Chapter Text
There is something to be said about white walls and white floors. In a place so clean, so orderly, so squeaky nice and scientific, sometimes the walls have eyes and stare back at you because there’s nothing else to do. It’s nice to let the dust pile up sometimes, to let blood and dirt build up under fingernails, just for the repetitive motion of picking at them with some vague form of interest.
The girl is born in a lab and taught to be human by the inhumane.
Perhaps she would’ve broken at some point, if she were normal, and turned into the mindless super weapon that they’re training her into becoming. Or, by some miracle of the gods, she would’ve protested with all the innocence of a child, brought upon by the slightest hint of compassion and humour in the scientists’ examinations of her, and would’ve become a perfectly well-adjusted little girl. Hope is inevitable, no matter how many needles, scalpels, and drills are cut into her. She’s only human.
It’s a few years later, when the lab is besieged by a third party – the secret police or spies from another country, who knows – when all the white, white tiles turn a pretty red from the alarm lights and the girl realises it’s time to go. She takes the only possession they’ve allowed her, a chimaera doll (free from any technology, she’s turned the doll inside and out many times to check), finds the corpse of the head researcher, digs through his pockets for something pointy, and uses it to escape. The scalpel, incidentally, fits perfectly into the screws for the ventilation grates, and the girl finally, finally, gets to go outside.
She got to go outside all the time Before. There was a mom, a dad, a cosy house, and a friendly neighbourhood that liked listening to her laugh and play in the grassy parks. Now, there is a city, pouring rain, dirty gutters, and rats that get too close.
But she is outside. This is a good thing.
The outside facade of the lab is an average five-story white-brick building, with tinted windows and a few purposeful strokes of wear and tear on the double doors. In this world, in this country, in this city, it could be anything from a nondescript office building to plain residential apartments. The averageness is shocking because all the girl remembers is pain, boredom, and fear, so she turns around and walks.
One step, two step.
One foot in front of the other. The rain soaks her thin dress immediately, but she’s still grateful to be wearing actual clothes. Some of the other kids in the lab, the failed experiments, were not so lucky to be able to waste expenditures like that. One of the scientists in charge of the telepathy research group must’ve been kind enough to think that the girl would like to wear clothes between the testing periods. But shoes weren’t necessary in a laboratory or in padded rooms, so the girl feels the muddy cement scratch her delicate skin, leaving blisters and scrapes immediately.
But this pain – this kind of pain – is rejuvenating. This is the pain of freedom. She walks, jogs, then runs, her soft feet slapping against the sidewalks, crunching on broken glass, bird shit, stray weeds, and more. Blood puddles down to mix with the rain, swirling down the drainage canals, and the colour of dirty and ugly intrigues her.
One step, two step.
She runs. She can’t stop running, can’t stop going forward to somewhere, anywhere better than the lab. Her heart beats in her chest, squeezing, clenching, throbbing, fighting a wild battle against her own nerves, saying go, go, go, go, gogoGOGOGOGOGOGOGONOW!
There’s a rock song playing in her ears despite not having listened to the radio before in this life. But she can feel the beat pulsating, setting up a tempo that gets faster and faster with every breath she takes. She falls. She gets back up. She turns a corner, hoping to any god out there that no one is behind her, and immediately runs into a dead end. She climbs the wall, digging into the mortar of the brick edges, digging her tiny little fingertips as far as they’re able, and ignores the blood from her hands as she scrapes her way up and over the wall.
One step, two step.
There’s ice in her blood and it’s getting cold out. The sky is a blackish blue, not quite full darkness yet, but the sun has recently set and the street lamps are all lit.
Someone grabs the scruff of her dress as she passes by the next sunken alley. Objectively, she knows it’s not someone from the lab because it’s just a homeless man living by the trash bins in between a closed down salon and liquor store. But she sees this large, looming figure, with curiosity in his eyes, and the girl cannot think of anything but terror.
The girl has been taught not to scream or make too much of a fuss, but this is the outside world. Things are different here. Even though this isn’t the world she remembers, society ought to follow basic rules still. She screams, screams desperately for help, because even though she’s not really a little girl she’s in the body of one and there are adults somewhere in the street, please, please, please help me.
The man reacts instantly, shoving a muddy hand to her face to block the noise.
“No, stop!” He hisses. “Yer just a troublemaker, aintcha? Lost little ‘un, get back to the orphanage before the monsters come out and eat ya.”
The girl listens but it’s too late. The man is trying to be helpful. The man has nothing to do with the organisation. The man wants to guide her back. So she bites his hand, watches him tear it back in pain, grabs the scalpel in her pocket, and stabs him in the throat. Blood sprays out instantly, and even though she hears his words, he’s too dangerous, too foreign, too strange for her – so she stabs over and over again mechanically, just like the way the scientists stabbed the girl’s veins for testing, over and over again. Blood squirts out helplessly, almost comically, but he still chokes and moves around, so she reaches into the open wound with her little girl hands to pull and tear apart his trachea.
The thick, hot fleshiness of the inside of his throat is surprisingly comforting. It’s so cold outside.
