12. I'm Not Going To Stop Helping You (Patreon)

A/N: Hey everybody! This is probably the chapter that took the longest to edit out of everything I've ever written, so trust me when I tell you we've got some content warnings on this bitch. Stop reading this note now if you don't wanna know about them! Are you gone? Okay, so! Self-harm, panic attacks, a notable lack of empathy towards someone having a panic attack, and ableism. That's always a fun combo, right? Yeah, no, it isn't, please be safe and manage your needs! The chapter will always be here when you are feeling better. So, without further adieu...!



Mixing alien and earthly biology is a lot stranger than expected.

Not because it's hard or anything; rather, a big part of what makes it weird is how incredibly easy it is. Alien cells are more different from human cells than plants are, by a substantial margin. They have cells, or at least something sort of like them, but they're way smaller and made out of completely different substances. They have no identifiable DNA, none of the organelles match up, and altogether I can't make heads or tails of it.

It's not a huge deal, of course. Like I said, mixing alien biology into and around earth cells is nearly seamless, if a bit less sturdy than a full set of one or the other. Even then, it should be possible to weave an overlapping lattice of otherwise-incompatible cell structures for a bit of extra durability.

"You seem like you're quite deep in thought," my therapist prompts. He's pretty blatantly fishing to get me to open up and talk about something I'm interested in, since people tend to like talking about anything that can catch their attention particularly hard.

"Power stuff," I grunt. "Not much to say."

"I've heard you're performing substantially better in the practical class lately," he continues. "Had a bit of a breakthrough, I take it?"

I glance up at him, actually bothering to meet his gaze with what I'm pretty sure is a mix of human and alien eyes dotted around my face. I unform them, letting Lia's mask fall back into place. It's more comfortable when I think of it that way: a mask. Even if I look like her on the outside, my insides can be more or less anything.

To his credit, he doesn't flinch at all when he meets my gaze. The guy probably has a lot of experience handling wacky superpower crap, and I've been using my mandatory sessions with him mainly to practice things these past couple days. Because, for some godforsaken reason, I'm still required to attend these even though most people aren't. It pisses me off.

"I know what you're doing," I say. "You know that I know what you're doing. Do you just not have any strategy beyond achieving the colloquial definition of insanity?"

"Well," he answers, crossing his legs and giving me an annoying smile, "you can say it's crazy to expect a different result from repeated actions, but people aren't mathematical formulas that you can shove a single input into to achieve a desired output. Maybe you're having a particularly bad day, or a particularly good one. Maybe my patience, persistence, or glowing natural charm has gotten through to you. Who knows? But it is my job to keep trying, especially when it's my continued opinion that you need someone to open up to."

I snort, looking away from him again. If I could trust him not to report everything I say to his bosses, maybe I'd take him up on that. But I can't, so I won't.

"Do you really consider me so useless?" he asks, frowning slightly. "Or do you just consider yourself so far above the need for help?"

I ignore him. I always ignore him, and eventually he stops bothering me or our time runs out. It seems like today is one of his persistent days, though, because he keeps talking.

"Neither of those is the main issue, is it?" he prods. "There are things you don't want to tell anyone. Secrets you think I'd have to share."

I try not to react, ignoring his stare as best I can.

"...You shapeshift less when you're trying not to bring attention to something," he comments, and the ripple that pulses through my body all but gives away that he's figured me out. Shit. I shudder, glaring at him with his own face. It's not even a conscious decision, but that finally gets to him a little. I still don't have full control of my power, so I've been focusing on trying to roll with my instincts rather than fight them. The results tend to be… mixed. At least I only took his face, rather than his whole body.

Fuck it, let's roll with it.

"Now what kind of secrets would a shapeshifter be hiding?" I ask him with his voice. "That's how this goes, isn't it? You think I haven't noticed I'm the only person in my intake that still has to see you every day?"

"Well, Ms. Morgan, everyone else in your intake has talked to me," he parries cleanly. "I have assembled psychological profiles for most of your peers that I am confident both accurately reflect the strengths and challenges they will face in their positions and maintain a level of patient confidentiality that I am comfortable with. And yes, some people continue to see me more than others, based on desire and need. But you, in your apparent quest to prevent me from doing my job, have only forced me to assemble a psychological profile listing you as stubborn, suspicious of authority, fiercely independent, and actively interested in obstructing further psychiatric evaluation wherever possible. Which… yes, from the perspective of the Army, means you require more therapy."

I turn his face back into Lia's, looking away and trying to focus back on the alien biology investigations I was doing before. If I can just turn them into something useful—and really just be useful enough in general—they won't care too much what my therapist has to say about me. Results trump everything. That's just how the world works.

Dr. Morrison sighs at my silence.

