakes from the depths below, bathed in a writhing silver as she read the texts over and over and over again.

Kidnapped.Kidnapped.Kidnapped.

"Haven..." Katja stared at her phone for a moment, its screen cracked under the sudden pressure exerted upon it. She only looked up when she felt that familiar sensation next to her, those crimson tendrils of wicked energy. She hesitated for one, two seconds, looking at Amma like a startled animal who knew it was about to be punished.

But that feeling was fleeting, quickly overtaken by concern for Haven, and for Amma.

Katja dropped her phone and reached for Amma's shoulders, braving the energy that coiled around the smaller girl. She shook her once, twice, thrice.

"Snap out of it Am! Valkie needs saving, and she needs all the help she can get!"

Amma snatched her palm around Katja’s wrist, a sudden swell of energy bidden around her shoulders, silver flames alighted in her blue eyes as crimson cords snaked and snapped over her arms, unable to dispel the tremor that ran through her very bones.

“I made a promise once,” she whispered, lashes fluttering against an onslaught of memories unbidden, of a time and place where she fell through the ashes of the damned, where she had screamed and cried for all the wrongs of the world and the cruelty of power and life unbound. Where she begged and pleaded, for the hand in the dark that reached out to her, for the one who asked her what her name was, that dubbed her as precious and lost and forsaken- the one she –

The one she had -

“I know.” Was all she said, releasing the manacle grip she had, slowly plying her fingers away as she looked down at her phone once more. “Canis dorms, right.”

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In hindsight, Amma doesn’t know what she expected, much less what could be done. Students had gone missing before and perhaps it was this that inspired her actions, back then there was little to be done, helpless as she was suspended in the dreaded dark upon the chasm of her agony. Those darling phrases lent to her waking world where the eternal pain remained as the tether to her lamented soul spent and drenched in red. The fury though was much the same, kinship to the vengeance she sought, to the redemption promised, to the malice that slid through her veins and churned over her flesh. The world once more held breath on the fringes of Amma’s intentions, her posture taut and rigid, arms crossed as scarlet threads of power warped over her shoulders as writhing serpents of ill intent and promise, the steps up to the dormitories looming before her.

When Rory stepped out, with Harper not far behind, she could not prevent the way her eyes dropped and landed upon his arms, the marks there sliced over muscles, angry slivers partially faded but still feathered in red, memory served of how she clung to him with the desperation of a wild animal. She would never admit it aloud, but she felt still the weight of the chains cinched tight around her throat and arms, still felt the needles pricking her skin and the way she stood now with her weight rolled away from her braced ankle, the scar on her chest an aching reminder that Amma knew she’d forever be damned with.

“If they have taken her,” Amma began carefully, mindful of Katja standing next to her- mindful of the distrust she knew would be marked in his gaze. “It’ll be near impossible to find her. I know you don’t trust me.” She shook out the weight of her powers, red sparks flung from her scarred palms, attempting to dispel the unease pinging down her spine.

“And I don’t care. But, I do know that many went missing while I was at The Foundation, and none were ever found. None were reported. But we noticed.”

And were helpless to stop it.

“If it’s…” Amma paused, a subtle tick in her arms, an anxious habit that bid her inked fingers to flex and crack, her rings adorned through her quivering gestures, gleaming with one in particular beset with a precious red jewel. “They used to take me down, through the dark, the lowest rooms imaginable, where no light could reach.” The same room where Rory had found her in the simulation, the fissures in the walls churning with the endless sea beyond, the deepest recess beyond even hell where only cold emptiness remained. She did not say so aloud but kept the intensity of her stare locked onto him, willing him to understand what went unsaid.

“That’s where they’ll have taken her. If they’ll even let her go, if they –” A ringing peal of agony sheered through her lobe, a horrid and anxious sound that bid her eyes shut, plumes of red and black whisked through her hair and down her back before it fell to her feet and churned away at stone and dirt, eating away at the world that was helpless against her might.

“A name. No, names. Many given and many taken. My name.” Names, she thinks, the countless monikers fitted to her past, the many now that burdened her heart and mind, the monster within lain dormant at her struggles, curiously soothed and complacent despite the shudder of her breath as she fought through the haze of her fiendish memories. Amma did not know if she could revisit those tortures once more; but if she could offer figments of her power to save those without; if she could offer the last of her strength to save those who owed her nothing; if she could soothe and placate another of their demons and fears; if she could accept friendship from another who she had harmed. If Amma could face all the wrongs the world had done to her and stand in defiance to the hated dark she would never admit that she feared.

Then maybe she could help to save the girl who refused to leave her behind, who offered to watch her back even when she openly mocked her hope.

Hope that she found alighted there in eyes of blue and hazel, but hope could only take one so far, and Amma knew she had none left to spare or give, as hope died long ago with the heart of a ten-year-old girl.

“I don’t know the campus like most, and I can’t go far without being with one of you, and they don’t want me gone long from the infirmary, but I will offer my power to you to help find her.”

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Flashback. Infirmary Gardens . - P.R.C.U. Campus.}

Take On Me #3.048: sugar.

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_{Interaction(s): gil. - @Roman}

Previously: Won't Be A Thing To Become.

She awoke with a subtle start; vibrations of awareness swept through her entire body, down the length of her spine curved and flush against the warmth at her back, cheek pillowed on the crook of her arm and opposite fingers nestled against the pout of her lip where a shuddering breath brushed over the delicate touches of her gestures- the same hand that had been entangled with his the night before. It was the coming dawn and the feathering light chasing away the comforting shadows that Amma realized she did not suffer any sort of nightmare or terror, she had slept, such simplistic sleep and comfort afforded to her waking world. Her lashes fanned against her cheeks, blue eyes still wreathed with catches of exhaustion, illustrating her usual intensity with softer features that beheld a sort of glow. She felt Gil move and became just that more aware of his presence and the quiet exhales of sleep before he stirred and came to at the sounds of his phone’s alarm. Amma’s breath stills, her eyes falling shut, not prepared to acknowledge that she had slept in his room, that she had pursued the comfort of night and companionship here, the slight tranquility that fell over the two of them with cords of tension that spindled through and down to her core that hummed with appetence. She felt him: felt the wealth of his stare, the weight of his body as he moved, her breath heightened to catch up on the cage of her ribs before she smothered that slip of a whisper against her arm and curled inward, preserving the warmth sought and given through the night.

He didn’t disturb her, and she was grateful, for she did not know if she could withstand the depths of those steel-blue eyes witnessing her in such vulnerability.

Implications donned the day, the touches of sunlight luring her further away from her feigned sleep whilst Gil assumed his morning, content to let her remain, the intimacy is not lost upon her, but Amma can hardly discern what it even was that had swept betwixt them by just the grace of touches alone. When he departed, her eyes immediately snapped open, and an uneven slip of a sigh fell over her pout before she arose, blanket pooling around her waist whilst she studied the cold space left behind. Her gaze lingers, lids panned down low, an unnamed emotion woven into a medley over her heart eerily calm where she palmed her scar and smoothed away at the ache bundling there. A phantom slice of pain and power that bled red and silver, the remnants of pleading mercy woven through her mind, a scream and a cry of fear of death given by her kiss. A declaration to the monster that had won and the undeserving spoils of a life she had taken.

Amma spared one final glance to where Gil had lain beside her all night, where he had not moved to touch her, where they had simply been, where the physical temptations had been replaced by something that dwelled within the mystery of an emotional connection under the disguise of moonlight and shadow.

She sighs, one hand sliding through the waves of her hair, nails clutched against the crown of her head where wistful trills ebb and flow, a laugh that hummed with all the hopeless wonder of the world.

The timing could not be worse.

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An afternoon breeze found Amma lying beneath a dogwood tree, sunlight filtered through gaps of leaves and branches, delicate catches of wind slid through waves of midnight hair draped over the stone bench she reclined on, eyes fixated on her phone trembling in her grasp. Darling rays of light suspended over her frame dressed casually in lace and an oversized jacket hued olive and trimmed in black. Her thumbs continuously pressed and slid over the fortified glass of her mobile, twitching fingers caressing the case as she continuously typed and deleted message after message, unable to acknowledge the wealth of emotion that sunk betwixt her ribs and tormented her spirit postured over the unknown.

Lorcán was hurt.

The group text she had begrudgingly accepted filtered with some numbers saved and others not, the simplicity of words lost to the truth of what had occurred. He was here in the infirmary like she was, like Gil was, and no further news had been proffered and who was she to demand otherwise? None had visited her whilst she remained locked in solitary, none had inquired about her affairs or state of release or healing. There were no messages from Blackjack as the days carried on and the only text she had revealed in her recent recipients gave her eternal pause every time she clicked back to it.

Gone to physical therapy. No dreams. Drop by again if you want to talk more about mending.

Thank you.

She had no method with which to reply, fingers hovering over digital keys, lashes fanned against her cheeks as she memorized each letter and clicked out of it once more. She allowed her phone to relax within her grasp as one arm draped across her brow and the opposite left to hang off to the side, the grass brushing across her knuckles whilst she glared at the swaying tree above. It was not often, if ever, that Amma was left out of sorts, spiraling into the uncertainty of where she belonged and questioning the beat of her very heart that seemed spliced through and through with hate, desire, and a comforting wealth of emotion found next to a man she had hardly spoken to before. Did the path of vengeance afford her minuscule doses of comfort? Did revenge owe it to her for the yearning wealth of companionship that ventured beyond the physical? Amma’s mind listed back to the forest clearing and the intensity of heat that had fanned away at her core, their powers that had forged into a singular unit of raw, unfiltered energy and having felt the entirety of him through the sluicing manifest spiraling through her even now.

A whispering voice, one that was seeded deeply with malice and doubt, the face of a demented creature looming on high that spun through her a hated voice that fed upon her ambivalence like a glutton.

The unexpected and the always desired.
But never chosen.

Amma laughed, a rueful sound spun from her risen chest as she breathed, punching out the ironic humor of her life undone. For she was a creature of life unforgiving and uncaring, she carved her path through the world without regret, spun hated words of truth that none wanted to hear, tore her hands through the shuddering veil of reality to take what she wanted, a woman of vanity and hubris, the sins of humanity compounded through her for all the oppression she had endured under the hellish dark of her past.

Yet here she lay, undone by a simple text. Undone by the reveal of helplessness. Undone by the very in-between in which she dominated and lived her life. Her faults within and without and a question that hazed through her half-lidded stare.

What did she want?
Everything.

But, now, lingered the exact quantity of what everything entailed. Did she want to visit Gil again? Did she even want to be friends with Katja, Haven, or even Aurora? Did she like Lorcán? Did she want to visit him too? Could she even bring herself to do so?

Amma won’t find the answers now, but as the day continues and the breeze sweeping through her fringe turns cold and the sun banks yonder the clouds of twilight, she finds the answer to at least one weighted inquiry as the hour tolls midnight once more.

Down the hall, alone, no guard to hasten after her haunting steps unhurried and unbound, a sweeping gesture down a familiar door that yields to her touch as if awaiting her very arrival by the heralding of the shadows soft and delicate along her profile. Gil is once more tossed within the throes of a nightmare, beaded sweat and laden groans at whatever stalked his dreams, the revelations the trial had revealed to him about his very self always known but ignored. Amma is beholden to his figure under the disguise of the night, a time now belonging to them, a moment she cannot place or name, and perhaps she did not want to. Perhaps he didn’t want to.

But then, what did Gil want? Did she care?

Carefully, Amma approaches, silent, as if unreal, hair tumbled down to her waist as she studies his features and commits such to memory. With their inevitable discharges from the ward, she wonders if they could even continue meeting, and if so, would he come to her dorm? Would she dare venture to his? If neither could sleep alone, what did such even entail? Did it have to mean anything, she wondered, tucking wayward strands of black behind her pierced ear. As if feeling her there, but unable to acknowledge her presence by the vice his nightmares maintained, his grip suddenly turned lethal and clutched at the space where she had lain the night before. Amma hesitated, a fluttering gaze bidden to the line of his arm before sweeping down where his cast had been traded for a boot to allow further mobility. She considered leaving, if only for a moment before she rested her hand on his, entangled her fingers with his own, and marveled at the immediate tension that unspooled through him and quieted the hellish sire of his terrors. She knows then that she cannot leave.

Slowly Amma entered the bed to lie down beside him, facing him this time instead of offering her back, the line of their bound gestures not allowing for another position, thus she told herself, the blanket provided creating another barrier between them. For maybe an hour she lay there, counting her breaths and his own, cheek pillowed on her arm, eyelids fell halfway through her gaze aglow in the shadows of the moon, silver framed on her lashes before sleep finally claimed her.

For the second night in a row, Amma Cahors does not dream.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Infirmary Gardens . - P.R.C.U. Campus.}

Take On Me #3.027: aqua regia.

