Are You Even Human

"Is it just me," I scowl at my assigned therapist, "or am I the only person who has had to see you every day this week?"

And what a week it has been. I wake up every morning as some horrific abomination that nearly gives Christine a panic attack, eat as much as I can get away with, do my best to stay conscious through our lessons about military superpower use, eat as much as I can again, practice getting a handle on my domain, have mandatory therapy, and then eat one more time before passing out and doing it all over.

I wouldn't say it's boring, outside of some of the lecture classes. Even then it's neat to see how vast numbers of wildly different abilities are slotted into the highly stratified and standardized structure of the military. Reading between the lines a little, it seems like there are three basic categories of powered troops: specialists, attackers, and domain cows. Specialists are people with very powerful and useful abilities that provide more value to the Army off the battlefield than on it, like Cross Country or that truth-determiner guy. Attackers are people with offensive abilities potent enough to do serious damage to the enemy, especially Angels. And domain cows are everyone else: people with abilities that simply aren't as good as the basic utility inherent to just having a domain, protecting mundane troops and ordinance from supernatural bullshit that would otherwise obliterate or nullify them. Because, and who would have seen this coming, guns and bombs are pretty damn good for fighting a war with.

The military does not care if you can shoot fire from your hands. That does not make you special. Shut the fuck up and spend your life protecting an entire squad of soldiers with flamethrowers, or whatever weapon would be more useful than that. Queens tend to have abilities that let them no-sell a lot of human ordinance, but without that protection the Aliens are still flesh and blood, just like us. Shoot them with enough bullets and they die without a fuss. The same goes for anyone with powers, really. The military's main strategy has therefore not been to form superhero death squads to fight the aliens (although that is definitely something they do sometimes) but instead to take advantage of powers in order to negate the effects that render standard military hardware ineffective. That's pretty much all domain, no actual power use at all. A so-called superhero's job, nine times out of ten, is to just stand around like an idiot and exist, fed and fattened up for the useful effects they passively produce and nothing else. Thus: domain cows.

Despite my less-than-complementary name for them, I wouldn't mind being a domain cow. Cows are well-fed and they don't have to do much. In war, that's not a bad gig. Unfortunately, I'm already a wing ripper—an Angel killer, something only a bare fraction of the strongest superheroes can claim. Even if I wasn't suspected of lying about who and what I am, even if I didn't have a power that makes me perfect for infiltration and next to impossible to kill, every eye would be on me for my deeds alone, trying to learn everything there is to know about me.

It feels… unwarranted. Unearned. I beat an Angel as an amateur because that Angel's power helped make mine stronger, and I somehow managed to piss the Angel off so much that it refused to retreat in spite of that. That's not indicative of my skill; hell, I barely even remember half the fight. I don't particularly like the attention, and I certainly don't think I deserve it. But who's going to listen to me on the matter? I'm only the person who actually did all the stuff everyone is so worked up about; my opinion obviously doesn't matter.

"My other patients have a large head start on you, and nowhere near as much recent trauma. I try to schedule based on need."

Huh? Oh, right. I had asked a question.

"You think I need more therapy than everyone else?" I scowl. "What about Christine and Anastasia?"

"Well, I'd probably be putting them on a similar schedule if they were my patients, but my colleague is the one handling both of them," Dr. Morrison smiles. "And yes, I feel like being trapped alone in a war zone with no training, watching numerous people die in front of you, and feeling responsible for the survivors may have had a disproportionately large impact on your life for the amount of time that passed."

"I'm not going to say it was fun, but I feel like you're making it a bigger thing than it really was," I frown.

"You say that, but in all six of our sessions so far, you have gone out of your way to avoid speaking about anything that happened. That strikes me as a 'big thing.'"

I suppress a scowl, though focusing on schooling my expression ends up making me lose focus on Lia's form, briefly replacing her face with the doctor's and her hair with blades of grass before I force it all back into place. To my extreme irritation, keeping Lia's form hasn't gotten easier with time, it has only gotten harder. I'm messing up more often and everyone seems to be noticing. Not that many people outside of Christine and Anastasia bother to talk to me much, but I get a lot of weird looks.

"Is there something in particular you wanted to know?" I ask him.