She rips out a blob of pinkish flesh that dissolves into stretchy strings in the rain, once washed of blood. The man stops moving.
The monster has already come.
The girl did not come into this world unaware. When the scientists gave her a name and powers, she knew exactly what her future entailed. Anya. An esper. A happy little girl, surrounded by spies, assassins, overarching governmental entities, and suffering. The girl doesn’t think she’ll ever be the perfect Anya that she’s supposed to be because that Anya was purely, truly innocent, only looking for a bright tomorrow. The girl, the current Anya, has already lived the perfect life in the Before world. Everything else here pales in comparison.
She wants to go home.
She’s been wanting to go home for the past four years.
Perhaps there’s a way – the science here, in terms of the supernatural, is far more advanced than what she knows from her previous world. If the girl becomes the new Anya and goes along with the Mission Strix, she might gain access to top secret information from both sides of the war, from the missions of the fake parents, and could possibly find a way back home. The problem arises in becoming Anya – the girl is not the innocent, cute and quirky little child that can bypass the guards of everyone around her. The girl is cold, silent, and different, but in a bad way.
One step, two step.
The girl will take it slow, first. She aches with exertion and excitement she’s never felt before. The run down orphanage is easier to find than she expects, mostly due to the delinquent children hanging around the broken playground sets in the front yard by the gate, and they let her pass with ease. Several of them eye the blood that couldn’t be washed off with just rain, but it must not be the oddest thing they’ve seen because there’s no confrontation or worry.
“Who the hell are you?” The caretaker asks. He’s old and dumpy, but empty enough in the brain from obvious alcohol use that the girl doesn’t need to exert effort into finding sanctuary.
“I’m new,” the girl says. “Where’s my room?”
This is a type of person who doesn’t care about digging into matters enough as long as he’s paid. She can’t imagine this orphanage being government approved – probably privately owned by a tryhard, overwhelmed charity, or a project by a wealthy paedophile who wants the option to take and choose from a large and unknown variety. But it functions as an actual orphanage enough that the girl doesn’t have to fear the environment.
The caretaker sighs, coughs, and mumbles something about a spare top bunk in one of the rooms upstairs. “No, but what’s your name. I need to add to that damned registry, kid.”
The girl is halfway up the stairs. Blood tinged rain drips down her clothes. She practises a smile, because that’s what little girls do. “Anya.”
And Anya walks up the stairs with trembling legs, bypassing the other disgusting little children, to find a shower. She rinses the blood off her body, hair, clothes, doll, feet, arms, legs, belly, neck, face, and scrubs and scrubs and scrubs her fingers raw. Her nails are chipped and her fingers and scabbed from the wall climb. They turn bright pink under the lukewarm water. It’s the ugliest thing she’s seen. She rubs at her fingers, making them turn pinker and pinker, until some other orphan girl enters the shower room. Despite having been treated like an animal for her entire life here, she’s suddenly fearful of nakedness, knowing that the research scars aren’t normal for most kids, even if they live in harsh conditions like the kids here.
Anya quickly dries off. Her dress is wet, but there aren’t any other clothes for her here.
The top bunk is empty for a reason. In this room, the fourth room on the left on the second floor, is large and draughty, with mostly only kids who bunk here temporarily for a chance to get off the streets or broken homes. Her bed is next to the window that doesn’t shut properly, next to the freezing cold air vent that breathes icy hell into the bedroom. If Anya curls up at the far end of the stiff mattress, making herself as small and curled like a prawn, piling stolen towels (instead of blankets, because there are no more blankets in the closet) warmly as possible, then she might be able to sleep.
The rain howls. The windows rattle. The cold aches into her very bones, despite the towel pile. The hour turns late enough for other children to come inside to sleep. It’s very quiet in the orphanage, surprisingly so – not a place for joy, then.
Below her, a pre-teen boy starts to nod off. He thinks of warm, fuzzy sheep, and acres of prairie land. Anya infiltrates his dream, listening to his mental mumbling to drown out the other children’s dreams. His name is Khan. He’s from the southern isles of a nation that no longer exists due to the civil wars in the coastal regions. He dreams of endless blue skies, periwinkle and cloudless. Warm breeze radiates from the ground up, with soft and swishing fields of lavender and grass. His dead family’s cows moo in the distance.
Anya listens to Khan’s dream, and sleeps.
She wakes up to his nightmare. Fuck. She’s not supposed to spend too long listening to only one person’s thoughts for this reason exactly – she gets in too deep, too far into their own brain. The scientists liked it when she could do this, to get into every facet of someone’s mind to the point where she could mimic their next words perfectly, down to speech pattern, personality, and emotion. It’s the worst sort of privacy intrusion. Masks are meant to be physical, not mental – she hates the idea of becoming someone other than herself, again, because the girl from Before is already almost gone. Bled out from the trauma of rebirth.