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_{Interaction(s): katja. - @Zoldyck}

Previously: away & mirror, mirror.

She felt her before she saw her.

Her sphere of influence and perception is magnified, from every rustle and prick of grass impaled and torn by her nails, every scar of her usually graceful gestures pulsating with the vice she maintained to the earth below. It was anchoring her to this reality, as shadows oozed and spread through the fringes of her vision, her glare burdened by shapes of devilish creatures and profiles of malice that clicked and hummed with cruel grins wreathed in jagged bone. Awareness sires through her limbs as electric impulses of red dance through her pores, flashes of power gilded to every flicker of muscle as Amma lanced her gaze from the proffered hand she witnessed in her most recent nightmares, often beheld of blood and a broken heart, and ticked every passing glance through her lashes bidden on high in the first dawning touches of apprehension not befitting to her usual disposition. She cannot help with the way her eyes flicker, brightening just so in recognition, framed in glistening silver as she pins that intensity upon her shoulders- shoulders she had maimed, shoulders she had touched and broken and made bleed. The manifestation of her chaotic maladies that had impaled through imposing musculature and rent apart flesh and nearly bone. The hand before her was now bathed in red sorrow, the illusion of crimson pooling over the delicate motion hoisted above her crown where she was helpless against the rightful vengeance that would see to her demise.

Amma’s entire body goes rigid, a slight tension that corded through her lithesome shoulders that curled inward, pressing herself flush against the stone bench that ground against her aching back. Her lashes pan down low with a sliver of teeth edged onto the pout of her lip, liken to a feral animal retreating in on itself, her guards take one step, recognizing the signals almost immediately until she speaks.

“I’m fine.” She claims once more, louder enough for them to hear, and shifts her body enough to reach back, palm braced against stone, the entire length of her arm at such a disadvantage as she attempts to lift herself- the prideful of the fallen given here, as she rejoins on a whisper.

“I don’t need help. I don’t need anyone.”

Katja took in a deep, shaky breath as she could feel that horribly beautiful power of Amma. Her shoulders, despite supposedly being treated for any pain, started intensely throbbing as she was reminded of the painful sensation of being touched by that crimson lightning. Her hand twitched slightly as all of it came back to her. Though it only lasted for a split second, to Katja it felt like she was experiencing that night in the tent all over again: The confusion, the anger, the confrontation, the pain and the promise. All of it played out in front of her again.

Seeing Amma on the ground in that almost bestial pose of hers almost made Katja wish she would lash out at her again. At least then it would be over. All the pain, all the doubt, all the sorrow. The loneliness. Scattered with the wind as she was turned into dust by that incredible malicious energy.

But then she heard Amma utter those words. Words that echoed her very own when Harper and Rory had offered their help to her right before the Trials. Words that she now deeply regretted as she now understood how they must have felt when she told them off, much like Amma was doing to her right now. Despite everything, it pained Katja to see the pale girl like this. It was only a little over a week ago when they had both enjoyed their time on the beach. Where she could still embrace Amma and, despite the other’s rejections of the concept, treat her as a friend. She wanted that back. She would do anything to have that back.

But Katja knew that, if it were even possible, that would take time. She knew that she couldn’t force things through. One glance at her current state was enough argument against that course of action.

So instead she swallowed and spoke with trembling hands.

“I know.” Katja uttered meekly as she took a step back and slowly pulled her hand away after the rejection, needing no reminder of what would happen if she insisted on helping Amma. “Just felt like I should offer you the option regardless.” Her voice grew softer as her confidence seemed to wane by the second until finally only a barely audible whisper escaped from under her breath.

“To show that I care.”

“Hah! That’s laughable,” a bitterly seeded trill spooled from her lips, slithering through her gritted teeth as her arm strained to withhold her weight, every nerve wailing in pain, every muscle locked tight and taut and incredibly worn. She could feel the trio of serpents still clamored over her skin, writhing and coiling, bunched and feathering those forked tongues at the horrid scar she suddenly felt obligated to conceal. Her fingers clutched at the slope of her sweater, the sin of vanity wrought through her being as she laughed.

“I forget, teammates and all that. Blackjack is drenched in it.”

Though she hesitated, for just a second, her opposite gesture relinquished its hold at her breast and clung to the stone bench, hoisting herself up as best she was physically able. She shook her head once, twice, a terrible buzzing lancing through her lobe, stricken upon her thoughts and woes, and clung to every quivering muscle that refused to obey.

“Dammit!” Her legs gave out and slid out from beneath her, one arm spread aloft where her fingers clutched and dragged against the stone, and the other spearing her nails into the dirt where grass gave way to her self-inflicted wrath and pity. Amma cursed, head canted down low where a hardly interceptable nod followed, her critical gaze aglow in frigid blue oblique through her sweeping lashes and fringe of black hair.

Katja ignored the jibe towards Blackjack. Amma had made herself very clear about her feelings towards the team, so it didn’t come as a surprise to Katja to hear the derision in her voice. Instead, she looked on in subdued silence at Amma as she tried to hoist herself back up on the stone bench. Seeing her fail, Katja had to repress her instinctual urges to rush in to catch the other girl before she hit the ground. An urge betrayed by the flaring of her nostrils and a slight twitch of the tall girl’s fingers.

She wanted to look away, to spare at least some of the pride of the injured girl. But right as Katja was about to shift her gaze, she caught the blue eyed stare of Amma. Those eyes that had mocked her so cruelly mere days ago. Those very same eyes that had, if only for a fraction of a second, shown remorse at the harm she had done to her. Now however, there was a different look in those eyes, one that Katja couldn’t quite place. And with it came a barely noticeable nod of acquiescence.

The first step Katja took towards the downed girl was clearly a hesitant one, as she wasn’t quite sure she interpreted Amma’s nod correctly. With no reprisal forthcoming, the second step became more confident, while the third was a full on stride that was enough for her to cover whatever distance had been between the two girls. Squatting down, Katja put one arm under Amma’s legs while using her other arm to support the girl’s back. She locked eyes for just a moment, as if to ask whether the raven haired girl was ready. As no objections were uttered, Katja perceived this as her go signal.

“One, two…” The large South African said before she easily rose back to her full height, the slim shape of Amma in her arms. Katja didn’t activate her powers for the task, as the effort didn’t require it and she was afraid that she might accidentally injure Amma more by a reflexive action due to being exposed again to the pale girl’s HZEs.

“You still okay Am-” Katja interrupted herself as she looked down at Amma cradled in her arms, an embarrassed blush wasting no time to appear on the blonde’s cheeks. Looking away, Katja hastily, but gently, put Amma down on the stone bench before taking another step back to create some respective distance between the two again.

She can’t help it, she doesn’t want to, but Amma is reminded of another instance when someone picked her up in such a similar fashion- a time so distanced from now, another world, another girl that took kindness and melded it into something more, and a boy that just wanted to show her what fun actually was. There was no comparison to be had, the two vastly different, but she was human; of limited means perhaps; a multifaceted creature of cruelty and malice, but a human nonetheless that clasped her palm briefly over Katja’s shoulder- and promptly took it away.

It lasts for maybe a second, a small glimpse into the soul within, but Amma is uncertain if what she feels is what many would compare to the emotion of guilt.

“Always am.” She utters, the bench utterly frigid against her gestures, she could not explain why she felt so entirely weak, her body spent and drained, all the rest she had accrued in the last few days did little to assuage the exhaustion of her mortal frailties. HZEs were restored instantly, the world once more at her beck and call and ebb and flow, so why did she feel so frail? Amma lifted one scarred palm up to her inspection, fingers splayed and arched as she slowly curled each nail against her scars, tacking to each line smothered with the whorls of heart and fate. She lifted such up to the filtered dapples of sunlight through the dogwood tree, attempting to decipher why her body felt weighted, liken to a stone within a pit of darkness.

Her penetrating glare falls upon Katja once more, finding it within herself to inquire, a mutter of gratitude failing to find itself betwixt them.

“Why are you even here?”

Katja cast her eyes down the moment she felt Amma’s piercing stare at her, like a schoolgirl caught by their teacher doing something they shouldn’t. The brief flush in her cheeks almost immediately disappeared, as the sense of embarrassment evaporated in an instant. Being replaced by anxiety, a feeling she had grown very accustomed to over these last few days.

“I came here because I…” She paused once, clicking her tongue in frustration as she couldn’t seem to utter the last few words. “Because I…”She said a second time, softer than before. “I…” Katja said meekly now, before finally clearing her throat and trying again after taking a deep breath to regain her composure. When next she spoke, it was with more volume and confidence, as was more befitting of her. “Because I need help.”

She nodded over in the direction of the infirmary, obstructed by well maintained brushes, trees and flowerbeds, but looming in the distance all the same. “I wanted to schedule an appointment, or maybe have a walk-in therapy session if that were possible. I’ve never really gone to any of the therapists here, even if it was mandatory. They’re not really sending people after you if you don’t go, and I always found that the gym was a better place to deal with my issues than by talking to someone.”

“But this time, that just didn’t seem to help.” She looked up, her ice blue eyes meeting the cerulean of Amma’s gaze. A melancholic smile curled up her lips as she continued. “So I figured I’d try this out for once. See if they can help me deal with whatever it is I’m struggling with. To deal with the loneliness.” Katja lowered herself down to sit on her haunches, a shaky breath ushering in a short pause.
“To deal with the pain.”

It was then, with her focus being on the word pain, that Katja noticed that the pulsing in her shoulders was gone for the first time since she laid her eyes on Amma. She reached out with one hand to the one that Amma had only briefly grasped. But apparently, that gesture had been enough to soothe the hurting feeling. She clutched her shoulder firmly, whether for confirmation or as a sign of appreciation she did not know, but clutch it she did. And as she did, she imagined that some of the cloudiness in her eyes dissipated, as she could have sworn that her picture of Amma became clearer in front of her.

“They just ask a lot of questions,” she states, a matter of fact, unleashing her gaze and casting them heavenward, a breeze teasing through the branches above and the longest strands of black curled against her nape and spine. “Loneliness and pain go hand in hand, side by side. I think.”

Pain was an eternal friend, pain was familiar, pain made one aware of life and gave meaning to it- to existence. The agony of the living could hardly be spared for the woe of the dead, and if her desire of life to live everything to the fullest capacity, to be as unforgiving and sown deep with that ambition, meant to be burned by agony for eternity- then so be it. Loneliness, however, was more of the unknown, for she did not understand the discrepancy of its meaning and defilement, betwixt those who wanted to be alone and those who could not harbor that monochromatic shade of personal ailment.

“Sometimes,” Amma breathed a sigh, unable to still the confession that whisked away in a whisper. “It is better to be alone.”

Katja cast her eyes down as she let Amma’s words sink in. She had to admit that there was a grain of truth in them. Afterall, she wouldn’t have felt this sense of betrayal if she had just stuck on her own and never signed up with Orcinus to begin with. She balled her fists at the thought of being so easily sacrificed, but mostly because she realized that she was not blameless in this respect either. If her now former allegiance came to light Katja was sure that all in Blackjack would be hurt the same way Katja was hurt now. If she had continued being alone, none of this would have been a concern.

“Perhaps you are right.” Katja said as she wrapped her arms around her legs before resting her chin on her knees. She remained quiet for a moment, staring out to nowhere in particular as Katja seemed lost in thought. “Perhaps,” She admitted softly, almost inaudible to all but her. “It is better to be alone.”

Yet as those words left her lips, Katja could feel the small girl she had once been scream out in rejection of this line of thinking. She was reminded of how dark the world seemed when she had been alone, shunned and persecuted by a world that didn’t understand her, or any of her kind. And then she recalled how happy she became when first entering PRCU, being accepted for who she was rather than being judged for what she was. How overjoyed she was when someone called her a friend for the first time. And how grateful she was to know that she had them in her corner.

“On the other hand,” Her eyes flicked back up towards Amma, the sadness from earlier giving way to a more uplifting gaze. “Sometimes it helps to be able to air your heart to someone who truly listens.” An embarrassed half smile cautiously curled up on her lips as her eyes remained locked on Amma, making sure that the implication would be obvious to the other girl.

“Because sometimes, it’s nice to know that someone has your back, no matter what.”

In that moment, she is reminded of Haven, those eyes of moss and bark that had sparked in defiance to her truth, that had refused to to submit to her glare and refused to believe that the world was as hopeless and lost as Amma knew it to be. Her lips curled into a delicate smile there, a sort of spun mirth that was suspended in disbelief at the toils of friendship given here, to the same words that had been spoken in stubborn whispers:

Don’t you want someone to have your back?

Haven and Aurora had refused to leave her behind but did one such act of kindness and understanding equate to the forgiveness of life undone and cruel and forsaken? Did that allow her heart to yawn forth on the hinges of yearning and want of kinship, despite all she had done, despite all that she had yet to do? Amma’s expression hardened with a glacier mask of porcelain donned over the dejected glimpse of her inner thoughts, the creature suspended betwixt a cage of bone uncoiling from rest and reared forth the crown of blood and hate that she clung to all the more.

