What was it that Isaac Merlo had said, about not wanting his little sibling to know he was a monster?

Isaac was the furthest thing from a monster. If anything, she was the monster now. Or, she was becoming one. For a reason, she said. With a purpose, she said.

Did it really matter, though?

The flowers that sprouted along the edge of Sima’s grave made her heart hurt. They were beautiful, and they reminded her of the beautiful things she’d been working on with Elisabeth Fiorelli: bouquets and arrangements and soaps and baked goods and teas and all other matter of cute, beautiful, meaningless things.

“It’s perfect. Thanks, El.”

She’s leaning on the cane El’d lent to her and chewing on her bottom lip.

“I’m… I’ve been better.”

Was she making a terrible mistake?

(It didn’t matter. She had to.)

“How are you?”

El Sunderland

☉

The sincerity of the moment makes Cyg uncomfortable. She doesn’t know when she became so allergic to feelings, besides rage, desperation, and a smug, aching sort of pride.

“I… yeah, don’t worry,” she says, forcing a smile, “I work-- well, used to work-- at a florist. I have enough bouquets to last me a lifetime.” And yet never enough.

She has a house in Sootopolis-- a real fancy house, with a little courtyard that she’s replanted with yellow and blue dahlias.

They’re starting to cross-pollinate. She’s getting some funky colors.

“Yeah?” Cyg said, picking up that thread and running with it. Pokemon was a topic she could talk about. Pokemon were safe. “Let me know if you ever want to, like, run scrims, or something. I’m not Champion level by any means but I did train with MATIAS SILPH for a bit.” Before they both started going crazy.

Her smile became genuine when El said they were doing well, healing relatively quickly. “Good. Make sure to get plenty of rest.”

Then El directs them back towards the crux of the issue.

“Just some… life changes.” Her gaze drops down and away, and she leans on her good leg, frowning.

Bibidi’s gentle exploration of her mind would be met with a wall-- stony, hard, well-built after long hours of keeping Kanaya from her thoughts. Not cold, though, just… defensive. Protective.

Ashamed?

“My best friend is… she’s… well, to be quite fucking frank, she’s gone a little cuckoo,” Cyg says, snorting a laugh and trying to deal with the tension with humor, which is her balm for everything, “and I’m kind of… going with her?” She swallows, chewing her tongue.

“And other people important to me wouldn’t… I’m not sure if ‘understand’ is the right word, but… I’m on a very steep, morally gray slope and. I’m sure they wouldn’t agree with the direction I’m taking.”

El Sunderland

☉

“Fair,” Cyg said, smiling at El when they confessed their aversion to battling, “but they don’t always have to be combat. Just… practicing moves, strategies. Stuff like that.” When she and MATIAS SILPH had first trained, his technique had been to use roar to displace all of her Pokemon until she’d finally landed a throat chop to silence him. But even that, it seemed, would be too much for El, which was fine. Honestly, better than fine. It suited them and worried and comforted Cyg in equal measure.

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. You and Isaac Merlo are the same.” She thinks back at their little ramen date in the woods surrounded by the Hallow’s ghosts and how she’d promised him she’d do all his fighting for him. All the dirty work. Just use her like a gun, point and shoot.

How naive she’d been. Like her servitude was some great gift. Or even what he’d wanted, just because that was what she’d wanted. Funny, how nuanced humans were, even those you loved.

They drift into a long silence that is not uncomfortable. Cyg can feel the way El approaches the situation, looking at it from all angles; she’s not being ignored, she’s been appreciated, for what she’s worth. It’s relieving.

“It’s… well, here.” She squeezes El’s hand firmly, but briefly-- she’s present, she’s thankful, she’s comfortable with it-- and slips the walking cane between her knees to squeeze it as she bunches the hem of her shirt in her hands and lifts it to just below the curve of her breasts, making sure to not flash El, or anything, but giving them the chance to see:

There are scars. Jagged, uneven ones, from battle trauma; a circular punch of a hole from a rifle slug, and the woobly outline of where Kanaya’d packed everything in and patched her up. But there, at the bottom of her ribcage, four scythe-like marks that are far too straight to be accidental: they follow the line of her bottom ribs, arching up along the side of her body.