"You know," he says, "I've worked with a lot of people who have powers. It's my specialty, I suppose. Not by any particular intention; it's just where my career ended up. So while I doubt most of what I'm about to say would hold up under scientific rigor, I do have a few pet theories I like to pontificate about. Namely, Ms. Morgan, it is my suspicion that you are not having issues with people trying to pick apart your identity because you are a shapeshifter. I think it is possible that you are a shapeshifter because you have issues with people trying to pick apart your identity."

My skin flows into scales and back, like ripples on a pond.

"...You think you know how people get powers?" I ask slowly.

"I don't know anything," he answers. "We're fairly certain that powers are controlled directly and exclusively by the people who manifest those powers; there's no evidence or indication of otherworldly beings intervening in your day-to-day activities. But while your power might not itself be sapient, that doesn't mean there isn't an intelligence behind whatever gives them out and guides their function. My personal theory is that this guiding intelligence is just your own subconscious, latching onto whatever source these abilities come from and crafting you something of a personal safety blanket."

Huh. I guess most people don't get their brains assaulted by eldritch voices from beyond the veil. I wonder if that makes me special or crazy.

"You see a pattern between a person who doesn't want to talk to you and a power that lets me physically hide my identity," I conclude for him. "So? It's a fairly basic conclusion to make."

"Sure, but it's a conclusion that presupposes that you were already the kind of person to hide your feelings well before you ever gained the ability to hide your face," he says. "And given what I'm privy to from your background, Ms. Morgan, it is not at all difficult to see why."

Yeah, I'm sure rich bitch Lia had such a rough life. …Ugh, I mean, she probably did, I guess. Her parents are awful. I can't exactly respect how she went about handling that, though. She went and turned her traumas into everyone else's problem, lashing out and generally being as much of an asshole as she could get away with. She doesn't get a free pass just because her situation sucked.

"What do I need to do to reassure you that I don't need this?" I ask bluntly. "You describe me as a lot—and yes, I'll admit I'm stubborn and actively suspicious of you personally. But it's not like I don't understand my situation or respect the chain of command."

"Lia, there will never be a time you don't need this," he says. "You're a soldier. Therapy will be important for your entire life."

"You have a point, doc," I nod, "but shouldn't that be my decision? You're never going to get me to talk by forcing the issue, so why not stop wasting both of our time and leave me alone?"

He leans forward, officially on the attack now that I've responded to him being more direct about things. A mistake on my part, but I am getting tired of this. He's right, unfortunately: repeat something often enough with the same person, and you absolutely will start to get different results.

"I want you to tell me why you're so vehemently against talking about yourself," he says. "Why don't you want anyone to see who you are underneath it all? Are you afraid they won't approve of the person they find? Of the real Lia?"

I can't help but laugh. It's such a corny way to phrase it, and completely off-base. I'm so tired of this man that I can't resist the temptation to keep taunting him a little.

"Hypothetically," I say, "what would you do if I told you there is no Lia? What if I said, right here and now, that I'm an Angel in disguise, using her body to infiltrate the military?"

"Well, I'd have a lot of questions about your people and your culture, for starters," he smirks back, "but before that, I'd ask you what changed. Because you certainly seem to treat humans with a lot more kindness and care than I'd expect out of an alien warrior hell-bent on conquering our planet."

"Ah, yeah," I nod understandingly, tapping the side of my head. "It's the brain, unfortunately. My power changes it along with the rest of me. Just… the whole-ass brain, you know? I think I might have had some of my original gray matter back at the start of all this, but by now the Ship of Theseus has long since sailed out of port. Empathy's a bitch, you know? Completely messed up my invasion plans. Huge shame, guess I'll have to fight my own kind to the death instead."

"Perhaps what you're worried about isn't that people won't like the real you, then," Dr. Morrison says, ignoring my jokes. "Perhaps you're worried that there isn't a real you anymore at all."

That breaks my smile, just for a moment, and I know he catches it. Damn it.

"I think you'll find I have far too high an opinion of myself to struggle with insecurity issues," I deflect, knowing full well that arrogance and low self-esteem aren't at all mutually exclusive attributes. "I'm more frustrated by how jarring and annoying it is to have my sexuality constantly getting scrambled up."

"Oh?" he prompts, happy to accept my change in subject just because it means I'm saying anything at all.

"Yeah, it's a pain," I nod. "Like, I'm a lesbian. I have a girlfriend. And normally, I am quite attracted to women. But my brain never stops mixing itself around, and sometimes when I wear someone else's face my preferences shift a little, too."

As much as I wish I was making all this shit up to give him a problem to distract himself with, this is actually a problem I've been having lately. Frankly, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what 'being continually distracted by the weird yearning feeling I get when I stare at the girl in front of me in class' meant, since I've never actually felt sexual or romantic attraction before in my life. The more I settle into my routine and get used to the constant, overwhelming stimuli my body refuses to stop shoving at me, though, the more I can identify that yes, Lia's body very much has the capacity for sexual attraction, and other bodies I sometimes occupy also have their own individual preferences.