"Well, why you don't seem to want to talk about it would be a start," he answers.

"...It's not like I'm avoiding it," I insist. "I'm just not the sort of person that talks much at all unless other people prompt me."

"Mmm. I have noticed that about you," Dr. Morrison agrees. "But you seem to have a lot to say when you are prompted, so… take this as a prompt. Talk about those four days."

"That's… a little open-ended," I mutter.

"Start at the beginning, then."

The beginning? The part where 'I' crash the car and get nearly everyone killed? Yeah, I don't want to talk about the beginning. So I'll interpret it a little more conveniently than that.

"When I first got my powers? I… basically had no idea what was going on. We had just gotten into a car accident so I wasn't all there. Emily kinda took charge at that point, since she barely even got a scratch from the crash."

"Who was driving the car when it crashed?" the therapist asks.

This time I don't suppress my scowl.

"...Me," I lie. Note to self: pretend to be traumatized about cars because I don't actually know how to drive one. That could get me found out.

"That's a heavy burden in an emergency."

"Yep, and I fucked it up. Anyway, the really scary shit didn't happen until Emily's brother got exploded by the Queen and then the rest of us got attacked by a Behemoth. I kind of… got impaled by its leg, but then my power activated and I turned into a Behemoth and killed the other one. Then eventually we ran into Christine, fought off an Angel, ran into Anastasia, fought off a ton of Raptors, and holed up in various houses, stealing bottled water and nonperishables from people's cupboards. Sleeping in their beds. Being creepy little scavengers. You know."

"How did you make it out?" he asks.

"Well, we were slowly trying to make it towards the edge of the zone, and eventually the sound of combat got close and Emily made the call for us to book it in that direction. So everybody got on my back and I ran for it. The Angel tried to stop us, Anastasia passed out from blood loss fighting it off, and… well, y'know. Shit happened."

I shrug, trying to ignore my intense urge to shift myself a Raptor brain for the rest of this conversation. I succeed, but my arms briefly shrink into Raptor forelegs until I force them back.

"I see," my therapist says. "Not to change the subject, but just… something I've been meaning to bring up. Correct me if I'm misreading something, but you seem to use your power to fidget a lot. Such as when you're nervous?"

Uuugh. I doubt I can get away with lying about this. 'Oh no sir, I'm just very diligently training extra hard whenever you say something that upsets me!' Yeah, not gonna fly.

"...Yeah, I guess I do," I sigh. "Apologies. I'm trying to control it better but it's… difficult. I keep using it subconsciously."

"Do you want to use it?" he asks.

"What? No," I spit out immediately, but to my own surprise I realize that's a lie the moment I say it. "...Maybe? I… give me a moment."

"Of course," he says, annoying me because why did he say anything at all, I just asked to think I don't need his words mucking it up. Everyone just likes making sure they're the last person to talk I guess. What was I… right. Do I want to use my powers?

"I… enjoy using my powers, I think?" I say slowly, frowning as a wave of crystals grows out of and back into my skin. "I don't know. It's complicated. I guess what you said about using my powers to fidget is pretty accurate. I feel like… a background urge to change myself pretty much all the time, and unless I'm sufficiently engaged with something else I have to focus on not doing that in order to… well, not do it. I'm uncomfortable until I make a change. Little changes help a little, big changes help a lot. It feels good, but not in like a pleasurable way, just in a… relieving way, I guess?"

I drum my fingers across my thigh, trying to maintain Lia's body while I think about it. It's… straining. Frustrating. I feel like I'm getting actively more irritated the more I do it. I keep doing it anyway.

"So I guess you could say I want to use my powers in that regard," I continue, "but at the same time, I really don't like the fact that I'm using them all the time. I should be able to hold that back when it isn't socially appropriate, which is… y'know, most of the time."

"I see," he says. "Well, we can certainly work together on self-control if you like, but I want to say that while you are in my office, I want you to be as comfortable as possible. If there's any social situation where it is appropriate to use your ability for personal peace of mind, it is here. Though, er, do try not to damage the furniture."

I snort.

"The main thing I'm worried about damaging is my clothes," I say. "I feel like no matter how comfortable you want to make me, you probably wouldn't want a teenage girl naked in your office."