“No matter what. Does that account for what I did to you? Does that account for what I did to-” Her voice drops away, face contorted at the lapse of sound that came out in a wince, the buzzing betwixt her ears returning tenfold.

“Where does the line of Teammates truly end, where does it begin, tell me, Katja. How far does it really go? How much can it withstand?”

“No matter what, to me, means no matter what.” Katja said with a shrug before glancing over at the shoulder Amma had touched earlier. “Fights happen, and with some of us the effects are just more violent than with others.” She gently rubbed a hand over the same spot before forming her hand into a fist and giving two knocks on the wound. “That doesn’t mean we can’t move past that.” A smile formed on her lips, the first one since before the trials. Katja just uttered the words she herself needed to hear the most. If the people in Blackjack were truly her friends, which she thought they were, they would eventually find it in their hearts to forgive her for breaking their trust.

“Afterall,” She said softly, almost in a mumbling way. “That’s what friends are for.”

Katja looked up from her shoulder to meet Amma’s harsh stare with a soft gaze of her own before she clearly proclaimed. “Not Teammates. Friends.”

Katja quickly raised both of her hands before Amma could interject, ushering her to pause any sort of retort with a calming gesture.

“I know what you think about friends. Trust me, I am very well aware of your stance on that.” Her lips curved into a rueful grin before continuing. “And I am by no means trying to force you to accept all of us, or even just one of us, as your buddies or mates. Not at all.” Katja shook her head wildly from side to side before pausing and taking a deep, shaky breath.

“I’m just saying that, even if you don’t like to think of others as friends, I would like to be the next best thing to you. Just like with Rory, Haven or Harper, I will do whatever I can to help you through whatever hardships you may face. But only if you let me.” Katja bites down on her lower lip as she finally averts her eyes from those fierce orbs of Amma’s. Still seated on the ground, her shoulders slumped slightly as only a weak muttering escaped her lips, for she realized she might have pushed too far again like last time. “And, more importantly, only if you’d want me to.”

Amma scoffs: “Is there some kind of script you guys pull that from? Haven said something similar before -”

“Well, before.”

It was such a strange feeling, fleeting and barely there, but peculiar all the same: how Katja was able to express herself, how Haven was able to convey her defiance in the face of the damned, how Aurora’s emotions were so easily and carelessly illustrated with that hopeless desperation of life and love. How even individuals like Lorcán were able to glimpse beyond the beast and find the girl within that yearned to love and be loved in return. Amma’s gaze fell away, lashes swept low liken to a moth’s wing upon her cheeks that fanned and narrowed, thoughts unbound. She barely discussed the Trials endured, even with her therapist, unable to speak aloud of The Beloved she encountered, the likeness of happiness and the witness of those delicate arms embraced and linked to broad shoulders, the lips of bitten red and blossoms of a rose that swelled with the euphoric grin and bliss and completion known by the heart to be whole. She could not acknowledge the needles that had penetrated beneath her skin over and over, the numerous injections she had been forced to live through, the last decade rent asunder through her being to break her again and again.

“You are far too forgiving, Katja.” Wisdom flitted to her voice, clinging to her whispers, something aged and lost. “I asked for someone to kill me, and he refused, for all that I have yet to do. For all that I am meant for, the role I have to play.” Slowly, her head cants to one side, rolling her neck with a cascade of black spilling over her shoulder. The intensity of her stare pierced deep, shattering through the glacier barriers that had once brimmed with life, hope, and affection that she had broken.

“If I asked you to kill me, as my friend, would you? That’s what friends are for, right? To help those in need.”

“That’s what you just said.”

Katja’s expression noticeably changed as Amma spoke. Her brow furrowed slightly as her eyes narrowed, her smile waned while her shoulders stiffened and her back straightened. The reply caught her off guard. She had expected the scoff, perhaps even a lashing out like last time. What she didn’t expect was this question Amma queried at the end.

Running a hand through her long blonde locks, Katja remained quiet for a moment as she mulled over her answer. She took one more deep breath before finally looking back up again, meeting that fierce gaze with a determined one of her own. “It depends, I guess.”

“I would try to talk you out of it at first, because that is what friends are for too. For giving you their advice, even if you don’t want it.” Katja replied with a smirk, a melancholic sight more than a reassuring one, which disappeared again as soon as it came. Her voice, for the first time today, seemed unshakable and resolute. Her entire being radiated a serious determination. As if she was resolved to go through with whatever she was going to answer, no matter what. So, with her eyes locked to the cerulean gaze of Amma, Katja replied with full, unwavering sincerity. “But, if that doesn’t work, if you are truly adamant about it, then I guess dying by the caring hand of a friend is the way I would want to go too.”

“So, if you really wanted me to, then yes. Yes, I would." A smile, a thing of sorrow, formed on her lips as she kept looking into Amma’s eyes. “And, if that day eventually comes, I would expect my friends to do the same for me.”

“I just-”

I can’t stop it.

Remember the rewards given.
The lives you took.
The lives you take.

Her lashes fluttered closed on a trembling sigh, something akin to relief spreading thin through her body, a release of tension subtly dispelling from her shoulders. Many faces flit on through her mind, names branded there, similar to the one branded onto her neck. Amma slowly palms the pulse at her throat gone quiet and still, her nail scraping slowly over the ‘I’ - and ‘M’ and then pauses, looping through the rest of the raised ink until her tracing stills across to her nape where she clasps her fingers to roll her neck. Her stare begins anew with the sudden silence, opening to lock with Katja’s determination.

“Then I guess this makes us friends.”

Hearing Amma utter those words, Katja felt her entire body relax, punctuated with one long, drawn out breath. The tension that she had felt all this time seemed to dissipate entirely, melting away like snow in the sun. The expression in her eyes, locked with those of Amma, remained determined. Yet there was a hint of softness now in them, a sense of joy radiating through her gaze. One that was also mirrored by her smile which noticeably grew broader, almost running from ear to ear. Despite the promise made, one with severe implications, Katja’s entire demeanor seemed to have shifted, the fog which had covered her eyes ever since the Trials, ever since that night in the tent, seemed to be lifting away. For a brief moment the sun pierced the clouds of Katja’s mind.

“I guess we are…” The tall girl said as she stood back up to her full height, towering over all those currently going about their day in the garden. After taking a moment to stretch herself out, Katja took a small step towards Amma, eyes still locked on those of the other girl. “And you have no idea how much you saying that means to me.”

“I’m gonna be honest, I would really like to give you an embrace right now, Am.” She defaulted back to Am without even realizing. Signifying the return of confidence within her when dealing with the Raven haired girl. “But I guess that would be pushing it?” Katja said with a grin as she looked down at Amma, rubbing the back of her neck in a slightly embarrassed fashion.

“Don’t push your luck, Katja.” She rejoined on a soft laugh, accompanied by a shake of her head, disbelief coloring her mutterings, the easy acceptance and joy that she exemplified by the mutual agreement despite the severity of their drawn promise. Amma carefully rises to her feet, her guards moving in close, though without as much concern by the trudging of their steps with a loose smile softening her often intense features.

“I’ll see you around, friend.” Amma steps around her, arms crossed and gaze dropped and as she moves to be escorted out from the gardens, she pauses long enough to brush her hand over Katja’s shoulder, a soft and delicate clasp that illustrates the closest to an apology that Amma can give her before she leaves. The buzzing follows her, as do the shadows and the soft hissing that she now feels upon every prick of her spine, the weight of a serpent unseen coiling over her shoulders.

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Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Infirmary Wing: Solitary Confinement . Infirmary Gardens . - P.R.C.U. Campus.}

Take On Me #3.015: away.

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_{Interaction(s): &&}

Previously: reflection.

They’ve taken so much from her already - she counts it down, writes it in hated slashes across her soul, tallies everything, remembers it all. With a finger dragged through ash and blood her signature blooms bright and edged in vengeance, the looping scrawl of a harsh delicacy that spells the name given, the name chosen, and the name both lost and forsaken —

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By the fifth vial of blood taken, Amma’s voice rasps through her throat, dragged over shards of bone as she tries to reign in that quaking violence of self-preservation to keep her wrath in check. She feels the needle beneath her skin, in the crook of her arm that trembles over the cushion of a slight medical cart rolled in with her sudden guardians stationed at either wall, both equipped with powers she does not know. Still, she could feel them there by the lazily churning scarlet whorls that slither beneath her bed and clamor over her ankles, focusing more so on the one that had been broken and now was set with a simple brace strapped painfully tight against her sensitive skin. It was a peculiar situation when she had been sedated and taken from the Trial’s conclusion, her bones had already begun to mend, a medical anomaly that had her wounds setting incorrectly, which introduced the necessity of breaking her ankle once again for a healer to mend marrow, tendons, and tissue to grant her mobility.

“Why the blood draw?” A simple inquiry, her usual cadence dragged into exhaustion, psychological detriment weighing heavy on her spirit.

“Torres requested we run a panel,” her assigned nurse had been quiet and calm, her presence one typically accustomed to patients like Amma, to her she saw a young woman battered and worn, whereas many others saw a spy or a furious creature that had attempted to defy their orders since she had woken up from her sedation. Reproach alighted blue eyes framed heavily in lashes, lids surrendered over the breadth of her stare, a sort of melancholic unveiling that took her intense features and softened them into something delicate- something not quite there. She takes one more, the needle sliding out from her vein a surreal sensation that she feels down to her bones, and lets loose a shuddered breath as the nurse presses gauze to her skin and seals it with medical tape.

“There,” she stepped back, her guardians stepped in close, a whispering trepidation that coiled through the room with a spool of crimson poised over the embellished skin of her arm, linked to the scars that crossed over one another, carefully betwixt the bodies of snakes that wreathed her arms with skull laden birds in flight. “I would advise more rest, you have a therapy session scheduled later this evening, though I will reschedule them for tomorrow if you’re too tired.”

Her brow lowered, just how many more did she have to participate in to be released? It was the same inquiries over and over, questions about her mental state, questions about what happened in the simulation, questions that probed too deep into a mind chained and bound- there were so many things she could not remember. Many things she did not want to remember.

“I’d like to go outside,” Amma uttered, a restless kindling of silver banked within her stare. “You don’t need permission for that, do you?” A quiet challenge, her nurse quietly disposed of needles and plastic and gathered the vials carefully with a whistling sigh.

“...It’d be my professional medical opinion that you are allowed fresh air. Just don’t make me regret it, Ms. Cahors.” She made to wheel her medical cart out from her room, holding the door ajar to retrieve a duffel bag just outside.

“Your house representative, Ms. Clarke, retrieved some things from your room.”

Left alone, Amma carefully rummaged through what Ryan had deemed appropriate through her earlier request after she had been denied passage on the ferry. Blouses in various shades of grey and black; a couple of her sweaters of cable knit stitching; and another that was cropped to fit slightly above her navel; cut-offs, and fitted leggings; all things afforded to comfort along with a pack of her clove cigarettes tucked carefully into an adjacent pocket and a lighter to accompany it. Amma dressed carefully, every muscle taut and protesting against her movements whilst she changed, fresh bandages fitted where proper, her anxious habits traded for shredding them without her rings to adorn her fingers. She felt exposed by the scar defiling her body, the peak of the ruined flesh and moth bisected by it revealed through the drape of the pullover as it settled over her lithesome shoulders and scooped low at her front. She threaded her arachnid gestures through her mass of hair, settling the strands into a high-strung tail that displayed the lines of her neck and the unique name scrawled at her throat in black ink.

Once long nails traced over the letting, the phantom sensation of a burn coiling through the ‘I’, her index finger edging out over an ‘M’ before she stilled, settling her palm against the pulse hammering away at her throat. Amma inhales, sharp and whistling over the pout of her lip, at least the simulation hadn’t shown her them.

She knows she would not be alive if it had.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

There’s a slight commotion elsewhere whilst Amma is escorted outside, the entrance to the infirmary is temporarily warded off and it’s down another series of hallways that they take around to the gardens. Such a term is lost in the reality that it’s a few trees scattered to the edges of intersecting walkways that conjoin the myriad of medical wings through an outdoor option where patients are permitted to linger. It’s quiet, save for a few students flitting to the shade, their whispers growing hushed when they notice her. The discarding of the standard uniform is taken to well enough, by the observation she proffers with a cant of her head, raking eyes up and down until she dismisses them with a flicked wrist and settles at a stone bench given to the shadow of a dogwood tree. Her guards station themselves far enough but she is kept within their line of sight, the familiarity of such an entourage not lost upon her as she plucks a stick of clove from her pack and nestles the filter against her pout, striking her lighter with a flourish and palms the flame close to her. Embers reflect in her eyes, the hypnotizing twirl of fire warming against her scars, the igniting of the cherry, and that tantalizing spice wafting up upon her visage as she inhales sharp and heavy and exhales upon a plume of vanilla and sweet herbs.