In the next few weeks, Anya adjusts to the new surroundings. No more tests and experiments. She sees so little of her own blood it drives her insane. The slippery flesh of the homeless man’s trachea makes an appearance in her dreams so often she starts to hunger for the taste of human meat. It sickens her, but the selfish, horrible, messed-up part of her brain needs needs needs to have more. Experience more. Try more. The power of the scientists, with their shiny instruments, except now in Anya’s hands.
Anya is not a psychopath. She doesn’t want to kill innocent animals and people. She’s only curious about the lack of red. Where did all the blood in her life go? How could it leave her?
Pain doesn’t frighten the girl. There is no new pain that she thinks she’ll be afraid of – pain is never forever. If a rowdy orphan punches her in the face for getting too much porridge in the breakfast line, the sting fades after a few days. Pain is not an effective deterrent for a woman in the body of a child, cut open and prodded like cattle. As a matter of fact, Anya loves and loves and loves so strongly that she thinks she might go insane if she makes a friend. She loves her chimaera doll. There doesn’t even have to be a reason for love. A girl accidentally steps on her doll and Anya forgives her. Another girl tries to steal Anya’s doll.
Anya does not know violence. The scientists were not violent. They only wanted to learn. So Anya tries to learn what this girl, Mary, is thinking. She digs deep into Mary’s mind and learns that she often thinks of the spider haunting the corner of the main room. Mary is scared of spiders.
“Give it back,” Anya says.
Mary sticks her tongue out. Toys are rare here. The colourful patterns on the chimaera doll enticed this older girl to steal. When negotiation fails, a spider is found crawling on Mary’s face the next day.
The doll is returned.
She loves and loves so much that she’s already enamoured by the thought of her future family. Twilight wants to complete the mission to the best of his ability, and will attempt to be the best father for his fake daughter. He’ll do anything for his mission. Anya wants the comfort of a paternal figure. The Thorn Princess will do anything to maintain the facade of being a normal woman in a highly suspicious society. Anya wants the comfort of a maternal figure. They’re strong. They’ll protect her. She’s a little baby, cradled by both parents.
A few months into her new routine, a middle aged woman approaches the lone girl in the bakery. She’s learned to be good at stealing, from watching the older kids do it. The rich old men and women in the high streets try to ignore the low-life, so Anya learned to pretend to tag along behind ordinary couples without them noticing, pretending to be their child, in order for the pedestrians to not be suspicious of her character. She knows she’s cute and pretty. Thievery works like a charm.
With the petty change from pockets and pockets, Anya likes to buy sugary, calorie dense foods. The chocolate croissants are on sale today, and as soon as she exits the store to follow the woman, she stuffs all of it into her mouth in a few seconds.
“I think you dropped it here,” the lady continues.
Anya didn’t drop anything. She wants to see what will happen from here. The woman, someone who calls herself Martha but is actually named Mela, is beautifully cheery and perfectly charming. She could almost be a grandmother, perhaps, and that is why the baker and his attendants didn’t even think twice about a small child being led away by a stranger.
On the other side of the narrow alley, a black car awaits. There are two people in the car, thinking the same thing as the lady: this is an adorable little girl. Emerald green eyes, round and glossy, with curly lashes and a mysterious gaze. A small, pinkish button nose. A full head of thick, luscious locks. This child looks like an expensive porcelain doll worth millions. People will pay handsomely for this child. She must scream good, she must cry diamond tears, she must exude something beautiful and lost.
Human traffickers.
The scalpel burns against the skin of her arm, permanently hidden under the sleeve of her dress. Anya tugs on Mela’s skirt. “Can you tie my shoes for me, please?”
Mela smiles with the happy wrinkles all in the right place, but the mind never lies to a telepath. “Of course, darling,” the lady says, and bends down.
There were worn out little Mary Jane slippers in the closet of the orphanage that Anya took for herself – a lucky find. Shoes are hard to steal from stores. These shoes, made of pleather, don’t use laces.
Wait a minute, Mela thinks, but it’s too late. Anya always aims for the soft part of the neck. She cuts at a downward angle this time so the spray of tracheal blood hits the ground instead of her. She digs into the open wound, making sure blood only touches a small part of her hand, and rips away any soft flesh she can grab with her baby hands. Then the girl runs away, stepping into street corners and intersections with the grace of an innocent child playing around with imaginary friends, tagging along behind unobservant couples until she gets back to the orphanage, undisturbed.
The sight of red is magical. Beautiful. Cathartic. Like nothing else. The meat of a person is a forbidden dessert, a juicy red jello, wobbly and sweet and there for the taking. The scientists have cut open every part of Anya with Anya still awake because they wanted her to read their thoughts and learn. Learn how to be a scientist like them, to maybe provide additional insight into her powers when she’s grown. This is subcutaneous tissue, they said. Here’s an artery, don’t touch it, it supplies blood to the entire body. And she witnessed everything, high off localised painkillers and anaesthetic, and saw how her own flesh wiggled under the touch of cold metal. She wanted desperately to cut the researchers open instead, to get them to sit on the table instead of her, to see their own body displayed like a toy for them to explore.
Anya stares at the bits of trachea in her palm. She’s sitting on her tall bunk, hidden from the world. It looks like candy.
And she eats it.