Or at least I damn well hope you wouldn't.

"Er, yes, that's correct, that would not be appropriate," he confirms. "But considering that this topic is about your comfort… would nudity make you more comfortable, Ms. Morgan?"

I blink. Uh. Would it? I mean, it would be a lot easier to take forms that deviated from the human baseline that way. I could be a Behemoth or a Wasp or an Angel. I might be able to make a Raptor body that doesn't break my clothes, but that's about it, and… I kind of… want to? Like. I don't know. It wouldn't exactly be comfortable being a Behemoth in this tiny room, but… it would be nice to have the option, I guess?

"It's… I… hmm. I guess it's weirdly restrictive, yeah. Wearing clothes, I mean. I was… well, by necessity, I was naked or at least half naked a lot in the incursion zone. And I'm not… I'm not an exhibitionist or anything like that. I don't want people to see me naked, but the idea doesn't upset me at all, for some reason? And it makes it easier to take more forms."

Why am I telling him any of this? He's going to think I'm crazy. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Bring it back, Julietta.

"Well, I'm afraid I do need you to keep your clothes on," my therapist says, "but outside of that, if there's anything that would make you more comfortable, I want you to do it."

Hnng. I don't like how tempting that is.

"No," I tell him.

"No?" he asks.

"No," I confirm.

"Why not?" he asks.

Because I don't trust you. Because it's embarrassing. Because I don't like the way people look at me when I change. Because I'm terrified that everything I do here will be reported to some trigger-happy militant bigwig who wants to make sure that the next time I get repeatedly shot by my own government, it'll actually stick.

"I don't want to slack off on my training," I smile at him.

We chat a little more, but it's not long before our time is up and I'm heading back to my dorm, ready to unwind with the comically miniscule amount of free time we get at the end of each day. I'd better enjoy it while I can, since even that will be gone once boot camp starts.

…Not that I have much to do with the time, of course. We have no phones, no computers, no books, and no personal belongings. There is no communication with the outside world at all, at least not without paperwork and supervision. I kind of want to call Emily, but… well, supervision would make it difficult to say anything I want to say to her.

It's not a big deal, though. I smile and nod at everyone I meet on the way back to my room, trying desperately to seem less weird and scary, but honestly I'm happy enough to just have some alone time. Christine will be there, of course, but she generally keeps to herself… though when I finally make it back to my room, I find that she is, in fact, not in it. Huh. Well, I doubt she can get into too much trouble on the base, and it's nice to have the space to myself. I've been meaning to get a better look at some of the faces that keep showing up on my skull.

I head to the bathroom and flip the bird at Lia's reflection to make myself feel better, then start cycling through various alterations I can make to said face, adjusting the skeletal structure, fat distribution, and feature placement by a little bit at a time. Adjustments to my body outside the 'templates' I pick up with my power are obviously possible for me; that's how I combine different aspects of templates together, after all. Manual changes to a form outside of shoving two templates together and making scale or attachment adjustments is something I haven't experimented too much with yet, though. The face seems like a good place to start getting a handle on that.

I have a second reason to do this, too: the human body has never exactly been a source of interesting aesthetics to me, between wanting to avoid thinking about my own body and not having any particular incentive to think about anyone else's. I've never paid much attention to the theory behind what makes someone attractive, but I figure it's worth trial-and-erroring out, now that I have the time. Being able to look exactly as attractive as best fits the situation is a useful trick to have for social engagements.

Plus, it feels like a thing Lia would do: stare vainly in the mirror, using incomprehensible eldritch power to airbrush out what few imperfections her face hid behind its silver spoon. Obviously, any particular opinions on attractiveness are filtered through whatever weird quantum state my brain is in that allows its cellular structure to get completely replaced without altering my memories, but other than being bisexual I don't have any reason to believe her preferences differ all that much from the norm.