The conclusion of her continuation to attend P.R.C.U is anti-climatic at best, she’s already requested an audience with Torres upon her return to the island, amended with her request for what personal clothing she had. Returning to those damned pyramids out amongst the sea unsettles her, but at least there she knows her purpose, at least there she can resume her preparations for joining The Foundation Force under the appellation of Tiamat. Amma recalls the first time she slid into latex and lace, delicate latches of silver, gossamer finery slid over hips and bisected through the gaping slivers that plunged low and teased at the most intricate of tattoos that curled over her midriff- the shawl that had been granted, handed over by them, a face that–

Her recollections are interrupted in such a delicate manner that Amma’s motions are stilled carefully, the telltale sensation of being watched beyond the station of her guards coiling through her bones and pinging down her spine in whispers of awareness. There, in a breathing sigh of her name –

Tiamat.

A caress against her mind, a shuddering claim that slides betwixt her ears and buzzes away at her lobe, it crawls through every sheered nerve ending and sires through her blood. Her name - her name - that breezes through her soul.

Amma.

She feels it against her back first, a sudden weight that slides up yonder her sweater, pulling away at the thread of her clothes before it crests over her shoulder. A triangle head, a slightly upturned snout, black scales rippling through dappled sunlight, a hiss that slides against the shell of her pierced ear as a viper bunches against the curve of her clavicle.

Ammar –

“Don’t,” she breathes, head tilted up, the sudden presence of a secondary serpent coiling and sliding against the juncture of her throat, forked tongue against her flesh as a trilling sound rises against the sensitive plans of her body. The dogwood sways above, a perpetual shade of darkness rising to her stare as a third snake settles across her lap, bunched over her thighs, causing her to still even her rising chest that crumbles away at the breath that stutters from her swollen mouth. Eyes of red, eyes of blue liken to her own, eyes of steelish azure, eyes of vermillion, eyes of the sky that shatter again and again, and then the soft flutterings of skull-faced moths that hover just yonder her rigid figure. Wings of ashen black and red, with smudges of demented yellow, twittering birds constructed of frail bone that perch above her crown, lost among skeletal branches that pierce the heavens.

Twisted shadows malformed in the distance, the decaying brown hue of bone smudged in black as a myriad of hellish hounds leap forward, tooth and claw poised to tear her very throat out as the serpents hiss and agitate themselves against the hideous scar rent over her heart and cinch tight around her limbs, curved fangs against her breast, a piercing flare of pain that tears through her skin, shorn to the bone – and there, she sees it, the siring of a reaper that looms over her very soul, a threaded line of scarlet stricken to her chest, invading through her being – it tugs, her spine curved inward, wound so tight she can hear and feel her bones breaking –

And then, nothing.

It stops so suddenly Amma falls to her knees, fallen away from the stone bench rigid against her spine tense with pain. Her two guards snap to attention, shuffling forward to assist where she lifts her trembling palm, brows plunged low over her glare as she commands:

“Don’t, I’m fine. Stay away from me.” A hiss writhes against her mind, her captors exchanging glances and inching closer, situating themselves at an immediate distance as Amma struggles to retain her composure, her breath heaved from her ribs that ache – everything ached. She deigns to remain sitting on the grass, comforted at the moment by the sensations against the scars laden through her gestures, nails sunk deep into the dirt, anchoring her to reality. She cannot, however, ignore the telltale awareness that she is still being watched, from beyond somewhere in the trees above where a buzzing continues to ebb and flow.

Be it in the distance yonder, or perhaps still in her mind, a screech so terrible and so haunting explodes through her waking world, a roar that demanded nothing but death and hungered for it - like nothing she has ever heard before.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

Charlotte Cahors is young and she is afraid, afraid of a world that will never accept or forgive, afraid of the sleepless nights, afraid of the world that shudders and churns upon the wailing cries of her only daughter. The child barely eight years of age, spun of her likeness with those subtle reminders of her father that Charlotte still yearned for. On whispered promises, he made to return to her, when things were safe, when things made sense, when a mission had been fulfilled and a purpose had been given. Bound to an innate desire better fitted to demented chains that held him to obligations he had long sworn to before she. It is in the arch of her delicate brow, the intensity a child of her years should not have been capable of, and yet when Charlotte looked upon her, she felt everything shift as if the universe bid itself to her chaotic whims of youth. Bright eyes laden in crystalline blue banked with an innocence the world would later seek to destroy.

A child she adored, a child she feared, a child she wanted to save.

She would later cry and weep and scream, cursing a sky where an Almighty reigned, pleading to the heavens for redemption to lay upon her daughter, to spare her for the wrongs the world would do unto her. If only Charlotte knew that a netherworld would instead heed her woes, the darkness of an eternal void already marked upon Amma's soul. All that was, and all that would be, done upon the elegant scripts of two very different letters that would decide the ultimate fate of the harbinger of destruction, the elegant reaper that could've been Beloved and was traded instead for the Unknown.

A monster. A beast. A spawn of circumstances and manipulated chance laden in ash, the crown of bone impaled so deep upon her scalp she would know not where it ended and she began.

The first time such a christening is foretold is in the spires of Rouen: a cathedral that punctures the clouds above, spearing into the gardens of an Eden where once mankind reigned, sanctioned from such a beauty by the mutterings of an ill creature. Under the designated hour of twilight, Charlotte held a child with hair liken to a raven's wing, clung to her for all the hopelessness that bedeviled her life since those pulsating coils of hated scarlet first wreathed her daughter's bearings; eyes aglow, becoming brighter and brighter, almost laden in silver for all the strength that spun from delicate hands suddenly there and then not.

Ushered within, hushed mutterings of prayer and thankfulness as the vestibule yawned forth into eternal darkness speckled in small flames of lit candelabras encumbered by wax, almost skeletal and perverse and lain upon iron wrought in peculiar patterns. She mutters her worries in French, her accent reminiscent of a delicate hope that dubbed her as both Mother and Protector and Darling. Among the ivory of her skirts, Amma Cahors peers eyes wide and high, the arched ceiling giving way to bell tolls that mark the hour, gilded pillars tarnished by time, the interior a herald of the lost age when many gathered in prayer and worship. Led by a man donned in ebony robes they came upon a dias, the structure inlaid with obsidian and stone, plaster conformed to the lustre of volcanic glass to depict plunging angels that heralded many wings and eyes, the flickering fires abound cast them aglow.

Words are interchanged in hushed, panicked lapses, the manic fluttering of once simplistic gestures now as if wounded fletchings, a peculiar ring flashing there, twisted bronze and golds, the child that was Amma often looked upon its malformed design, noting that such was an all-seeing globe that was set with a precious jewel of red. Here her mother was strained and taut, the ridge of her stare a tumultuous breadth of fated nature raked over the world, peculiar starbursts lain in those eyes, wreathed in the cosmos of an all-seeing being.

Stars rose and fell in the encompassing stare of Charlotte Cahors, perhaps more unsettling than the wealth of power in her daughter's crippling gaze. She had stars in her eyes and the world in her hands, as once whispered to her by a philosophical man that saw both beginning and end in her damning gaze.

And lo, before them, anchored into the dias was a pool of rippling sapphire that lapped away at edges of gold, the slight depths bisected by a sliver of cerulean. Bidden closer, both mother and daughter looked unto those churning blues, and there in the flash of color, a marring whorl of black, something almost unseen and indiscernible if not for the eyes beholden to Charlotte to see and know All. In rushed whispers, she asks:

What is this?

A purposeful pause, a hidden signal, a wreath of black as more robed figures gather - a hush of a hymn vibrated down to her bones.

A cure, a means to see your child saved.
In the world we reign; in the world we live.
There is no room for false gods.
There is no room for a defiler --
you want to save her, do you not?

Charlotte stills, head panned down low, a glare that her daughter knew as both stern and wrathful. She quickly claims they were mistaken, that her daughter was no foretold wretch of this life. She was merely a child, and she was a mother only wanting to keep her safe, to seek the means to allow her the gift of happiness owed to her. They simply laugh.
It happens too quickly, it happens too fast. A mother torn away from her daughter, screams of horrid pain impaled upon this hour of hellish twilight, a trembling hand reaching and seeking and clawing for her precious babe. A child that wails, hands manacled and bruised upon her delicate arms, pale skin bloomed with fresh violets as she is dragged forward. Nails splinter, bones break, a terrifying cry that rings through the cavernous spires looming above. Above her crown, windows lain with stained glass, a myriad of colors blooming red and then silver, as the hour betwixt dawn and dusk reigned true. The glass splinters, cracks, it falls plink by plink by plink until --

Cherub bearings turned demented with rage, a screech of defiance and fury, tiny hands turning inward, slicing scarlet smiles into her palms, mouths gaped wide on the feral screams that tore asunder through her body beholden to fear. Amma screams and she screams and the world answers on drones of terrifying manifest, it explodes, the belfry of this cathedral shudders and trembles, wood and stone bellow and crack, flesh peels upon the herald of crimson whips of power that challenges the very heavens above. Fissures of silver reap and tear and pillage through bone and blood and eyes turn yonder in prayer as Charlotte grabs her child and runs.

She runs for what seems like eternity, she runs and weeps and falls to the earth, she laments over her daughter and the cruelty of the world that would don her the unworthy and the forsaken.

Chaos is many things. It is an awakening of disorder that existed long before the mundane, it is the reign and herald of something that the world has never forgotten but also refused to acknowledge. It is the unknown and the in-between, the void of life and death, the void of total disorder that gleams red upon pale skin that would later be defiled by many, many scars.

At the feet of Amma Cahors, where her hands weep blood, flowers of pulsating ruby cores suddenly bloom.

It's only a couple of years later that Charlotte Cahors loses her daughter to all the fears and woe she tried so desperately to save her from.

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_{Location: Infirmary Wing: Solitary Confinement - P.R.C.U. Campus.}

Take On Me #3.007: reflection.

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_{Interaction(s): &&}

Previously: devour.

A flower. But not a flower. The grass wet beneath her palms, dirt on her nails, and the sky above bearing down upon her.
Was it real?
Did all of that happen?

The simulation ends and Amma Cahors falls to her knees, once, twice -- again and again, breath caught betwixt her bruised and battered lungs. Every cinch of bone turned inward to impale against her erratic heart. Harsh pants rip away from her bloodied lips, slivers of bone impaling into her pout as she struggles to summon control into her waking world. Manic eyes of a horrid blue flash back and forth, upon every member of Blackjack -- she tacks each of them, rakes her intense glare through every pass of flesh and bruise and blood. Alive. Real. Maybe.

Or she was just dead.

"Who."

It was a declaration of malice, hate, of an untamed nature that simmered long and cold betwixt broken ribs, it was a bidden christening of the demented monarch, the coronation of the damned beast that rose with a crown laden of bone and blood and hate.

"Was it you." She hisses, eyes fell upon Calli, and then Harper, her lashes fluttering on erratic pulses as whorls of red pulsated against her quivering hands.

"No.. No. Who did this. Who --"

Sparks of dreaded carmine pulsated in threatening strikes upon her arms and hands, nails sunk deep into soil and rock, fingers arched and chest heaved with her quickening breath, eyes of a netherworld peeled wide on tides of a storm, a hellacious act of nature that burned and writhed and punctuated through every twitch of wailing muscle as Amma roared. She needed to get it out- she had to get it out. Needles from long ago pricked her skin, laying upon her flesh, and drove down to the sinew and marrow until burning hate was pumped directly into her soul.

"Get It Out!" Amma snaps, teeth bared, a wild animal stricken in blood loss and panic, her strength ebbing into disarrayed cords that slid around her throat, choking her cries, writhing against her tongue and stricken upon her teeth as fangs that pried her lips agape with each screech that peeled away from her heaving chest. A manic peel of laughter sundered from those bloodied lips capped in violets and sapphires and black, the grin that curled over her wounded cheeks split wide liken to a fiendish cheshire.

"They wanted to punish me for the life I spared. She said she could help me find her if I let her go! She said she had a sister. Baxter. I know I asked for it, I know I wanted it. Instead - they gave me to Hell! I didn't ask for this."

Somewhere she hears the call for sedatives and within the bedlam of her shattered spirit, Amma's heart splinters and crumbles away into dread, a choked gasp sputters from her lips, lashes peeling wide before her body suddenly goes limp, her entire frame broken and bleeding, wounds freshly irritated and exposing the lining of scars over the entirety of her body; the horrors of her past on a sickening display.

Upon the earth, she lays as a fractured doll, porcelain defiled by death and blood; a begone weapon forsaken in this life, and then the next, the means and her purpose warped and shredded.

