Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
WHEN AMALIA AWAKES, THE FIRST THING THAT SHE NOTICES IS A THRUMMING UNDERNEATH HER SKIN, LIKE AN ITCH THAT SHE HAD NO CLUE HOW TO SCRATCH. She has this urge to move, to get up and just do something, almost like she had drunk way too many energy drinks and they were starting to all kick in. Mal notices that in the time that she was out she's been brought back to her cell, and Bianca is now nowhere to be seen. She hopes that doesn't mean Bianca is being given whatever the hell she was injected with because that was a unique hell she doesn't wish upon anyone.
When Mal moves to get up from her cot, her entire body screams in protest. With the way that it feels like every fiber of her being aches, Mal wonders how long she was unconscious. The intense burning throughout her whole body has faded from their awful experiments, but the lingering aches and pains remind her of when she was younger, spending hours at a time beating a punching bag and training to take down others far larger than her.
As much as she tries to ignore her past, the life she had before coming here, Mal can't help but reflect on all the mistakes she made as she faces the reality that any day in the Necron labs could be her last. Maybe she should have tried to be a better daughter to her mother, instead of living to please her father every waking moment. Would she have stayed with them then? Where even is her mother now?
Her father always told everyone she was dead. Better to pretend that his wife was long gone than to admit that she was disgusted by who you'd become, who you were turning your family into. Deep down, Mal has always believed she escaped. Mal doubts that she ran off with some other man, but now starts to wonder if she saw something like his coming. If she saw her husband becoming a monster, transforming from the man that she had fallen in love with into some unrecognizable criminal.
Did she know that her eldest daughter was drawing down that path? Fear that it was too late, that those she loved had been irredeemably corrupted? Could she not bear to look at her newborn daughter, knowing that she would likely become just as evil as her firstborn and husband? Mal thinks that she may have been right after all, that they were nothing more than selfish sinners pretending to have power in a world full of other self-centered lowlives, all chewing up innocent people and spitting out new monsters.
A neverending cycle of bad overcoming good, of those with pure hearts being overtaken by the cruelty of the world around them. This was all that was left for her, a reality facing the horrors that she had helped to perpetuate. Mal wonders if it is even worth living on, worth even bothering to try to get out of here. She might just even deserve this, the beatings and the brutality, as penance for all the wrongdoings that she had caused previously.
-×-×-×-×-
Sometime during her hopeless musing, the cell door slams open, and Mal flinches on her cot. Bianca is tossed roughly onto the other cot in the room, and Mal can see plain as day that she has come back from the serum room as well. Her face has lost all color that it previously held before, and there are black veins mapping themselves all across her body. Mal quickly looks down at herself, and she's relieved to see that she doesn't have the same dark veins, which only cements her idea that she must have been unconscious longer than she originally thought.
Looking down at Bianca's helpless form, Mal feels something strange shift inside of her, a sense of protectiveness forming for the other girl. Perhaps it was her instincts, after having raised Cierra for so many years, that she would feel a responsibility to look after Bianca when she is so clearly helpless. Mal goes to get up, intending to help shift her into a more comfortable position on the cot and cover with a blanket when it happens.
It's as if one moment she was planning on getting up, and the next moment she's there, across the room at Bianca's side. Mal freezes in shock. What the hell was that? How did she just appear on the other side of the room? Did she somehow start having memory loss, and just happened to forget the actual act of walking over there? In an attempt to stop her panic, Mal decides to go back to her cot. Surely she would just walk right over there and nothing would be out of the ordinary, proving she was just making much ado about nothing.
Instead, rather than calming her anxieties, this return trip only fuels them further. Once again she just appears on the other side of the room, no memory of how the got there. Mal starts shaking, fully terrified. No memory loss could be this selective, which left only one true option as to how she moved across the room.
It worked. The scientists as Necron had succeeded with their experiments and had given her powers. The weight of this realization causes Mal to sink to her knees, clutching her head in her hands. She looks down at her arms and realizes that, faintly, her veins are pulsing black with every heartbeat. Horrified, she watches them, waiting until the black color finally subsides and she is left looking every bit the same as she did before.
But Mal knows that she is very, very different now. She is not, and never will be the same now. Finally, Mal breaks down into huge, heaving sobs that wrack her whole body and leave her breathless. She cries and cries until her tears slowly stop and she is left with nothing else, and she mourns everything she has come to terms within the past months.
She mourns the father who had only wanted to provide for his family, and instead had become a monster. She mourns the man that for so long she had idolized, only now to realize that he was the furthest from perfect one could be.
She mourns the sister she left behind, abandoned in her own greed for more power. She mourns the sister who now would grow up crushed under the pressure of the expectations Mal had always shouldered on her own, the sister who she would never see again.
She finally allowed herself to mourn her mother, who despite leaving for her own good she could never forgive. She mourned the mother that she lost and Cierra would never have, the one who was too selfish to stay but too selfless to have left earlier.
And Mal mourned who she was, she brave headstrong girl who thought she knew everything about the world, and how to conquer and reshape it into her image. She mourned the girl who thought she had known everything, only to find out that she ultimately knew nothing at all. She had thought herself a god, perfection in the highest, but in the end, Mal thinks that she is nothing more than damaged goods, broken right down to the core with no hope of repair.
