It had played into the one fight, but now it made me wonder about the context of other ones. Break-ups and make-ups were part of any relationship, especially teenage ones where school and superheroics had a way of making the remainder of life very limited option-wise, so we’d done that, but now… it was tainted.

And I’d had only the one thing that wasn’t tainted, that I could go back to that was sexy, sweet, and lovely. Where I’d felt like I was loved and there weren’t ulterior motives. Where I’d been me and not some mangled, violated mess of stray animals and bugs bound up into a Victoria shape, doing physio every morning because of the accumulated injuries and ugliness.

I’d just wanted the one thing.

And somehow that paled in comparison to the visions. Jessica. My mom and Uncle Neil. Amy.

My skin crawled, and as it crawled, I became aware of my injuries again, of the notion it wasn’t my skin. I had no right to dictate thoughts, but the notion that she thought of me, that she’d touched herself and when I’d voiced aloud that I didn’t want to know, the crystal had answered my statement with an image of me…

In another situation, if she’d been in reach and I’d been confident in my ability to safely act on her, I might have mangled her hands until they weren’t recognizable as hands and those fucking tattoos would be unrecognizable forever.

Hurt her, tell her never to think of me again, and send her on her way.

Except I knew that was unfair, that it was barbaric when I didn’t want to be barbaric. She was… ill. I could hate her, but what she needed was to be removed from people she would hurt and treated with kindness.

And that would absolutely, no-way-in-the-fuck be me.

Fuck. There were still master–stranger protocols active, there. Wholly deserved, but I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to revisit that room in the prison.

I should’ve asked about what happened, hard as it was. Why I had a fingernail I’d distinctly remembered losing.

I couldn’t dwell on it without losing it, and I was aware I needed to wrestle this whole mess of thoughts off to one side so I could focus on Defiant. Which was a crisis unto itself.

Step one: calming down. Touch base with where I was. Locate yourself.

It was technically morning. Early enough that it wasn’t light out, but morning. We thought the city might break yesterday, and if it didn’t, it would break today. Tinkers and thinkers all in agreement.

It didn’t break yesterday.

Meaning that today is the day disaster strikes again, and we see how bad it is.