…And yeah, she is definitely bisexual. Or I guess she was, and now I am? Unwillingly, of course, but I guess it's not like anybody gets to choose. I don't actually know if I'm feeling this way because of her brain, of course, that's just a theory of mine, so it's possible that this is how my sexuality would have worked if my body hadn't been completely fucked before puberty. Hell, it's possible that these weird, sudden urges are the result of that severe hormonal fucking getting instantly and dramatically reversed; I could be misinterpreting what would otherwise be normal aesthetic appreciation for sexual desire simply because I don't have any fucking idea what the difference is. It's impossible to know for certain why I feel any particular way about anything right now, so I'm just sort of blaming it on Lia as an excuse not to think about it, which I think is fair because fuck Lia. Regardless, I don't like attraction. It's distracting and difficult to catch myself focusing on. I wanna go back to not ever having to worry about it.

I guess I want that about a lot of things in my life, come to think of it. A shame, that.

An unexpected knock on my door breaks me out of my thoughts, and I quickly shift my body back to Lia standard before heading to answer the door. I'm not really sure who I expected the person to be, but it definitely isn't the super tall girl I keep struggling not to stare at in power training class. Her name is Maria, her power has something to do with summoning a little fairy? I don't actually know the details, since when the actual power training starts I'm usually pretty distracted by all the stuff swarming inside my domain.

She looks close to my age, maybe a little bit older, with a long red braid and an absolutely delightful freckle pattern that my power keeps trying to put on my face whenever my skin is pale enough for them to be visible. She's got a bit of a stocky build, with wide shoulders, thick limbs, and an overall rectangular frame that makes her look like a giant. And yet, there's an ethereal quality to her that I can't quite define, an entrancing sort of—okay, okay holy shit brain, calm the fuck down. I get it, she's pretty, Jesus Christmas Christ! I leave you alone for two seconds and you're already slobbering over her, god damn.

"Maria?" I greet her with a question. Now that my eyes aren't gearing up for a grueling hike down from her face to her tits, I manage to pick up on the fact that she seems kind of upset. She's breathing hard, too. Did she run here?

"Lia! Hey, um, I need… you're Christine's roommate, right?"

"Yes?" I confirm. Oh, damn it, is this what I think it is?

"She's… she's kind of in a bad way, and Ana told me to come get you, so…"

"Ana did?" I ask, already stepping out to follow before I even say the words. Shit, is Christine having another breakdown? Is Anastasia caught in it? I hope it's not bad. Why the fuck did Maria leave her there alone instead of having Anastasia come get me!? At least she shares my urgency, immediately running to lead me in the right direction.

"I don't really get what's going on, but Christine locked herself in a bathroom stall and she's freaking out. I didn't want to leave Ana alone with her but she insisted you could help," Maria huffs.

"Yeah, I can help," I huff. It's what I do.

We run for a while before Maria ducks into a women's restroom, and I follow her just in time to hear the tail end of Anastasia speaking.

"—hurting yourself. Please?" she begs.

Oh great, that's always a fun one to walk in on. A nine-year-old trying to talk a grown-ass woman out of self-harm. I find Anastasia staring at a locked bathroom stall, Christine's feet barely visible under the door… which shakes slightly as Christine slams something into it. Probably her head.

"I deserve it. I deserve it!" she snaps back, obviously in the throes of panic as she continues to hit herself on the other side of the door. Damn it, it's a bad one. Definitely the worst I've seen from her, and she's had a few nasty panic attacks in our room together. My heart beats a mile a minute, and I am furious at her for not only having this happen again but also for doing it in front of Anastasia and making the poor girl have to deal with it. How can you possibly be less capable of basic human functioning than a goddamn child!? I want to scream my head off, berate her, pound some decency and sense into her skull.

…But of course I don't do any of those things, because that would be abusive, insane, and ultimately do nothing but make every part of the situation dramatically worse. So I instead exercise this novel little concept called 'self-control' that I think more people should learn about and speak calmly but firmly at the door.

"Christine," I say. "I need you to stop hurting yourself."

"No, no no no," she whines incoherently. "Go away, Lia. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Please."

"I will not do that," I say, and she slams her head into the door again. It's not loud enough to cause much of a commotion, but it's loud enough to cause a bruise. "Christine, open the door."

She doesn't answer. I only hear a thump again.

"Christine, under normal circumstances I would honor your request to be left alone, but you are committing self-harm," I say evenly. "If you don't open the door, I'll force my way in. Do you understand?"

There's no answer, but no striking sound either.

