Super

51. teacher's pet

Less than twenty-four hours after the collapse, Shao found herself seated in a small room.

Its walls were metal, and it was bare except for a single cleared table with twin holes in the center. Two chairs were kept facing each other across the table, heavy plastic chairs which weren't exactly luxurious but dug into her tailbone when she sat down on one of them. It looked like an interrogation room, which it was, except not in a police station. The room was in a psychiatric hospital, inaptly named the Edgewater Asylum For The Mentally Ill because of its lack of actually mentally ill occupants.

The air smelled like medicine and morphine and was stifling, though she thought it had less to do with the lack of windows than with the borrowed black t-shirt she was still wearing. The sleeves were long and came down well over her knuckles, so her fingers kept pulling at the hem out of obligation to a nervous habit. Her face was turned towards the table, dead to emotion, the only moving muscles in her body being the flexors of her forearms and fingers and the occasional twitch of her facial scar.

The door opened with a drawn creak, and Irene stepped in. Her face was bright—not falsely, exactly, but in a fixed, unmoving way that resembled the fixed expression of someone who had had one too many plastic surgeries. Shao knew Irene hadn't had cosmetic surgeries, though. Her face was the way to was because of the broken mind that worked behind moving it, unable to identify its own brokenness and continuing to work the same way despite it.

"How are you feeling?" Irene asked in a pitchy, sweet voice like honey with a sprinkling of cinnamon.

The interrogation room had once been used to interview clients and people with mental illnesses, long before they had been considered an actual health issue. People had stood here in the past before being locked up in cells for the rest of their lives, rotting away, uncared for and ignored, to a carcass. No one to care for them, no one to look at them, and no bodies to be buried once they died.

Shao slowly looked up at her and blinked. "I don't know," she answered, unsurprised at how hoarse her voice sounded. In truth, she knew exactly how she was feeling, but didn't want to say in case she upset her...patron. "Tired, I guess."

"Oh, you poor thing." There was a sympathetic pout in Irene's voice, but noting that came close to empathy. "You've been working so hard. Just a few more trails to go." She smiled. "We're getting closer to our goal with every passing second."

Shao tried to smile at her, but the physical fatigue and mental drain was too much. She'd begun just as passionate and wild as Irene, striving for the Foursaken's shared goal which all of them were convinced mattered so much more than the world around. But that had been before she's seen the world around, and now she didn't know what to think.

On one hand, Shao didn't want to leave the safe cocoon of her beliefs. After being left homeless and helpless at such a young age, Irene had taken her in and given her what she had needed most: a family, and a goal. Just like she had done with the others. Shao had found a home in the slightly fractured family of four, and something to believe in, something bigger than all of them. It had been easy to go on believing, sacrificing everything to their cause before she'd gotten a taste of something else.

Joining the Supers undercover hadn't been done intentionally. Before two months ago, Shao had only known about Taemin through Irene's stories. None of them had been aware of the Supers until the night at the hotel, and Shao had gone with her instinct, improvising a role and following the team back to their headquarters out of a strange curiosity and Irene's need for intel.

What she hadn't expected was to grow closer to them. With the team, Shao had realized that her family of four was more than just a little fractured, and they had taken away the safety blanket to reveal the repercussions their actions could have on the general populace. Maybe the Supers had become her temporary home, but it was just a role, wasn't it?