Discarded and broken.

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Amma Cahors was condemned to solitary confinement under the disguise of demanding to allow her wounds to heal; treatments were sparse and erratic, attention for critical medical applications spared for others, she thought she heard the staff mention Gil at one interval -- punctured, broken, bleeding. Dying. However, she phases in and out of reality, arms free from restraint after twenty-four hours of powerful sedatives to quell the compelling summon of HZEs that had continued to crawl across her skin in fiendish lines of black. After a series of various psychological evaluations, she was scheduled for release in the coming days, pending that she no longer attempted to flee. The first night had been a testament to the incredible power lain within, the walls of her room still held the scars of her wrath, the ceiling eternally marred and the floor splintered and jagged. A message had been left for her by Torres not long after, a cryptic missive and subtle demand that she comply with the school and rest well in preparations for the sparring matches to come. A reputation was to be held, and nothing less would be accepted.

They still demanded Tiamat- Amma promised she would receive it.

She rested now, as much as her body would allow, carefully plucking away at the bandages coiled of her wrists and arms, bruises fading into bisque edges, deeply seeded hues of purple and blue heralding over her flesh, beset by intense blemishes of red where the most powerful of blows had fallen. And there, upon her chest, the most devastating of wounds to behold where healers had attempted to still the remnants of death that had corroded muscle and tissue, where once a moth had been inked over her heart, wings displayed and proud and bright and beautiful. The testament of art that had been commissioned to regain a sense of self, to one day seek light and life in the dark, to hold over her own life as her own, which was now torn and jagged with a hideous scar. Amma studied it often and carefully, pulling away at the shirt given to her in exchange for a traditional gown, it pulsed and throbbed with her heart, an eternal reminder of the trials endured.

To the simulated life she had taken.

She had made a simplistic request to board the ferry at a later time, to purchase new clothing and certain supplies, which had been hastily delivered, and then answered with denial, claiming that Amma required a chaperone or guard until she completed a series of delegated therapy sessions. Such assignments had been seamlessly blended into her newly given curriculum, of such Amma could not be bothered with, not as she thought and pondered about her place here. P.R.C.U tried, it did, it attempted to welcome her as a normal girl, one burdened with power, one given a critical label, one that the faculty deemed themselves wary of but still a girl.

If only they knew.

Amma breathed in deep, ribs protesting against the stress of her actions, every follicle of nerve shorn and sensitive, firing signals of warning down every plane of skin exposed as she pulled away at her bindings. Pain was not new to her and neither was the aching sluggishness of healing, she grew up upon the finer knowledge of pain and the breadth of life that saw every scar anew with the summon of her powers that often linked into her back or postured over her arms. Though her many embellishments hid their truth, it could not entirely distract away from the simple nature that Amma was subjected to torture and experimentation for over an entire decade. A truth that had been revealed during their manipulated trial and the realization that even the most sterile of domiciles contained the most heinous of sins. Amma knew of the cruelty of this individual dubbed Hyperion and the remaining disciples that had bid themselves under the rule of this rumored Harbinger that had trapped them within that hellish realm from her nightmares. A group she knew nothing of besides the whispering of the healers and nurses that bustled outside her fortified door that she knew was guarded carefully not by just one, but two individuals.

The phone call she had received only just a few nights before resurfaces as a vague memory.

She carefully rips away one bandage, then another, gauze peeled and shredded, congealed lines of red against her trembling arms, the unbidden tremors coiling away into her scarred palms.

Did she even belong here anymore?
If she ever did.

Amma stares down upon the lines of fate and heart, disfigured by the myriad of scars crossing over one another in silver slivers of a horrid tale, one she refused to share. She splayed her fingers wide, listening to the grinding pop of her bones, her nails broken, her quivering gestures unable to be quelled as she stared and stared. Hands of the reaper, hands of the woeful, hands of a beast that had attacked two of her teammates. She still feels the flayed skin of her beneath her touch, she still feels the softness of feathers sweeping through her palms, she still feels the thread of power that she had given to another, she still feels the clutch of a clove cigarette shared before a quiet and innocent flame, she still feels the bloodied skin of him as she begged and pleaded to be slain.

She feels everything and wishes she could forget.

She knows, without a flicker of doubt, that she does not belong here. Amma knows this and clenches those hands tight, palms them through her hair, and shields them over her eyes as the hopeless dregs of reality tug and pull upon her limbs and the threaded strings woven within a hellish medley over her heart. She once denied Torres that she would return, that she would not go back, it was her Will, her Truth, her Conviction, and now it remained shredded and bloodied at her feet liken to pools of crimson hate that followed Amma through her waking world -- within and without.

She tells herself that she doesn't care. She tells herself that it doesn't matter. For she is selfish, she knows she is vain and stricken with sins of wrath and greed and lust. She whispers unto herself over and over and over again: I am the monster you all want, the answer to all the wrongs and all the things lost, I am the creature you fear and the one you envy - I am me. I am The Foundation.

Amma Cahors knows that freedom is often lost and fleeting, and hers was slowly coming to an end.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Southern Plateau - Pacific Royal Campus}

Hope In Hell #2.0059: devour.

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_{Interaction(s): rory. - @webboysurf}

Previously: the offering & dragon.

Rory took a half step backwards, his eyes firmly locked on Amma as he attempted to parse her cryptic language. It was hard to tell between her and the twisted copies that the simulation had formed thus far. His fists remained clenched at his side, his eyes narrow and body tense. His body screamed that he was in danger, and that he needed to move and leave. Surely, this was like the Lorcán that tried to burn him, or the voices that begged him to kill.

But there was something too real in this Amma’s reactions, or perhaps too sad for him to believe as imaginary. He lifted a hand up, his fingers flexing as they probed the front of his mask. He slowly removed it, tossing it haphazardly to the side before looking back towards Amma. “Not my mask… but it was my blood.” He flashed his bloody palm in Amma’s direction, before just shaking his head. “I’m not going to kill you, Am, even if you’re trying to flirt with Wings or whatever you’re talking about.”

Rory took a step forward, his eyes focused on the chain and collar attached to her neck. She was restrained like a feral animal, not a person. His eyes lowered towards her wounds, a grimace crossing his lips at the sight. She needed medical attention. He desperately tried not to think about the torture he was shown of Haven. Wings had to be ok. Everyone had to be ok. They’d get through this, surely.

He slipped the robe over his head, and held the bunched up cloth in one hand. It became clear that his other hand was holding the folded up sidearm as he remained about an arm’s reach away from Amma, stepping just within her reach to hand over the robes. “I don’t know how clean this thing is… or if it’s even real, but I’d probably put some pressure on some of those wounds. Last thing we need is you bleeding out before they pull us out.”

"They won't let us go." She muttered with her eyes fixated on every movement Rory made, her head canted back and forth, reminiscent of a creature committing every detail into a singular point of observation.

"No? Then why come here, to me, why not go to Haven? I freed her, I gave my power to them. They should've..." Her admission feathered into a whisper, the mask discarded, her gaze flickering to and fro and back, tracking over every feature displayed to her now that he had revealed himself. She panned her stare down to the proffered robe but did not reach for it as Amma's stare aglow and silvered in power fell upon the weapon clutched within his grasp.

"Then, what is that? If not the weapon given to slay the dragon." A soft trill pulled from her bloodied throat, a slight shake to her shoulders that rattled chains and coils of red that fell from those lithesome bones donned in crimson light. "Are you even real?"

Amma's hand snaked out, one and then the other, arachnid gestures arched and splayed as she pulled tight on those restraints ratting and straining against the containment that was she. Her nails raked over his arm, down and down till she laced their fingers together, her hold liken to a vice as her power spooled away from her flesh in erratic pulses of hated carmine. With their hands conjoined she lifted his defiled palm to her lips and with a heated rasp she spoke:

"If you don't kill me. The others will get hurt. I can't stop it."

Rory’s eyes remained fixed on Amma as her fingers dug into him, his eyes filled with concern as she clung to his arm and hand. He dropped the iron ball and robe. He did his best to ignore the throbbing pain, focusing on her as best as he could. He took a deep breath, taking a step closer. “I… wait, are you a dragon? No, that’s stupid, sorry I asked.” He gave a weak, half-hearted smile, before he continued. “I’m not killing you, Amma.”

Rory eyed the chains and restraints again more closely, before looking Amma in the eyes. “They… whoever messed this all up, wanted me to find you. I got this far playing their game. But I’m not killing you, and I’m not gonna let you hurt anyone, ok? We’re gonna get you out of this, find Haven and whoever else we can, and hold out until they pull us out of this nightmare.” His voice was less wavering, and more firm. Even then, he couldn’t tell if he was trying to convince Amma or himself. “I know Jim and everyone are out there doing everything they can to get us out of here. We just need to buy them time.”

"Oh, Rory." Amma whispered, he stepped closer and she clung to him all the more, nails against the blood of his palm as she held fast, her opposite gesture reaching up and curling against the broad line of his shoulder, and there she too raked against his skin, summoned coils of red spindling away from her grasp and pooling down his arms. The world shuddered, the entire room quaked and a distant wail sounded, coming back down the hallway where he had come from. It shuddered and swelled with darkness, lines of vermillion warped through the shadow that swept through the gloom where they stood; demented eyes and endless smiles and slivers of crimson that bloomed like wildflowers of hell. Amma pulled Rory to her, nails tracking up and over as a roar shattered through, within and without, her cell of confinement beholden to the terrible cry as her chains rattled and then she appeared. The one that had dragged her into the void, the one who remained chained and bound to a horrid beast.

Like her, but then not, those eyes of hellfire and talons that raked up Rory's back and lanced deep, holding him in place as Amma's scarred palms caressed over his jaw and there she smiled; a delicate sliver of her full lips bruised and bloodied.

"I've already hurt someone. And no one knows, she won't tell. I know she won't. She has too many secrets herself."

What little light that could be spared guttered out, the ocean beyond swelled and churned, frothed as fiendish eyes of blue peered through those slivers in the walls. Everything trembled and in the dark, Amma simply laughed as a netherworld of her waking world descended upon them both.

"You should have killed me when you had the chance."

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Southern Plateau - Pacific Royal Campus}

Hope In Hell #2.0049: the offering.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): &&}

Previously: a name unspoken.

She fell through smoke and ruin and blood and ash- her skin was marked in it, her veins were tainted through it, and her heart wailed and her soul splintered; tiny fragments of red and black that shattered; pieces of a conceptual design beholden to immortal intricacies. In vain did she try to fight, talons sunk deep into her flesh, purchased as vices, and through every weakening pulse of her heart she felt every lance, cut, gash, and sliver of pain on her body. She counted each of them once and then twice over, she relished in every mark that would awaken as a new scar, the fire that pulsed and throbbed as a symphony of life therein, for as she tumbled through Hell, Amma knew she was still alive. She marked this agony as the epicenter of her forsaken reality, the dregs of self and reasoning forever lost and nevermore, the threaded fate of a name unspoken that bloomed red and threaded to the quivering hand that held fast and true. To the hand that broke through the dark and asked her name, to the hand that fell before her and asked to take a walk, to the hand that yearned to show her what fun was, to the hand that clutched at her throat and speared nails against the name that burns away at her flesh. Slithering through each vein, every pore, every pump, and gasp of breath as heated lines of vermillion simmer away at her throat --

An 'I' slowly crawls there.

And she screams.

With a crash, she fell, finally, thrown against a wall already defiled by blood and quaking fissures of hate and denial. A gurney lay toppled over, erosion and rot pulled away at the metal bars, manacles lain open, vials strewn, and a single bulb of fluorescent light flickering in tandem to her sluggish heart. Her body quakes and trembles, muscles locked tight in fatigue, her flesh screaming furiously in protest as she struggles to stand. She falls once, arms giving out first. She falls once again, her legs refusing to obey. And then she falls a third time, a slick pool of red and black that is liken to cement that keeps her in place as Amma finally manages to sit upright.

And then wishes that she hadn't moved at all.

She was back in the first room she had entered, where that mask had slipped free of its bindings for just a moment to expose the raw denial of what she had endured. Here, the walls were lain with death, lines of red and silver, and oozing shadows of black that carved through the confinements of this once pristine hell. They formed letters and words, they formed sentences of her whispered confessions, they formed demented illustrations of a child and the cruel monarch of the christened beast within. They formed each name she commanded, each name that bore with it an incredible weight in each utterance, the letters cruelly weeping red as she too spared tears for the prices she had to pay.

Amma Cahors has not shed a tear in years, has not known to weep or cry, and has not been known to succumb to the woes of time and circumstance. Loneliness did not bedevil her life in shades of gray. She never cared, she didn't care. She bared her teeth and glared with all the furious defiance of a feral creature trapped and pinned to the corner and though her power was spent and raw and left her entire being aching, small, pulsating arcs of energy still bloomed and rose. The world would always tremble at her feet, the world would hold its breath just for her if she so commanded it even if she was to destroy it. She would end it. Amma could end it all. It was her role. Her purpose. Her intention.