“I replaced-- here, okay. So. The human body has 24 ribs: twelve sets of 2, right? So the lower five to eight don’t connect to the sternum, they connect to each other. When I got shot, my last two ribs got blasted all to kingdom come. Kanaya put me back together but they weren’t right. So. I. Replaced them.” She drops her shirt and soothes it down. “And then I removed my tenth and ninth ribs and replaced them, too.” Her gaze trails down to the ground and across the young growth, swallowing. “I’m… planning on upgrading the rest of them, at some point; and my ankle, and… I’m making Isaac a new eye, and I’ve got a lung prototype in the works, and trying to nail down a kidney, too. Not for me, obviously, but for people who need them.”

She wondered if El would pick up the thread of the thing.

El Sunderland

☉

She smiles weakly. “Whenever we’re both free,” she says, tone as watery as her grin. She clears her throat and thumbs idly at the cautery scars arching up along her ribcage.

El’s question hits her right in said ribcage, but she manages to hold in the punched-out breath that threatened to escape her. She had to play her cards right, now; she couldn’t be giving away too much of Isaac’s secrets.

It was hard, to tone down on the sheer emotion that threatened to slice her to pieces; when you felt so strongly about someone, all you wanted to do was sing their praises, tell your story, and gush about them until you yourself were an empty husk. But El already knew Cyg was involved in some unsavory bullshit. Telling the truth would implement Isaac in a way that she was certain he wouldn’t want to be implemented.

For all her gut churned at the thought of lying to El, it was sickened more to think she might be betraying Isaac, even without meaning to.

So she pours all those emotions into bolstering her smile and when she speaks it’s with a strength she’d lacked, before.

“He saved my life,” she says, and it is not, she’s come to find, a lie. “Even though we… were on opposite sides of things. Being his normal, selfless… self.” It draws a snicker out of her. “And we’re friends, but I also owe him one, you know?”

She owes him many ones.

El sees where she’s going with it exactly in a way that makes Cyg’s whole face light up. “Yeah! Exactly! It’s going to help so, so many people.” Which is what she was gunning for, in the end.

But then El asks her to explain herself and she stills.

“I’m not exactly doing it… kosher.” She drops one shoulder in a pathetic shrug. “There might be an element of… human experimentation… going on.” She exhales, trying to find the confidence that she’d had just moment before. “But-- it’s-- I mean, have you seen an organ transplant list? Or, like, think of the cost. No one normal can afford that much-- or to wait that long. I certainly couldn’t. So there’s… you know, stuff. And things. That I have to circumvent. In order to avoid those pitfalls.”

She rubs at the outside of her bicep awkwardly.

"I'm not... I don't know. I'm not kidnapping kids off the street, or anything. But... Team Rocket has a surplus of less-than-good people. And if some of the murderers and abusers disappear..." she trailed off, shaking her head. "And not all of it is involuntary. Some people come to me willingly-- people with terminal illnesses, people who want to try, people willing to make sacrifices for the good of progress. Hell, I use myself for a lot of things... but it's still too fine a line for... certain people I care about."

El Sunderland

☉

El gives voice to the doubts and shadows that already occupy her mind. She bites back a sigh and her gaze drifts away. “Yeah, I… I know. Not many can.” She could go on to explain that she takes precautions-- she isn’t just cutting people open and harvesting organs awake on the table. They’re properly medicated or Psychically held catatonic, so they don’t feel it.

But that doesn’t really make it much better, does it?

“But such is the price of progress, I guess.”

When they go on to say that Cyg’s self-experimentation probably worries the people in her life, she shrugs.

“I don’t think anyone actually knows, yet.” She huffs a self-deprecating laugh. “That shows how close they’re looking, right?” A hand tugs through her hair. “Ah, what am I saying. It’s better that way.”