Even better, since I'm passively shapeshifting without really thinking about it pretty much all the time, I can get really caught off-guard by sudden bursts of attraction that seem to come out of nowhere. It is infuriating, though thankfully I can usually just remove my own ovaries to get it to calm down a little. Not completely, but… a little.

I have not yet tested what any other types of gonads would do to my libido, and I have no intention of ever doing so.

"Are you worried this might negatively impact your current relationship?" Dr. Morrison asks.

God, what a question. Am I worried this would mess with the creepy pseudo-insestuous and entirely fake relationship I need to maintain with Emily for the better part of a year? No sir, I'm fairly certain the whole thing can't actually get any messier than it already is.

"In general," I tell him, "the implications of what my power and my current life situation means for Emily and me are huge and complicated in ways I'd rather not get into at all. I'm still just hoping I'll actually get to see her again, you know?"

"In the absence of extreme circumstances, you should be able to expect time off to see your loved ones after your general power training is over, and before boot camp," he informs me. "So about a month from now."

"Oh, okay. That's good to know."

He nods in acknowledgement and we settle back into our usual silence with me feeling like I've lost this entire interaction. I just had to open my stupid mouth; this will only embolden him to keep pressing me on stuff in the future. Ugh.

At least he lets me stay quiet for the rest of our assigned session, content for now with whatever he's already picked up from me. 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, though I guess I might be able to call Emily under supervision. …Supervision would make it difficult to say anything I want to say to Emily, though.

Well, it's not a big deal. I smile and nod at everyone I meet on the way back to my room, happy enough to just have some alone time. Christine might be there, of course, but she generally keeps to herself… and when I finally make it back to my room, I find that she is, in fact, not in it. Nice, some 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 face for a moment 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. 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. 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.

…She is, unfortunately, bisexual. Or hell, maybe I am. I mean, I functionally am either way, but I don't know if it's because she was or if it's just… how my sexuality would have worked if my body hadn't been completely fucked. (Honestly, it's impossible to know for certain why I feel any particular way about anything right now, so I'm just sort of trying not to think about it.) 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 some girl from my intake who I've barely even talked to. Her name is Maria, and she's mainly notable for being the tallest girl in our intake: an absolutely amazonian six foot five, though its impressiveness is admittedly somewhat undermined by the fact that we also have a guy that's seven foot even.

She looks close to my age, maybe a little bit older, with a long red braid and freckles that dance across her face like light reflecting off a pond. Her long, slender limbs have an almost ethereal quality to them, complimenting her high cheekbones and thin nose with an elfish otherworldliness that contrasts with a nervous smile that… 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 somebody, 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.

"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? 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 good, 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. My heart beats a mile a minute, and I am furious at her for not only having this happen again but to do it in front of Anastasia and make 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. "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 improve my 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, until I know her a little better.

"...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.

"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 a little too harsh, as fueled by my current irritation as it is. I have met all kinds of people that 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 succeeding) and her terrifyingly intense anxiety problems are probably the fault of chemical imbalances in her brain, severe trauma when growing up, or both. For all intents and purposes, she's handicapped just like I was. And maybe if I was a better person, I'd be able to properly think of her with the respect that people like us deserve.

…But I can't. I put a lot of pride into how hard I worked my ass off after my whole life melted away. I used the tools, I re-learned my entire body, and still after all of it I needed daily help. The degree to which I could minimize it mattered to me, though, and Christine isn't doing that at all. Part of it is a difference in circumstances: you can't exactly go out and buy a cane for your own brain. The nature of her issues makes managing her own capacity to manage a chore in itself. Obviously, she doesn't want to not eat and have a massive traumatic breakdown. She doesn't want to have severe executive function issues that impair her capacity to act on whatever decisions she does want to make.

But as awful as it is to ask: does that matter?

At the end of the day, the people around her still have to suffer the consequences of that poor self-control, just like how the people around me had to tolerate the limits I placed on them. And that goes both ways: people have a basic responsibility to not be assholes to each other, and that absolutely includes not giving people shit for things that are outside of their control. You will accommodate me, and you will be polite about it, or we will have a fucking problem. Treating someone poorly for something that isn't their fault is disgusting. But fault and responsibility are not the same thing. I am still responsible for the impositions that you don't give me shit about, and Christine is too.

…But Christine isn't somewhat reducing the average walking speed and needing people to hold open doors for her. Christine is traumatizing a child (and ruining my night). Even if everything else I just said about responsibility is bullshit, shouldn't I at least be allowed to get irritated by that?