The hospital bed beckoned as a reminder of the currency demanded, the power she had sought, and the power she had gained.

The walls shudder and tremble as she slowly pushes up, using the one at her back to hoist herself to her feet despite the agony that pulsates from her broken bones. Small victories lost to the hopeless situation lain before her as a door peeled open upon the familiar faces of The Foundation looming there, those that knew the secrets lost to the depths of the ocean, the screams and cries of many silenced, and the purring words of redemption. Too many faces and too many hands, and she glances down, expression stricken in silent fear as she recognizes the tools, the chains, that demented collar that fit so elegantly around her darling throat.

It is time to come home, Tiamat.

Amma roars and she screams, and she fights. She refuses to allow them victory even as she is beaten down, sliding through her blood -- is it hers, anymore? So much shed for naught -- and she just laughs. Every fist that connects with her jaw, her cheek, every grabbling hand curled inward as fiendish claws, the boots that connect with her stomach, ribs, and chest over and over and over again.

Over and over.
How much more is she to break, how much more is she to endure?
They conditioned her for this agony, she knew it as an eternal lover, a specter, a reasoning of self.
A hand wove through the mass of her hair and pulled, needles of pain through her scalp as she simply continued to laugh.

Remember the last promise you made.
The wish wasted away into the night.
Remember the life you spared.
Remember what happened then -

the punishment. The pain.

Remember the rewards given.
The lives you took.
The lives you take.

Amma wheezes through the agony and terror, her laughter spiraling high, every trill as demented as the first as she summons with a wounded cry:

"I am the advocate for the depraved and the unhinged.
I am rage, I am pain.
I am the unknown."

They lift her up and over, they secure those manacles around her wrists and ankles, they tear her augmented suit at her sleeves, surgical equipment harsh and cruel against the profiles inked into her skin, they cross scalpels over the alluring moths and snakes there, the skulls turned inward in fear of reproach as they bind Amma down further with cuffs secured over her arms and thighs. She bares fang and claws and snaps out with her teeth, lashes peeled wide and wild in abandon as dread makes itself known unto that beautiful face defiled with blood.

As she did then, she does so now, Amma begs and pleads for an end, as above and so below, her life suspended within and without. In exchange for the two lives she spared, even if it had been for naught, hopeless they were lost in this hell with no end in sight.

Forgive me, dove. They said you had to go; they said they could help you!

The voice of her mother, the haunting emote of Charlotte Cahors as she gave her over to them.
A letter - a letter with her name.

The world is never fair for the different, for the misunderstood. For simply being not-as-we-should.

Amma screams:
"I am Amma Fien Cahors,
"I am Tiamat
"I am Ammar --"

Leather is unceremoniously shoved bewtixt her teeth and she bites down, her brows sundered low over the glare of her eyes that froth and churn as the sea, the void within risen high on a cry of subjugation. The demand for penance and pain burns eternally blue in her eyes, a sickly cyan color that blazes like the hottest of flame known to man. And struggle as she might, bound and gagged, they also fixated that Inhibitor around her throat, tight enough to choke the cries smothered behind the barrier gnashed upon her full lips.

Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.
The world is never fair.

But no matter what, this world will never accept you. They won't forget. They haven't forgotten. I doubt they will ever forgive.

Amma's entire soul, though shattered and broken, stills and quiets as they begin their preparations. It is not unlike their intentions for when Haven was bound, but in place of gleaming bone saws and cages of hell, here they procured a row of vials - one after another, each capped in dried blood, each rusted shell boiling with that hated phosphorescent liquid that glowed - the same color as her eyes. Though she is silenced, there is no muffling the wailing cry of a beast that shatters through the room, the halls, and likely the very confines of the entire simulation. It is a bellow of defiance, fear, pain, and anger, it is the shattering howl of something lost, something a little girl gave herself over to without knowing what it meant. They hold her down, they each hoist those needles on high, and then they fall --

She only ever wanted to go home.

The thousandth upon a thousand injections come when she is twenty-three years old- too many to count, too many to place.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Southern Plateau - Pacific Royal Campus}

Hope In Hell #2.0033: feathering the storm.

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_{Interaction(s): haven. - @Skai}

Previously: asunder & put through the winger.

Her whispered words of gratitude fell upon deaf ears as Amma regained her sense of self and what minuscule portions of reasoning she could bear. Her power continued to pulsate in tandem with the incredible pressure betwixt her ribs, her heart looped in red threads that cinched tight with every breath. Her fingers twitched, her palms burned, every scar laden there thrumming with whorls of scarlet as she carefully lifted her gestures and poised her nails to sink, reap, and claw through the space between them.

"I suppose," she began, wrist rotating, flesh burning, and bones cracking. "These trials have us facing against our would-be selves," Amma whispered, voice wreathed in a hoarse utterance as her glare of blue fixated upon Haven, every flicker of her lash raking her eyes over her wings, every feather, and every drip of sweat that beaded her skin. "So I'll ask: are you the real Haven Barnes?" Her inquiry speared through the operating room with a string of crimson power striking the ground at her feet where ashen remains stirred from the impact.

Gratitude began to wane into apprehension as Haven noted Amma’s movements. With her heart still fluttering in her chest like a frightened fledgling, she couldn’t help but begin to wonder the same thing about the Amma before her. The muscles in her back ached as they tensed. Her wings wanted to tuck in tightly to her back, and yet they merely twitched behind her. They’d been saved from being torn apart, and yet the damage had been done. She would need to rest the feathered appendages for a while until she could fly again. In the meantime they felt like dead weight on her back.

Eyes the color of a forest sunrise warily watched as Amma carved a glacial blue gaze across her body. Was it obvious that Haven was in no state to defend herself against those blood red arcs of power? Her skin was hot and clammy from fear. She hadn’t looked at her wings yet, but she had an inkling that they looked like she’d crashed into an oil rig. Her wings were in a slumped position on her back, missing feathers, with splotches of black grease… and now the ends of her plumage were dusted with the ashes of things that had been about to dismantle her piece by piece. The same type of ash that stirred at Amma’s feet as her power struck the ground in a show of force.

Haven’s body wanted to flinch in response. Her mind wanted to back away. Yet her heart challenged her to remain still. Amma’s body language expressed a threat, but her actions a moment ago proved that she wasn’t here to harm. Haven couldn’t allow her fear to claim her again and turn Amma against her in the process.

“Do we know each other well enough to tell the difference, anyways?” Haven began slowly. Her voice as raw as her throat felt, yet carrying the weight of her heart within its timbre. “It seems like if the Foundation had its way, you would have let me die on that table.” An obvious shiver ran down the length of Haven’s body as she said it aloud. Her voice was softer in pitch when she spoke again.

“Why did you save me, Amma?”

The question visibly marked her, a subtle flinch through her gestures as another lance of her power bloomed, coiling through ashes and blackened remains, stained with their eternal rest. Skeletal fissures broke through the ground, increasing their intent, seeking Haven's truth that was lain there in every word she spoke.

"If The Foundation truly had their way, you would have been dead before I got here." It is a simple fact that Amma speaks, refusing to relinquish her hold just yet, unable to quell the trembling through her fingers. As slight as it is, it is telling in the usual rigidity and grace beholden to her presence. Perhaps her earlier ordeal left more than just the laceration down her chest and those that ringed around her arms and legs.

"Why..." It's the gleaming tools, the broken restraints, those four walls, and that damned door that she sees, but it's not the brunette before her, it's not the tawny wings smothered in oil and tainted with dust. It's the child screaming a plethora of whys through her mind, shattering through her waking world with every breath.

"Does it matter?" Amma sighs, finally lowering her quivering palm, her power slowly slinking back, aloft, and snapping to her aching frame. A subtle crimson glow lined her gesture, softening to a silver lining that coiled up her arms. "Maybe it's because you're a Teammate," she snaps those words through her teeth. "Blackjack prides itself on that, does it not."

"Maybe it's because if I make it out of here without you, or anyone, they'll suspect me." Amma moves to leave, offering a final glance over her shoulder. "But, I've been there- on that table. And no one was there to save me." She leaves the horrid operating room, mindful of the bodies in the adjacent space, trying not to look at the body of the girl left mangled and gone, her wings drooped to either side, her feathers forever soiled.

"I made a promise, once," she muttered, bracing against the pain and anguish. "I promised I wouldn't leave anyone to suffer what I have, not again."

Haven didn’t hide the relief that passed through her as Amma’s power returned to her body. Her shoulders sagged, along with her wings dropping an inch lower behind her. She’d never seen Amma shaken this way… and she wasn’t happy to have seen it at all. She could feel it in her chest that there was more troubling her saviour than this one act of kindness.

Everything about the withdrawn woman became clear as a cloudless sky as Amma walked through that horrible door. The pain of empathy returned again. Haven looked over the empty metal table, the broken manacles, and imagined someone much younger than herself being put through the terror that it brought her. She shook her head, taking another step away from it, and turned to leave it behind for good.

The scene in the next room was even more horrifying. Haven clutched her mouth, a sob escaping between her fingers as she pressed her back against the wall next to the door. The woman’s wings… It could have been her wings. Broken. Sullied.

Destroyed.

Haven trembled as she turned her gaze away. Fresh tears escaped down her cheeks and onto her hand. She pushed down the panic that threatened to consume her again and pushed herself away from the wall. Her steps were faster this time as she continued into the hallway behind Amma. She swallowed down the bile that had been inching up her throat.

It felt like she’d left her stomach behind. A chasm filled with painful empathy taking its place instead. Haven felt it for the dead woman she left behind… for Amma, and for the others that Alyssa had mentioned had gone missing. It threatened to tear her soul apart, but Haven felt anger keeping it together. The same anger that she’d kept stored deep within herself for many, many years. It stopped the flow of tears and it kept her from falling into despondence. She followed behind Amma for a few silent moments as she allowed it to rebuild her composure.

“They named you Tiamat after they rebuilt you… didn’t they.” It wasn’t a question. The voices that echoed the name at the beginning of this, and now Amma’s revelation, confirmed it for her. “How come you haven’t turned them to ash, too?” Her anger fueled this question, whether it lacked any social grace or sympathetic tone. Something told Haven that Amma didn’t need pity, anyways.

"Yes," she doesn't hesitate to answer, the rejoinder quick and torn from her throat in a harsh, feral sound. "And no."

No one had ever asked her about her name, not this calling that whisked through her nightmares, not the slithering malice of whispers that sired through the corridors as soon as Haven spoke the words aloud. Over and over and over as they moved down the corridor, the pace set one at leisure with their particular injuries. Haven's abused wings; her broken ankle, and her body that droned with the tumultuous power that fought to maintain itself within her grasp, every panel of the wall she touched splintered with tendrils of her power that imbedded itself into the simulated construct.

And then she heard it, the boiling fury that withered away inside her dulcet tones, the sort of cadence one expected from a bird, but no, this was a furious hawk's cry that barely encroached the depths of her obvious hate. An emotion Amma knew well and harbored within the pit of her heart and soul.

"You ask a lot of questions, don't you?" Amma paused, deliberately, turning to face Haven completely where she leaned in close, her frigid glare penetrating through slivers of green and brown, peering into the reaches of her empathetic nature. "You want to know why they call me Tiamat? Why they gave me that name? Didn't Alyssa tell you enough?"

Upon her spine and tensed shoulders did those scarlet threads rise, twisting into coils of ill intent, reaching and seeking high above Haven's crown and nearly caressing over her battered and bruised wings.

"They'll get what's coming to them. They all will. Everyone." A small laugh falls from her lips, punctured by the smile that carves its way across her face. "It's all a matter of time, Haven. As part of the role I'm meant for."

"What about you, what is your role to play here?"

Haven stared back into Amma’s eyes with an intensity that almost matched. Yet the subtle tick of a muscle in her neck gave away the wariness that Haven felt at this distance. She wasn’t afraid of Amma, really, but the energy that hovered fractions away from the most precious parts of her body. Still, Amma’s words had Haven pressing her brows together.

“Why do I need a role to play?” Haven thought aloud, genuine frustration evident in her frown. “Have you ever thought that some of us are just trying to make a life for ourselves? That despite the pain we’ve endured and might endure again, we still have hope?”

Haven suddenly thought of the bonfire again. Of Amma’s pessimistic words. She glanced between those cold eyes and wondered if they held the power to freeze her heart.

“How dare you try to crush our souls too.”

"Hope is fleeting, hope is a lie." Amma's words churn with a hidden frustration, witnessing the defiance that blooms within those eyes of moss and timber, a forest of secrecy, a forest that bids itself to freedom. She opens her hands, palms up, fingers splayed and blackened and red, her scars aflame with her power and the remains of blood that is not her own. The phosphorescent liquid had dried to a sickly cyan that still burned away at her wrists.