A tiny pink head noses through the foliage and Artie the shiny Furret ferret hops out to greet them, running his head along the underside of Cyg’s hand, demanding pets. She scratches behind his ears, thinking.

“Sorry. I know that’s a whole ass lot to put on your lap. I’m still… working out the details. It’s all a lot more espresso depresso than I feel like I want to be. But I also want to do good in the world. So.” She flattens her palm and tilts it side to side. “Finding balance. But I appreciate you hearing me out. And I appreciate even more what you did for Sima… that couldn’t have been easy.”

She was in many parts, after all.

El Sunderland

☉

El’s holding her hand again and schooling her in the basics of, like, common human decency, and not being a compliment fishing sponge. She smiles-- small, but real, genuine-- and nods.

Artie turns his tubular body, angling into the scratch. His back leg starts pawing at the air.

“If more people volunteered, sure,” she says, squinting into the space above the flowers, like trying to see an oncoming train far away in the distance. “But… there are a lot of steps, trials, snags.” She had, more or less accidentally, killed at least one guy… granted, he’d been a rotten thug who attacked and extorted the less fortunate, but he was definitely dead. It was better, Cyg thought, that he died, than someone like… well, someone like El.

“When I get a prototype that works and is safe,” she says, and her voice is firm, here, “I would love to help you out.” She doesn’t know exactly what it is that, for lack of a better term, is up with El, but she’d be down to take a crack at it. She’s building a new ankle… a lot of joints are similar, right?

“But as far as you throwing yourself under the meatgrinder that is scientific advancement, Iiiiiiii’m gonna hafta put the big kebosh on that one, bud.”

El Sunderland

☉

“They’re awful people. They don’t deserve your compassion.”

Here is the divide between Cygne and El-- and even Cygne, and Isaac. A general worship of human life and expectation that everyone, regardless of mistakes or choices, be treated equal. Cyg does not share this same view. In her mind, you get plenty of chances, and, at some point, you go too far. People are inherently selfish and harmful and it makes the ones that aren't inherently vulnerable and special. People like Isaac. People like El.

Hypocritical? Maybe. But if anyone came for her, told her it was her time on the wheel, that her choices had landed her on the shitlist… she’d fight, yeah, but she wouldn’t defend herself.

“There is no judge, jury, or executioner. That’s the problem.” She licks her lips, chewing her cheek. “The problem is, bad people go free and sit and have power. People like MATIAS SILPH . People like FERNANDO SILPH. People like declan walsh . People like me.”

There. She said it. She doesn’t want a medal but she at least wants El to know she doesn’t consider herself above the curve. It’s a pompous sort of entitled self-flagellation, but.

She looks down at El, wondering then what she’d do if they decided to step in. To put a stop to her. Knowing she’d let herself get turned over to whatever League authorities might decide to answer the call before she hurt El, hurt Isaac.

Something shakes a bit inside of her. Was this a cry for help? Some weirdly brain-fogged way of asking El to stop her, wrapped and hidden in her mind to make it seem like it wasn’t? Someone, somewhere, was watching this movie and writing a defense post for her on Tumblr. For sure.

“Maybe not. But if I’m going to do anything that leaves a mark on the world and inspires real change, it’s the only way. I need bodies. I can’t just keep making prototype after prototype with no testing that just sit on shelves and collect dust. But I’m also, obviously, not a doctor. I don’t have licensing. I don’t even have real money-- that’s all blood money, too, basically. There’s no above-board way for me to go about this. Option C, then, is to just-- not do it. Which I can choose, I guess, but it seems like such a waste. When I have good ideas and good intentions that, in the long run, will do more good than harm.”

Sometimes, she thinks, in the voice of a character from one of her favorite movies, One must be sacrificed.

"What are the alternatives? They run free and continue to hurt people. Or they get caught and sit in jail where they either thrive under a broken criminal justice system or get pimped out in a chain gang of unpaid labor. The world is just bad and sometimes you have to take it and make of it what you can."

El Sunderland

☉