"Do you understand?" I repeat.

"I'll stop," Christine says quietly. "I'll stop. Don't come in."

Hmm. Well, that wasn't one of the two options, but I guess it's reasonable. She wants to feel like she has control over the situation and she doesn't want to be seen. I guess as long as I don't hear any more banging, the important part is taken care of. Although… I guess she might be self-harming in other ways. I mentally brace myself as I swap over to Raptor olfactory receptors, trying to sniff for any sign of blood. …There's a little bit, but it's only in line with something like a small scrape. That's… probably fine. I wait a little while in the quiet, giving her some time to center herself a bit before I speak up again.

"Did you eat dinner today?" I ask.

A pause.

"...No," she responds.

"What about lunch?"

"No."

Yeah, that figures. No wonder her anxiety attack is so bad. I turn to Maria and Anastasia.

"Hey, could you two head to the mess hall and grab a dinner to go?" I ask. "Ana has the extra ration privileges. If we're not here, we'll be back in our room."

"Uh, yeah, of course," Maria nods, holding out a hand towards Anastasia. "Would you come with me, Ana?"

"...Is Christine going to be alright?" Anastasia asks quietly, both hands fiddling nervously with her hair. The girl looks ragged, haunted by the sight of one of the only adults in her life that she cares about doing stuff like this to herself. My anger at Christine flares up again, but I push it right back down.

"She's going to be fine," I promise. "I've got this. Thank you for sending someone to get me, Ana."

And I mean it. No matter how much I don't want to be here, that was a good job on her part. She made the right choice. It's not her responsibility to deal with this sort of thing. It's fucking Christine's. But of course, lacking that, I will take the responsibility on myself. Anastasia shouldn't need to worry about it.

"Let's go, Ana," Maria presses her gently, and I shoot her a thankful smile, which she returns before running off with the kid. At least Maria is getting her out now. And now I'm alone with the mentally unstable lady with the power to disassemble buildings! This is dramatically preferable, somehow.

"This is normally the part where I'd put on a song you like, or pull up a movie you're really into," I say casually, "but I guess we don't have that kind of stuff here."

She doesn't respond. Not a terrible sign, all things considered. Reminding her of the fact that we're basically in jail was mostly just a prod to try and get her to talk, but it's fine if it doesn't work as long as it doesn't make her start hurting herself again. Let's try something more direct. A casual 'what happened' maybe? No, probably not forceful enough. But 'tell me what happened' is probably too forceful.

"Will you tell me what happened?" I settle on. The details of what words are used and their exact inflections are so important, sometimes. I'm not really sure this particular collection of undertones is right for Christine in this situation, but the idea is to phrase it so that the request for information is structured as a way for her to help me rather than an order or just a question. As someone that's currently obsessed with her own self-perception as a fuckup who deserves to suffer, she might latch onto a way to be useful to someone. She also might not. It's all a gamble, since for all we've been through I'm still getting to know her.

"...Nothing happened," she mutters. "Nothing fucking had to happen. I'm just like this."

"Yeah?" I prompt. She's talking, and I need to keep her talking. It's something to focus on other than the panic.

"I wanted to be a… a fucking engineer, can you believe it?" she says, a laugh escaping her lips that drips with despair. "Like working with robots or something. I thought I could just go to college, learn a good trade, get out of this war shit that way, you know? People in schools for stuff like that don't have to go through bootcamp."

"Sure," I allow. The military always needs engineers.

"I never even got to the engineering courses," she sobs. "I could barely even get out of bed to go to fucking math class. I was failing everything before we even had our first round of tests. I just couldn't do it. It's not that I'm stupid, I just… I just can't do things, Lia. I can't. I'm so fucking worthless."

Yeah. Maybe. Outside of the superpowers and the general universal worth that one must assume all people have in order to possess a halfway not-fucked-up moral system, you don't really have much going for you, Christine. I will certainly not be the person who lies to you to try to make you feel better about it, and right now you probably aren't capable of believing anything anyone says about you unless it's cruel anyway.

