She found herself in a strange and restless world, full of places and people she didn’t know and couldn’t understand.

They spoke, but her mind couldn’t parse what they were saying, but soon the definition of the dream grew clearer. The world within her mind became that of crystal clarity. There was the room she’s shared with them for her entirely life, the walls covered in memorabilia that had changed ever few months as a child. From boy bands to girl bands, to art and history, anything and everything that had excited them as children had been up on those walls. It’d been an ever-shifting mosaic, a display of just how their minds had changed over the decade since the first thing was stuck to that wall.

Now, those walls surrounded her and them. Their place of solitude was broken by another painful retch.

“It’s okay.” She felt herself whisper, even though she hadn’t said a word. She rubbed their back, another woman with blond hair and hazel eyes. As she rubbed the other woman’s back, she felt a moment of severe disorientation, a distinct separation from reality and self that warped her very perception.

She was Aaliyah Flinn, taking care of her sister as she tried to quit heroin for the fourth time.

“I sure don’t feel alright.” Her sister–no, Aaliyah’s sister responded between retches. Aaliyah’s brow creased with worry, a roiling fear inside of her gut blooming into full flower.

“Please let me call someone, we can get you medicines to help you with–” Aaliyah said, her voice rapid fire, but she was cut off with an angry hiss.

“No! No help, no drugs, no Dad!” Aaliyah recoiled slightly, the hurt and helplessness swirling deep within.

“Halina I–”

“No!” Her sister said, almost screaming the words out with an irrational anger. She was like a wounded animal, staring at its attacker, getting ready to take it down before it died. Aaliyah swallowed down the hundred words she’d wanted to say, that she’d even prepared for this exact situation. She’d wanted to guide her towards help, but she was left with babysitting her sister through the pain and anguish every few months, when she got the idea that she was going to go cold turkey.

And it continued, and continued, and then one day she had died there, in that exact position. Her cold and lifeless body had been untouched by Aaliyah for hours before she’d finally begun to wail and cry, like the little girl that she’d been at the time.

And when the predator had walked into the room, she’d stared at him like a wounded animal, just as her sister had for far too many years. Except, Aaliyah wouldn’t stop at being the wounded animal, no.

She’d become the predator itself if she had to.

Mirah felt her body lurch forward, pulling against the resistance of the sleep that had overtaken her.

The awakening was terrible, with her mouth full of dry horribleness covering her tongue, a raw throat with the distinctive aftertaste of bile, a rampant exhaustion radiating from her very bones, and a headache so severe that she could barely open her eyes to the dimness of the room she was in.

It took a few minutes of struggle for the girl to open one of her eyes enough to see through her own lashes, the crusty residue of what could only be blood cracking and shifting as she opened them, as if she were asleep for centuries and stone and debris had covered over her eye.

Mirah hadn’t known what to expect when she did. Maybe a med bay of some sort, her brain unable to properly process any of the stimulus she was receiving. But when she’d opened her singular eye, the sight of Aaliyah’s sleeping form instantly made both eyes snap open, heedless of her exhaustion.

She realised that she was in one of the team’s rooms—Ajax’s, from the small collection of beer cans that he had lined up on the kitchen bench—and was being taken care of by Aaliyah. The other girl was sleeping, in a position that hardly looked comfortable. She was sitting on the floor, one of the large pillows placed underneath her for comfort, with one of her elbows placed against the coffee table and her head resting against her hand precariously. Across her pale skin danced grey blotches of colour, drowning out most of what usually existed on her skin.

Aaliyah’s sleeping form gave Mirah a moment of conflict, stuck in the middle of wariness and curiosity. She’d never seen Aaliyah with any other expression than one of the masks she’d worn or in one of the rare genuine expressions that only seeped out when emotions ran too high. But right now, she wore a peaceful expression, one that ironically showed Mirah more about the other girl than she’d grasped from her in weeks of training.

Ajax had told Mirah that she needed to make good with Aaliyah, and Mirah agreed. It would be the best for the team, for their continued survival. But Mirah didn’t like her. Her very existence grated on Mirah’s nerves, just like she expected that she did on Aaliyah’s.

They were separate beings, oil and water, direct counters to one another. Mirah logically knew that it was the best choice to simply include the other girl in whatever Ajax had begun to build with her and, if everything went right, Walter too. But that was easier said than done.

Mirah felt, deep down, that opening the door for Aaliyah was like letting a fox into the henhouse. She was a predator, and she reeked it from every pore in her body, even if she wore the sheep’s clothing spectacularly. Ajax and Walter couldn’t see the difference, they hadn’t ever had to learn the difference. She found herself being the only stopgap between Aaliyah and whatever she’d do to the team if she were allowed.

Mirah coughed lightly, trying to clear her throat of the phlegm that was impeding her breaths, but that little cough quickly turned into another, and then into a gut turning retch. As she felt her body trying to desperately expel the gunk, she saw a quick flash of movement out of the corner of her eye and as the miscellaneous material left her body it was caught in a bucket held by Aaliyah’s hand.

It took Mirah a few moments, and then a few more after to catch her breath as her muscles clenched uselessly after the gunk had been expelled.

“Feeling better?” Aaliyah’s sleepy voice called out, only half cognizant and lacking any of the usual barbs. Mirah nodded shakily before she leaned herself back down onto the couch, one that thankfully made a decent bed. She gave herself a moment to breathe before she said anything out loud.

“Who is she?”

The question froze the sleepy atmosphere, but vocalising it only made the memories come back stronger. Mirah had seen them, experienced those emotions and moments alongside her. For just a moment, she had been Aaliyah, and she’d had her sister.