"Where was hope when they started taking away students? Where was hope when I was left alone in the dark?" Her fingers quiver, her arms wreathed in scarlet as she looms closer to Haven, her lashes peeled wide and her power inching ever closer to her precious wings. "Where was hope when The Foundation came to this island and decided to try to make it their own?"

"Need I remind you too? She didn’t get it either." She whispered, "They won't let us go. They won't let you go." Delicate threads of crimson caress against the downy softness of her wings then, slick with oil that congeals some of them together, the ashes of their enemies slowly feeding into her power.

"That soul you speak so fondly of? They'll take that too. And once they do, you'll wish they had taken your life instead."

“Don’t touch me.” Haven hissed a warning. Her chest rising and falling faster now that she felt Amma’s threats. “You didn’t have anyone to help you then, but you could now.” Her voice remained tense as long as those red tendrils held themselves so close. Yet her voice didn’t waver. Her defiant gaze still held strong. “That’s what we do for each other- why we call each other teammates.”

“Don’t you want someone to have your back?”

Her pupils compress to an obsidian sliver banked within a turbulent sea of blue, something there in those eternal depths that writhes and coils, awakened by the challenge of Haven's words that lance against the fortress of black and bone within and without.

"You're right, I could." Those churning threads of her power encompass the entirety of Haven's wings then, spindles of crimson energy threaded through her feathers, from primary to secondary, through every construct of muscle and bone, and weave back to the delicate radius of every barb and shaft. The HZEs that complicate and compound the waking world that quakes at her feet suddenly seeking those lain within, a brief glimpse unwarranted to the energy that genetically endows her mortal frame with the beautiful talent of flight.

"But I don't -"

Teammates.

"I don't need anyone."

Just as soon as her power had latched onto her, ignorant of Haven's plights and sensitivity, they slowly slunk back; snapping, twisting, some as leisurely twirls of authority that settled over her lithesome shoulders. Sparks of silver and red dance on her lashes as she says:

"...You remind me of someone." Amma steps back, her favored leg causing a slight limp as she continues down the corridor, turning left after a slight pause, the hall to their right dimmed in flickering light, the edges of the floor suddenly awash in blood. Waves of ruby that lap down the panels shattered and vacant, something black and horrid churning through the gloom that bubbles, oozes, wed to the darkness that howls as if starved.

"We should hurry."

Muscles that had bunched together in preparation slackened as the intrusive arcs returned to their owner. Her feathers, on the other hand, remained subtly ruffled. Haven took a long breath through her nose and slowly released it through her teeth. Her heart still thumped in her chest even after her breathing calmed. Yet somehow Haven wasn’t left with a sick feeling in her stomach. It was a violation, there was no doubt about that, but it hadn’t felt malicious. It felt like gentle probing. A caress of Amma’s ions against her own, internalized within her blood, tissue, bone, and keratin. It left her grateful that she hadn’t swung on Amma the moment that her power had snuck its way between her feathers. And that left her feeling just as unsettled, because she always made it clear that they wouldn’t be able to do it again.

Haven didn’t probe Amma further as she once again followed in her wake. The longer they stayed here, the greater the threat of this place became. Her eyes traveled to Amma’s weakened ankle. Another spot she would have aimed for if things had turned violent moments ago. Now she wondered if she should offer help… The thought of being held onto again sent a shiver down her spine. Her arms would likely show bruising within a few hours from the vise-like holds that those gloves had.

She glanced to the right as she reached the corner. Then looked away from it quickly as she decided to trust Amma’s decision. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight as she turned her back to it. She exhaled softly as she brought herself up to Amma’s side.

“You may not need it… but I’ve got your back now.” Haven murmured while her eyes scanned the impossibly clean hallway in front of them. Open doors and crossroads loomed ahead. She didn’t dare to imagine what awaited them in the hidden parts of the Foundation’s maze. Otherwise the simulation might snatch it from her mind and make it reality. “Consider it a debt paid. Since you saved my life.”

She glanced Amma’s way, so that the woman saw the truth in her eyes, and then returned her gaze to the length of halls ahead of them. She waited for Amma to set the pace for them before her own feet began to move.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Southern Plateau - Pacific Royal Campus}

Hope In Hell #2.0027: asunder.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s): haven. - @Skai}

Previously: apparition.

How does one kill the likeness of a god?
How does one kill the multifaceted burden of their bitter heart?

How does one destroy the manifestation of love? Loss? Heartache?

Amma Cahors doesn't know the answer then, but she'll find it when destiny and fate collide and bring her to her knees; broken, spent, and alone. When the world grows weary of her malcontent - when a would-be almighty looks upon her and decides that she has had enough. When she no longer has the power to maim and all is for naught; the creature lain within finally lent to rest.

But now, the roaring betwixt her ears is a violent maelstrom that pillages through her lobe with the fury of a storm, the vibration of an unholy declaration sundered through the vessel known as the void that welcomes her into its embrace of nihility. She often dreamt of a netherworld where the forsaken and woeful found comfort in the caressing stillness, beasts of a prophesied hell cantering through her bones, marked in her blood, sluicing through her veins in phosphorescent fragments that shimmered and coiled. Wed to the HZEs that wracked through her, high-energy particles that were eternally tangible in whorls of scarlet liken to fated strings of life.

And through the darkness, they descended: the dragon of The Foundation and the could-have-been beloved of P.R.C.U. A princess now forsaken of her crown, her home, her will to be spent and lorn as she wept, screamed, and cinched crimson nails over the throat of the woeful creature that laughed and laughed.

And laughed.

Amma welcomed the prick of those damned nails to her skin, the loathed face that loomed over her, and the tears she spent as the eternal chasm of the deep seemed to stretch further and further. From where they had fallen vanished entirely, the lights guttered out in their wake as silver and red collided and wove together, their powers meshed to a singular unit of pain that wrecked through bones and flesh. She didn't know how long they fell through the ruin, but she knew the awaiting end would likely crush them both unless they managed to part. The sharp twinge of pain through her neck spoke otherwise of her likeness's agony and the unlikelihood she would allow her free and as the edges of her vision warped and faded, a roar split asunder the void and tore through her soul.

A hearkening bellow of something that never should have been, of something that should not have been part of this world. Amma remembers once the tales of another world, the christening of a god from the depths below, wreathed in death and life, a woeful creature bound in time and left to rot- an embodiment of vengeance and purpose for all the wrong done unto it.

For all the wrong done unto her.

"Why was it you that got to be true? Why did you get to live and not me?" A grin slid through the dark, a ridge of bone bathed in blood over the pout of her lip as she answered:

"Because I'm stronger."

The Foundation sought one end to the being that was Amma Cahors, the child they took, the weapon they created. The fabrication of the unknown that curled her arms around her opponent and switched their positions, the smile that foretold of hell, the smile that was Tiamat. She was stronger, for she was All, and she was Made. Her powers of decay spewed forth in plumes of black that shrouded the beloved in her grasp, snapping coils of obsidian wove to her body and slid through her hair, the putrid smell of rot permeating the air alive in red streaks of defiance and hate. From yonder the pit of despair, another cry sounded, a baying call that harmonized with the wails from those lips she had cursed with her kiss of death.

And there, she saw it. Fear. Reflected in her own eyes, a likeness of endless depths unburdened by rage but compounded by hate. Crimson swells of energy speared through her palms and visibly shuddered as they worked through her blood and flayed apart the wounds on her wrists and snaked over the split flesh at her chest, the fibers of her suit split down the middle, almost at her navel where the scythe of energy had cleaved down. Her fingers splayed, arched, claws against the skin slowly coming undone under her power of complete and total nihilism.

"No!" She screamed. "Not like this! Not after everything! The monsters are not supposed to win!" Red churned and sputtered and scoured over Amma's arms and impaled over her shoulders, it swept down the planes of her back and linked into her scars. She would not scream, she would not allow this weeping reaper the satisfaction of her anguish.

And with a sickening thud, they finally stopped.

What awaited them was an abyss that churned with thick remnants of that hated phosphorescence that clung to her pores, invaded her senses, and every lance and gaping wound and sliver of peeled skin that suddenly burned. Then Amma screamed. A lamented song of a siren not unlike her screech earlier when reality settled and she realized she was trapped, but lingering spools of pain wove through her throat and chest and another cry peeled from her full mouth. Something was broken by the hideous fire that quaked through her body, but it was the homage of misery that she knew, a remnant of her past where it was not only flesh that was marred but every link of marrow that had been snapped over and over. The threshold that most mortals adhered to, Amma had been spent beyond even that and once upon a time someone had muttered of hyper-psychosis: a term she recognized but knew nothing of its meaning.

Her likeness had taken the brunt of the impact and through the glow provided, she lay at an impossible angle, blood and tendrils of power churning through the liquid as everything broke and punctured within. Misery like she had known lay in her eyes unmoving and unwavering and Amma leaned over her, unable to shake the comparison.

"Maybe you should've been the one to be. That happiness?" A soft laugh eclipsed her words, a bitterness inflicting her confessions. "Maybe I should be the one trying to kill you in these trials." She tried to speak, blood that frothed black at her lips and nose choking her final whispers.

"I'm scared," she pleaded. "I don't want to lose them. Please. You don't deserve them! You don't deserve h-!"

"We never had them," Amma uttered, slid her fingers through her hair and touched her brow with her lips, a parting gift, a kiss of the final journey and her barriers- her walls of obsidian fell around her heart and soul, and she said:

"I'm sorry."

Life finally dimmed in those hated eyes and was swept away, her powers of destruction woven over her body until she was reduced to naught but ashen remains, her blood and bones and flesh lost to the leagues of black and red that slunk and snapped and warped over Amma's figure as she stood. Pain flared through her body but she bore the scorch of her wounds with cinched fists but as she turned, looking for a way out, she stalled at the rattling of chains in the gloom and what she saw that awaited her there.

Amma Cahors has known pain unlike anything in this world, she has known betrayal, she has known heartache and she has known death. But for the first time, she suddenly knows fear; the unknown, the in-between of this world, and something else that looms over her as the creature that also lurks within her soul. She is immobilized as it rises and with breath the color of the same red that warped the world at her feet, it exposes what lies within its massive claws. She is once again met with her likeness, but then not. Her eyes as pits of a forsaken hell snapped with wildfire in a sea of black; her skin alive with ink that roved and spun and moved; her hair bleached white at the ends and her entire frame wrapped in chains too thick for a mere woman. With a scar-riddled hand, she points over her shoulder, fingers extended into talons of black and stained in blood down her wrists and arms.

Be glad you did not stay, Tiamat.

A door she had not seen prior suddenly bursts open on a gust of unforeseen power and strength, tearing into the very walls that shudder under the massive strain. Amma doesn't hesitate and makes to leave, limping, but moving through the hated liquid pooled around her calves and clinging to her suit as if trying to prevent her from escaping. She does not look back, unable to witness she that is lost in the dark, chained to a beast and a void that they both knew as home. When she does leave that pit and all she has seen behind, the wall suddenly closes on screeches of metal, sealing shut as if it had never been. Harsh lights spear at her eyes and she glances down at her figure bloodied and stained, the yellow accents of her suit muddied in black and exposing her skin and the wounds she now bore. She caressed her scarred palms down, attempting to address herself into something proper, as another corridor loomed ahead and Amma didn't hesitate to move, eager to leave it all behind, to continue her search for a way out.

If there was one.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

In the distance she hears many screams, shouts, and voices that ping away at her ears, timbres she recognizes and names she now knows. Amma uses the wall as a crutch, stopping to address what she is positive is a broken ankle, the pain she can endure, but the progress she has made through the maze stalls nonetheless. Her wounded chest rises and falls on a quivering breath as she leans against the sterile wall now smeared in her blood, she wants to rest, weariness weighted through her limbs as she leans her head back and glares at the overhead lighting.

She would not be undone, no, Amma refused.

With gritted teeth, she continued on, up and up, left and right.
Right and up again.

And peculiarly enough, whorls of red, unbidden as always, suddenly sparked to life, these cords and whips of scarlet stirred into a frenzy as she was met with another section to continue forward, or to go left. Her powers bid left, the crimson sparks whisking away to silver at the edges and reaching, searching, seeking something that called to their manifest. Amma recognized the yearning that slid through her power, the undeniable magnetism that bore life in a clearing of just the two of them. A quiet trill of laughter spun from her bloodied lips, lashes fanned low on her cheeks as she twined her fingers through the cords of her potency, red flung away from her gestures as she stretched out her arm and through the ambient HZEs there, a banner of scarlet sundered away from her. Chaotic whips of energy speared down the corridor where many voices collided, where she felt herself drawn to.