...Perhaps that's all a little too harsh, as fueled by my current irritation as it is. I have met all kinds of people who are actually awful, nothing like the problems I'm dealing with here. The worst Christine does, after all, is occasionally require other people to take care of her in high-stress situations. It's exhausting, and it's annoying, but it's not evil. She's not trying to hurt anyone (even if she happens to be doing so anyway) and her terrifyingly intense anxiety problems are probably the fault of chemical imbalances in her brain, severe trauma when growing up, or both. I am well aware that for all intents and purposes, she's handicapped just like I was, and she's certainly having just as bad of a time as everyone else in this situation, if not more. I'm just struggling to give her the benefit of the doubt here because she's pissing me off.

I want to like Christine. Really, I do. We've been through a lot together, and Anastasia considers her part of our little family, since we all lost our old one together. But she just… rrgh, she's just so frustrating! My entire life has been about working what was left of my ass off ever since it melted away. I was tossed into a home with nine other children, none of whom knew me or gave a shit about me, and with two 'parents' who outsourced every aspect of raising us to the older kids while getting fat off of government money. They didn't give a fuck that I was disabled, so I had to just suck it up and act like I wasn't.

Obviously, that was impossible for most things. I couldn't just stop needing a cane, I couldn't suddenly start having feeling in my limbs that would let me know when I was bleeding. God, I got yelled at for bleeding on so much shit just because I couldn't feel my own injuries. Which is obviously fucked up and awful in retrospect, but at the time it felt like it was just… all my fault. I was younger than Anastasia, what else was I supposed to think? All I cared about was the fact that the adults and older kids were yelling at me and I felt like a fucked up monster. Then later I got older and realized that no, the people screaming at the child for things that weren't her fault were the monsters, but they still taught me a valuable lesson: you either solve your own problems, or end up hated when you become everyone else's.

So I got really damn good at solving problems.

Sure, I fight for dignity and acceptance where I can get it. People mad at me for being slow? Well, they're assholes, and it's worth letting them and everyone else know it. But that sort of thing only goes so far. Every human—abled, disabled, adult, child—will only accept so much of a burden from others. Exceed that threshold, and they will find a socially acceptable way to boot your ass and let the door hit you on the way out. Is that awful? Yes. Is that unfair? Yes. Should the world be better than that? Yes.

Too bad. It's how things go. I learned to adapt. Christine didn't, though, and she has thereby become my problem, and I… I don't know. There is part of me that says I resent her for it, but I don't think that's accurate (and I definitely don't want it to be accurate, considering how much of a hypocrite it would make me). I think that I just… struggle to respect her. She failed not just at the things I succeeded at, but at things I am fundamentally proud of succeeding at and value quite highly in a person. I consider myself strong because of my self-reliance. Therefore, I consider Christine weak.

It's the sort of thought that immediately raises my hackles a little, because obviously if I said that out loud to another person they'd tell me that's a little messed up and uncalled for. It's an overly simplistic system of judgment, almost childishly so. But just because I know that, it doesn't mean I can just wave my hand and make the feelings go away. Especially not when she's sitting in a bathroom, giving herself a concussion, traumatizing Anastasia, and generally ruining my goddamn night.

And yet, regardless of my feelings, regardless of how angry I am and how much I wish this was literally anyone else's problem, I know what I have to do. I value morality more than I value strength, and there is only one correct course of action here.

"I don't care how worthless you think you are," I tell her firmly. "I'm not going to stop helping you."

"You should," she mutters.

Yeah. Maybe.

"But I'm not."

"Why?" she groans. "I don't deserve it."

"Fortunate for you, then, that life has never been about what we deserve," I answer. "It's definitely going to be difficult for you to learn to handle your struggles, but this is a legitimate opportunity to do so. You are, objectively, quite the opposite of worthless in the eyes of the government. The Army will force you to overcome your issues, to some extent. And for all I don't agree with how they run things, I think you could benefit from taking advantage of it. You want to do better, don't you?"

"It's not happening," she insists miserably. "It's never going to get better. I'm just a fuckup."

"What you are is spiraling because you haven't eaten today," I correct. "Will you come back to the room with me? Get some food? Maybe tell me about that robot show you like?"

"...Which one?"

"Any of 'em," I say. "What about that one you were talking about at lunch the other day? Gundam Axis or something?"

"Oh. There's not much more to say about that one. It never finished; Japan was destroyed partway through the production of its second season."