That's the thing though, I suppose. All of this is just me mentally whining because I'm frustrated. The philosophy behind it does not and will never matter, because in the end, I'm the one ultimately committing to this. I could quite easily leave her to suffer and go enjoy some time alone.

But that's not the person I want to be. Like I said, as much as I don't feel any respect for her, I know that I should. I've been there, at least in part. As much as I've been trapped in a body that felt impossible to master, Christine is trapped in her mind, a fate that seems far worse. So it doesn't matter what I feel. It doesn't matter what I want to do. I know what the right thing to do is, and that is the only thing that matters.

"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.

"Oh my god, it was so cool," Christine 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. 3:47am. 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. 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 think I can tell what part of me is making the sleepy juice, so do I just… turn it off somehow? I probably shouldn't get rid of it entirely; that seems like it'd be stupid. It seems like a part of the body that is probably important.

…Actually, wait. If I can just make my own organs vanish into thin air, what's stopping me from doing the same with the individual chemicals in my bloodstream? Like I said, I can kinda feel them. I know where they are and if I just try to unshape them like I would any other body part, then—

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, my entire body screaming in confusion as it restarts from a catastrophic system failure. Okay then! Okay. Wow. I'm pretty sure I almost just killed myself! That stuff I just removed from my body was really important, it turns out. I should probably learn more about biology!

I try again anyway, but rather than making sweeping changes to my entire bloodstream like a complete moron, I follow my instincts a little more, pouring over the differences between my current, exhausted self and the healthier, well-rested templates in my memory. I understand a lot less of what I'm physically doing, but letting my power guide me through the process does work: I am awake as hell by the time it's over, which is good because my alarm is still blaring and pretty soon I'll be late to class.

Christine is 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."

She makes an impressively aggrieved and surprisingly deep noise that reminds me of a bear, but she does manage to claw her own way out of bed and get dressed. Good. That's how progress starts, every day.

Our general knowledge class sort of goes by in a blur, though; whatever I did to myself to feel more awake did nothing to actually deal with the fact that my brain is barely chugging by on two hours of sleep and the adrenaline from almost winning a Darwin award. I'm not going to remember any of this, so I write down as much as I can and otherwise don't really try.

After the knowledge class, I make sure Christine gets a big lunch since we had to skip breakfast, and then it's practical class time. We line up and wait for Commander to show up, as always, but when she finally does she has someone unexpected with her as well: Cross-Country, the teleporter guy who originally brought me to Georgia. Are we all going somewhere?

"Alright future soldiers, we've spent good time focusing on your domains and all of you are finally more or less capable of practicing their use without hurting yourself or others. You will be continuing to do so, on your own time, and you will be tested on your continual progress. But! Today, we add to the curriculum further! Today, you will all be expanding on your abilities in other ways, via individualized curriculums. For most of you, this will involve a bit of self-direction: you know your abilities better than we do, and you will be expected to write up requisition requests for anything you suspect you might need to improve your capabilities in whatever direction you think will be most effective—which is also something you will need to justify to your superiors. If we don't like something you're doing, or if we really like something you're not doing, you will have your training forcibly refocused, so you may also consider this a test of your judgment. For a few of you, however, we have already set up somewhere we'd like you to start. Baker, Folbridge, Lamburg, McNiel, Morgan, White! Get your asses up here! For everyone else, we'll pass you the forms."

I sigh, heading up to the front without a single drop of surprise that I'm in the special fancy group. I wonder what they want from me? Covert ops? Infiltration? I really hope I don't get put on an anti-villain squad, that would be awful but I can't deny that I'd excel at it. I would be terrifying for any anti-government or anti-military organization to deal with. …Which is why that's exactly what they're going to use me for, isn't it? Damn it, damn it, damn it! It's all I can do to not be actively grinding my teeth when it's finally my turn to get my assignment from Commander.

"Well if it isn't today's luckiest little lady!" she greets me, every last ounce of her fake cheer making me dread this all the more. "Tell me Morgan, have you ever been to a zoo?"

Wait. What?

"A… a zoo, ma'am?" I blink.

"Yeah, a zoo! God, please tell me that people your age have at least heard of zoos?"

"I just… I didn't realize they still existed," I admit. A zoo? A zoo? Like the place they used to keep a bunch of wild animals for people to pay money to ogle at?

"Ah, I'm sure you of all people know how eccentric, rich bastards are," Commander taunts, correct for all the wrong reasons. "Yeah, there's still a private one up in Ohio, and until the aliens take Lake Erie it'll probably still be around. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you tend to have a bad time when you first encounter a new animal, but afterwards you're pretty fine, right? Seems like it'd be efficient to just get them all out of the way, in that case."

Oh. Oh, wow. That… does seem like it would be really helpful, actually. Nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. But at the same time… they're going to want me to cram as much into my head as quickly as I can, aren't they?

Hoo boy. I am going to have so many seizures today.