But the terrifying screams that suddenly came from ahead stilled her intentions, screams she recognized of someone subjected to the helpless confinements of this hell. Amma flung another bought of her power after the first for good measure, not waiting to see if they reached their destination before she continued forward, those screams reaching deep and puncturing through her heart. A disembodied voice she recognized slid down her spine, bunched tight and tense as she pushed herself forward and with every panel her hand touched, a droning sound resonated, it vibrated through the halls as her abilities spun into a fever.

She saw the girl first, the wings next, the terrifying sobs that wrecked through her as bone and blood was shredded apart. Tawny feathers fell and a trembling hand reached out to her through the swarm of bodies bent over her, bloodied nails torn away to flesh as they cleaved through the wings stretched taught and bound. Amma stilled, recognizing the brunette hair, the manic eyes lined in red as sobs of pain tore away from her gaped lips.

She didn't hesitate.

Amma flung out her hand, fingers arched and bones aching, her nails raking through the air as spears of black and red came to be, the world trembling at her abilities as they dragged and impaled every masked figure. She bid them to be destroyed liken to the pain they inflicted. To be torn apart.

The girl on the operating table continued to wail and scream, her wings utterly destroyed and mangled, one nearly severed where downy feathers were matted and bloodied. She looked unto Amma with both fear and distorted hope, but there was no saving her, she knew. She begged for it stop, for everything to end and Amma granted her that single mercy with a flicked wrist, a cord a crimson snapped around her throat and looped down to her heart. She looked like Haven, but the color of her eyes told her it was not, but rather the former roommate of someone she knew that had been taken like so many others. At her feet, the masked figures wailed as they were rent asunder from within, but she spared little mercy for them as she finally looked up. A cage was suspended above but it was empty, the bars scuffed and familiar feathers spread across the linoleum below. Amma followed their trail to another room, a door at the back left ajar as more screams sounded.

There she found Haven much like the previous girl, bound and her wings stretched impossibly taught, masked figures prepping her for surgery in the impossibly sterile room, needles and tools and saws gleaming with promised malice. If this was the real Haven, she thought, her presence finally noted as one reached for a weapon, a gun hoisted forward and aimed at her chest.

Could she take that risk though? Even if she was a simulation, could she subjugate another to the same hell she had been put through as a child for so many years?

Amma lifted palms up, feigning compliance as the ground shook, tile broke and splintered as whips of silver and red rose up and up and bled black wherever they touched. She spared them a quick death as they fell, one by one, reduced to mere ashes that swept away into the void of nothingness before Amma limped to Haven's side.

"Be still." She commanded and made quick work of her bindings, slivers of her power breaking apart the manacles that held her down and making delicate attempts to unbind her wings next. She felt exhaustion loom just beyond the discharge of her usual breadth of energy, a first in many, many years that caused her breath to catch before she finally managed to free Haven.

"There," Amma breathed, stumbling back, her power refusing to abate as it pulsated down her frame as if poised and ready to strike should this Haven prove false.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Southern Plateau - Pacific Royal Campus}

Hope In Hell #2.0015: apparition.

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

_{Interaction(s):&&}

Previously: void.

Right, right, left.

A winding corridor lined in glass, a pitch that oozed, coiled, and slid against the silver panes, groaning under the considerable weight suddenly laden there. The ocean she thinks, or the void that lies in wait within. The beast hums away at her soul, a core of appetence that writhes against the figure lain and pressed against her bones, that crown of ash is all she sees and on her head, it is given. It thrummed and pulsated, it breathed and bore a sickening heartbeat that ascended with her own. A quivering tempo that galloped betwixt pained ribs, and at her breast did a churning whorl of red resonate, a thread of weakened contempt woven to her heart as the darkness loomed yonder, adorned in foreboding leagues of black.

Another hallway of rooms, each illustrated and possessed of a christening light; a stretcher; that sometimes laid broken and bent, misshapen by leagues of spiraling taint that infected the very walls, producing naught but revolting remains. Some rooms were rusted and worn down by time, blackened and smudged in soot and death, the edges of their domain bleeding red. Others were pristine and immaculate and hated all the more for their perfection.

Amma turns right, left, right.

Her name falls away into whispers, a voice that pings in familiarity but becomes lost with every pause of breath, her eyes spinning, lashes fluttering against the fixation of dread that weighted her limbs like stones. She could wade into the depths that squirmed and bayed and she would sink entirely into the awaiting embrace of oblivion. A nihilism that her struggling facade yet longed for, the mask that was no longer a mask, but the acceptance of her masochistic inclinations. The blood wash of anger over her teeth, tongue bathed in rubies that slid over her rouge-hued pout, lancing against the fragile barriers of the mundane. The harvester of greed, the one that sought power above all else, as her wanting will of life unbound and free compounded her in fragmented links of depravity.

Amma turns left.

There, a pointed ceiling rose, a spear into the awaiting darkness, the sky above devoid of stars. Not even the moon to mock her in all its resplendence cast from on high. She descended into that familiar conformance she had adhered to for so long, the product of her isolation to further nurture that manic complexion that dubbed her as pure chaos.

Here she remembers she had fallen, the child that wept, her body aflame in anguish, pocketed with black threads pinched tight, they always sewed her back up, stitched and glued and stapled. Sometimes a healer breathed over her mutilated pores, a whisper of warmth against her frigid skin, the flesh knitted with little to mark the cruelty done unto her. If it hadn't been for those fleeting moments of kindness, Amma was sure her entire body would've been marked in pale, silver lines, with little canvas left to commission the artwork purposely displayed over those that remained. Each beheld a story she refused to tell, to ward her trembling figure from the cruel whips of her betters, to ink the likeness of a netherworld onto her body to strike fear and promise of malcontent to those that did her wrong. Though she could not speak or act on her defiance then, she could at least show it, and with baited smiles of hideous desire Amma Cahors would stand alone.

Even against the world if she had to.

In the confines of her old dorm, Amma finally heard it then. The scraping of metal on metal, the sort of ringing and ping of ominous purpose slithering down her spine gone rigid. She panned her eyes over her hunched shoulder and saw --

herself.

A child, the one she once was, the one that knew only pain. The one she had sworn to protect, the one she had longed to redeem. To save.
The one she ultimately let die.

Was it worth it.
Did you find what you were looking for.
Do you remember me and the promises you made.
The vow you swore.
The oath you signed in blood.

She once dreamed of becoming important to someone. She once dreamed of love. To feed the void, to supply that ravenous chasm with just enough sustenance to soothe the eternal pain within and without. The air coiled, spun, the darkness thinned as the child lifted bleeding palms up and up, chains manifested, hoisting arms high above that tumble of black hair liken to her own. Laughter spun from those cherub bearings, the eerie trill reminiscent of her cruelty, when she had laughed at the dreams and hopes of others, as she laughed at their pain.

"This isn't real."

But it is.

Those chains warped, thinned, and bent around themselves till barbed wire hissed and grated and arose like demented serpents. They struck, one by one, and Amma allowed it. Sharp, burning pain tore through her wrists, and her arms, it coiled over her middle where she gasped, muscle taught and tensed and air ripped from her lungs as more slid over her thighs and legs and bunched tight. Metal bit and tore and reaped until she was forced to her knees, and there, a single wire looped around her throat and held fast; trapped and bound.

You like pain.
Don't you?
That's what you said
To him.
You said it made you feel alive.

Tell me.
Ammar -

"Don't."

The child slowly matured, her likeness spiraled and forced into adulthood, the visual evidence that Amma Cahors had been forced to grow up much too quickly. It was as Lorcán said, she had never used her powers for fun. She had never used any uniqueness of life for herself. And so before her stood a woman, a beauty of grace that smiled and clasped her hands behind her back, donned in silver, black, and red and her hair spun through with those striking hues, twinkling charms at her ears and braided through her tresses.

Do you ever wonder, what could have been?
Had Charlotte not given you to them?
Do you ever wonder, what you could be capable of?
If you had gone, stayed, if you had just been.

From her old dorm room to another classroom, this one elongated and warped, the only light offered to come from the multiple screens flickering before her prone position, bound in wire and scarcely able to breathe. She sat there, chin cradled in her hands, one leg crossed over the other at the knee, her heeled boot swinging to and fro, in tune with the delicate hum that spun from her mouth the color of bitten cherries. A gaze alighted in mocking warmth fell onto her, and she said:

"Do you ever wonder what it's like to be happy?"

The screens at her back buzzed and flickered alive, blackness oozed from their shells of bent and misshapen plastic with fissures of red spiraling away and impaled through the ceiling and floor, and there a hideous screech peeled through the air, causing Amma to flinch.

"Do you ever wonder what it's like to feel loved? To have someone want you? No? I do!"

What she saw next stole her breath, soul, her heart. It robbed her of everything.

She, as the one before her, was smiling in those projected films; laughing, swept into the arms of another, lost in love and warmth and kindness. Smiles traded with baited whispers and hushed cries, euphoric expressions across her face as she clung to broad shoulders. She was everything she was not, she was the completion of dreams and hopes and forsaken desires that Amma had long abandoned. Of what she had been denied from conception to damnation. Friends, she thinks, her teammates crowding around her with faceless smiles, her likeness cast a woman nurtured, desired, loved, and whole.

So that's what it was, that's what it looked like, to be known as beloved.

"Sadly, this too shall pass." Her voice dropped, a whisper of sorrow threaded through that voice like her own, a whispering of inflection, the slight husk she bore with a soft purr of her accent dropping off at the end of her words. "Because they, well -"

The scenes shifted, a kaleidoscope of color and imagery warped and malformed to sterile halls and hated rooms. Where she herself cried, where she clung desperately to another as her world was taken from her again. Again and again and again.

"They'll never let you go."

What came across next pillaged through her entire body, a shudder of emotion slithering across her spine where her back grew wet with blood, there a creature arose and stared on back from a myriad of glass with eyes liken to a storm wrought sea with endless depths and endless power.

"They still came for me, for you." She stands, her delicate fingers slowly working the sleeves of her augmented suit up, exposing pale scars so similar to her own, every cross and line a mutilated map to her past, but, where Amma had snakes and birds coiling over her arms, this woman had nothing to hide the anguish she must have felt.

"They always get what they want. Do you think, even now, you're free? Do you think they really gave you up? Why are you here, now. Why not then? Why not before."

"There never was a before -- " Amma whispered, mindful of the cord around her throat.

"Oh, you don't know! Do you? No, no you don't." She tapped carmine-hued nails against her temple, where the neural uplink would've been, where it was on Amma. "I know something you don't."

"Jonas knew about you, in fact, he sent a letter to Charlotte Cahors once upon a time, before The Alexandria Foundation."

"That's - "

"Impossible? No, nonono-ooo. Did you ever wonder why she gave you over to that awaiting hell? No? Maybe you should ask our father!"

The woman before her shifted, a hellacious wealth of power and energy surging forth, gales of black and scarlet churning through the air and striking against her, shoving her back and back where suddenly a pit peeled open on a shattering roar, and on that precipice of the void Amma balanced. Her figure was still bound, every pull of breath tightening the wires digging into her. Those tines sliced easily through her suit just as something - her power - suddenly lanced forward and cleaved down her front, a scythe of crimson and silver whorls penetrating through skin and poised over her heart.

"Though, I suppose you'll die before you even get the chance."

Was it cruel irony then or a demented form of redemption to be done under something she silently feared? The coils of crimson sunk into her breast, a thread of death loomed and spun and rose up and up, woven through the talons of her would be reaper that clutched them to her lips as if a sacred relic. Amma cannot contain the laugh that bubbles from her defiled chest, the warmth of life spread down, over her figure, her head arched over on the precipice of the void that awaited her. Her eyes aglow, she peered into that darkness, felt it call to her as the barbed wire slowly worked itself loose and free, her blood reminiscent of an oil slick that soiled the mane of her hair and pooled around her. Her laughter rose higher, a sound that shattered betwixt the waking world that held its breath on her whims, the same laugh that listed through eternity as the harbinger of rage; a woman that had nothing.

And therefore nothing to lose.

With that same spool of scarlet threaded to her chest, Amma pulled, she spun her own leagues of power, churned the HZEs to her command and yanked the other woman forward. Surprise flickered across the mirroring eyes of her likeness, their bodies suddenly flush, every expanse of flesh wed together with shackles of blood. Amma fisted her fingers through the damned mane of silver and red streaked hair, pulled that face she loathed close and slanted her mouth over her and inhaled deep. She stole breath, life, she tasted the fragile remains of hope and love, she tasted bitterness and she tasted fear. With her tongue she curled against bones and gums and every ridge of her mouth before she yanked back, her teeth dragging against her pout and muttered against the plushness of her lips and said:

"Show me what you got."

With a smile that bespoke of a promised hell, Amma held tight and hefted all of her weight back, pitching the both of them into that awaiting darkness below.