"Right, yeah," I say, sheepishly scratching the back of my head. "Wait, I thought Axis was a movie?"

"No, that's Twilight Axis," she answers. Ah, of course. Obviously. "Axis takes place between double-oh eighty three and Zeta, and mostly follows Haman Karn as she manipulates a child and backstabs her way up the political ladder to become the girlboss queen of space. Which completely decanonized Char's Deleted Affair, but like… y'know. Good."

"It sounds cool," I supply, trying to sound genuine despite having not a single idea what the fuck she's talking about. Fortunately, it only takes the barest minimum of apparent interest to get Christine to talk about anime.

"Oh my god, it was so cool," she groans. "It sucks that Japan got destroyed. I mean like, it's a tragedy in general, but also I really wanted to watch the end of that show."

God, what a thing to say. She's in a bad way right now, though, so I'll let it slide. I manage to finally coax her out of the bathroom stall over the course of her elongated ramble, making it back to our dorm just in time to run into Maria and Anastasia on the return trip. Christine now has a nasty bruise on her forehead, but she's not showing any signs of a concussion so I let her hide it under her hair and decline to drag her to the infirmary. I think that would only make her more uncomfortable, and for now she needs to eat and unwind a little.

Anastasia and Maria stick around for a bit as Christine insists that no, a Zaku is not a Gundam, it is a mobile suit, not every robot in Gundam is a Gundam, geez—but soon enough curfew hits and it's just me and Christine again. I keep her talking well into the night, sacrificing many precious hours of sleep to the altar of keeping my roommate functional. Eventually, though, she finally gets herself into bed, quieting down and at least trying to sleep.

I sigh, glancing at the time. 3:47 am. I have to be awake at six. Pretty awful, but I'll manage. Exhaustion claims me almost immediately, and the ache of my morning alarm pounding into my skull is the next thing I'm consciously aware of, my body writhing with alien limbs that I struggle to focus on retracting back into my body. God damn this exhaustion is brutal. My body is flooded with chemicals demanding my brain to return to unconsciousness, I can feel them being produced and infecting my bloodstream with commands to pass the fuck out.

…Hmm. I wonder if I can just… remove them, like I did with the MRI contrast. I lie in bed, the alarm still blaring as I focus on isolating the parts of my biology telling me that I need sleep. Getting rid of the urge probably won't be an actual substitute for the sleep that I need (though for all I know I can separately remove that need, somehow) but it should at least prevent me from feeling tired and allow me to function normally.

On one hand, this seems like a stupid idea because I have no idea what I'm doing. On the other hand, fuck it! My brain chemistry is already an existential nightmare and I feel like shit. Let's see… I can feel the part of my body that's producing sleepy chemicals, and I can isolate the qualia of the sleepy chemical itself because of that. I know where they are in my bloodstream if I just try to unshape them like I would any other body part, then… there. I… wait, I still… feel… slee—

Blackness. Numbness. I have no eyes, no ears, no sounds, and no light. I can feel nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. I am nothing, and I fear this, so I take the flesh in my domain and make it breathe.

I jolt awake, not in the sense that I successfully caused myself to stop being tired, but in the sense that I just made myself black the fuck out, and my entire body is now screaming in confusion and pain, my body returning to template from some catastrophic failure of…

Holy shit. Did I just die? …No. No, no, no, I couldn't have died, I mean, I'm obviously alive. Hoo boy am I alive, and definitely no longer sleepy either because adrenaline is a hell of a drug. Still! That stuff I just removed from my body was really important, it turns out! I should probably learn more about biology before I do that again!

I sit up, my heart beating a mile a minute as I look over to find Christine still in her bed, hiding her ears from my alarm underneath her pillows.

"Hey, we gotta get going!" I encourage her as I get dressed.

"Noooo," she groans.

"Come on, Christine, if you don't get yourself up the soldiers will come make you get up again, and that'll be worse."

"Let it be worse, then," she groans.

"No," I say. "I told you last night: I'm not going to stop helping you. Let's go."

And I won't. I won't stop. Never, ever. I won't be the same sort of person that raised me. No matter how much I feel like them, I'll be better.

Even if it kills me.