“Halina was your sister.” She answered her own question quietly, before leaning her head to the side on the pillow she’d been supplied looking at Aaliyah’s face. Aaliyah’s expression was one of pure shock, the ravine that Mirah’s words had created was deep enough to crack all the way through any mask she could’ve worn, and just lead directly to who she really was beneath.

“W-what?” Aaliyah said, but Mirah barely heard the words.

“You’re Aaliyah Flinn, your sister was Halina Flinn.” Mirah said, as if in a trance, “Your father was the Monarch, wasn’t he?”

Aaliyah swallowed against the sudden panic, a complete bewilderment as to what was happening in front of her eyes. Mirah was pulling information from nowhere, things that few ever knew. Her sister’s existence was almost entirely secret, as was her own until…

“You were the Monarch too. You killed your father.” Mirah’s green eyes pulled Aaliyah in like a blackhole, her mind caught on the edge of the event horizon for an eternal moment. Yet Mirah’s expression was filled with a strange understanding, something so alien to Aaliyah.

The movement was gentle, laboured even, but as Mirah wrapped her arms around Aaliyah’s shaken form, Aaliyah felt an undeniable warmth—soothing and mollifying at its basest form. It was jarring for her, the warmth that came from Mirah’s arms weakly circling around her body, something that she hadn’t been given in an uncountable period of time.

Consolation.

“You did the right thing.”

Mirah’s words were spoken in that same was as they always were. Totally bereft of any subtext or intrigue and focused entirely on their exact meaning. However, unlike before, there were emotions attached to them, heavy and serious.

“How?” Aaliyah asked, even a single word was too much for her voice to handle, cracking with a rush of emotion as she unconsciously raised her arms to return the hug.

“I saw your dream. I was you, for a moment.”

Aaliyah couldn’t possibly open her mouth again, fearing that the next word would come with a sob. Try as she might, couldn’t hold back the tears within her eyes, or the leaps that she felt in her chest as she bit down the sob that so desperately wanted to be released.

“You stopped your father from hurting anyone else.” Mirah said slowly, calmly, methodically. Aaliyah wanted so desperately to deny it, to tell the truth, to tell her that she was a monster, a predator. Because she was. There were no aspirations to help others, it was pure and simple revenge in its most horrible form.

“How many did you save?” Mirah whispered into her ear, her breath making the long blonde hair flutter ever so slightly. “And you sacrificed everything to do it.”

Aaliyah felt her heart jump into her chest as Mirah pulled away, looking deep into her hazel eyes with her rapturous jade green ones. Aaliyah wanted to hide away her face, to wipe it clean of the tears that had fallen down her face, ruining the perception of her power. But Mirah felt all seeing in that moment, as if there was nothing that could escape those green eyes of hers, and Aaliyah had begun to believe it.

“Are you not a Hero?”

“How could I be a Hero?” Aaliyah managed to say finally, the words coming out sounding strained and raw, yet Mirah’s expression didn’t do some much as flinch.

“Tracker told me something when I’d asked her about being a Hero.” Mirah began after a moment of pause, “She asked me about my past, and the little girl I’d watched being raped by a Linked. She asked me; ‘If you could go back, would you not save that girl?’” Mirah’s eyes were clear, uncluttered by complication or moralistic arguments. Her view was not binary, but it also didn’t see the entire words in a never-ending spectrum of grey like Aaliyah did.

Like everyone seemed to. Everyone watched the world, the horrors within it, and the powerful perpetrators of those horrors, and they simply saw them as grey. They didn’t allow for black and whites, because it was too easy to be burned by it. It was easier to see everything as grey so that they could shrug and say, ‘What did you expect?’ when something truly bad happens.

But Mirah didn’t. She saw the full spectrum, delineating them within her mind more precisely and with more veracity than Aaliyah had ever offered to her own worldview.

“If you could go back, would you not save your sister? Would you not stop your father? Would you let it all die?” Mirah shook her head, “You wouldn’t. You would fix it.”

“How could you be so sure?” Aaliyah said, trying to summon the barbs that she so often wore as armour, but Mirah saw past it.

“Because you aren’t like that.”

Aaliyah left, walking out of the room and towards her own with fevered strides. Within moments of finding the comforts of her room, she cried.

Mirah’s words had a way of being cutting, like a straight edge razor against skin. They were so sharp by their nature that they could part your flesh and, before you felt a thing, they’d clink against your bones, the very structure of your being.

Aaliyah, in any other mindset, would be trying to pick apart how Mirah had gotten this information and how she knew where to press to make it hurt like nothing else. Mirah, the most emotionally oblivious person of the entire group was also the one gifted with the ability to say a few sentences and make Aaliyah question her entire being, and what she was doing.

To hell with the safety and the security. To hell with running from it all forever. Damn her enemies, ones she’d created doing something she knew had to happen, for the sake of her sister. Fuck them all.

Aaliyah, in a moment of pure clarity with her heat cut wide open, realised that she didn’t want to live in this world anymore. Where there was nothing but pain and suffering, with every person being born with an inbuilt understanding that the world was going to die, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

No. No more excuses or easy outs. Aaliyah got up from her spot on the floor, walking over to her set of drawers. She slid open the bottom drawer to reveal a hefty sports bag that contained everything that she could possibly need to live.

She grabbed the bag, sliding the bottom drawer closed and instead opening the top one, the easiest to reach. She unzipped the bag, then upended it, spilling all of its contents into the drawer, and throwing the now empty bag to the side, beginning to organise the mess of clothing, supplies and anything else.

After a few moments, she stood back from the drawer, witnessing its neatly organised interior quietly. It was done. For the first time in years, she’d filled a drawer with her things. Aaliyah slid the drawer closed, then turned to her bed and fell into it.

Sleep came easy that night.