I lay face up on the oversized mattress, the afterglow of an enjoyable evening fading slowly back into the anxiety of what was happening all around me. Lily was still unconscious, even through dinner, and I was still unsure what to think of the new revelations about myself that had come flooding in this last week. Things had seemed so much simpler for a while back before that damn botched mission. It felt like I'd finally come to understand what my life had become, even if I still didn't fully grasp my past, and now it was thrown back into disarray.

Part of me wondered if that was just life from here on out for me. Mystery after mystery, punctuated by periods of calm where I got to feel like things were routine, at least for a little while. Or maybe there would come a time where I truly knew myself and didn't have to worry about stumbling onto new tracts of bizarre, otherworldly information that upended everything I thought was real.

I certainly hoped it was the latter. This got tiring.

The tantalizing, soft texture of fur brushed over my bare chest as Ray's claws dug gently into my side, a subtle movement of affection that brought me back to reality long enough to break my internal monologue. I lifted my hand as far as it could go with the massive arm over top of me and held tight to her abdomen and she capitulated by holding me tight to her chest, my head resting snugly against her neck.

"Stuck in your own head again, shaman?" she teased. She'd called me that before, several times. Something about how I connected to the ship much like some tribal earthlings could connect deeply with nature. I think it had turned into an affectionate nickname recently. I kind of liked it. "You think too much."

"Yeah," I groaned, nuzzling into the top of her chest. "May...be I do. It's j-just hard not to think a...bout it."

"Wanna talk about it instead?" She asked as her other claw began to gently stroke down my hair, sharp tips gently combing between the strands.

I groaned quietly as her claws came back up and began scratching at my scalp. That felt nice, dragging my mind back down into blissful physical sensation again. It took me a moment to put my thoughts back together. "Everything's getting com...plicated again."

She nodded with a gentle sigh. "It does that." We stayed silent for several minutes as she doted over me, her warm attention washing away my concerns again, just for a bit. Eventually, she rested her claws over top of my head. "That's the life we've chosen. Complications. Adventure. Getting to play the hero now and then, and trying not to be the villain to too many who don't deserve it."

"I d-didn't choose this, though..." I grumbled.

"Would you have?" she asked, and I actually had to think hard about that.

I tended to reflect on the oddity that was my life fairly frequently and lament just how bizarre it had become, how difficult it was to face what I was. I did it readily now, but it still felt like a burden. So if I had been given an informed choice, would I have chosen to live the relatively societally normal life of a corporate drone like I had in the simulation? For real, I mean.

Even though I loved being Theseus, I did tend to idealize those memories of a world where I wasn't special as well. Of having normal worries like workdays and financial upkeep. Bills and work-life balance. Of maintaining friendships between moments in a busy life. Of being unimportant. Of being able to remain unseen. Anonymous. Normal.

I thought of people that were in that position as lucky for not having to deal with things like being chased down by enemy corps and fighting for their life on a regular basis. Who didn't have to concern themselves with psychic powers and conspiracies. Blissfully ignorant of the surreal truths just on the other edge of a port or a research station.

I thought that they must be so happy. I must have been so happy.

Except I'd lived a facsimile of that life. I wasn't happy. I was complacent. I was trapped. There was nothing to fight for. There was nowhere to go. Just a part of a pointless societal machine so far beyond my control and so far against my better interest that it was slowly grinding at my soul until one day there would be nothing left. I couldn't change anything.

Here, in reality, I was hunted, I was beaten and shot and pulled within an inch of my life just trying to survive, again and again. Every day offered new mysteries and concerns, blasphemies against the world I had somehow come to find comfort in. I was tested again and again, to uphold the resolve that I'd grown, the things I now stood for. And sometimes I was so tired of it.

The difference was that here, I had options. I could petition the crew with ideas on where to go, on what to do, on how we could make a difference, and they would listen to me. They would take what I said into serious consideration and give me real reasons why or why not. And they would all play into that dynamic just the same. I was part of something that would listen to its parts, consider them, treated them with the agency they deserved. Treat them as the people they were instead of just as parts. We each mattered.

Here, I had at least some control of my destiny. Something far closer to real freedom, despite all those that wanted so desperately to take it from me. This was more real.

I gripped tight under Ray's arms, holding her as tight as I could. "Yeah. I would have." The words came out clear. Resolute. It was only a short phrase, but I was glad I didn't trip over any of the words.

She started petting me again, and whispered, "You're where you belong, shaman. Remember when you're tired, you can always rest, at least for a little bit."

And I did just that, letting the tension flood out of me and letting her hold me tight as I drifted off, trusting her to keep me warm and safe while I slept.

—

Everything felt different. I stared down at my hands, shaking with the constant tension of bracing myself for the pain. The noise within still raged against me, perhaps even harder now than it ordinarily did. Yet I wasn't scared. I wasn't angry or frustrated or even reverent of the power it held over me like I had become recently.

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Instead, I couldn't help but smile. It felt wrong. It felt disingenuous. Like a flood washing over top of a city somehow left unscathed by the waters that swallowed it, frozen in the more correct response to the pain and the torture and the noise. Beneath the ravenous waves of unfettered rapturous joy was something visceral and real that was being veiled by this overwhelming otherness.

I laughed. I actually laughed. I didn't want to, but the feeling was overwhelming. I kept laughing, my eyelids thrown wide as the realization that I'd completely lost control overwhelmed me. I cackled loudly in a way that I thought I never would. Never could. It hurt. It hurt so much. My chest began to burn as the unwanted, uncontrolled laughter began to win out over the disparate gasps of air I could manage between the spasms of joyous cries spilling forth unbidden.

I looked up at the monster above me, pleading in silence as I suffocated on my own imposed happiness.

A noise came from the blurry black thing, indecipherable as usual. "But she's finally happy," came a clear and quiet voice, demure, polite, measured, and ethereal. And wrong. There was nothing beneath the tone. She was being sincere, but there was no joy of her own despite the smile on her face.

I collapsed onto my side as I choked, my laughter turning into wheezes and ineffectual gasps where I could manage as I grasped at my throat and pleaded with my eyes up at the shadowy thing because I knew she would have no mercy. Was this how I died? Drowning in overwhelming false joy?

The monster spoke something else, louder this time as it kneeled down toward me.

The girl let out a sigh and suddenly, the floodwaters washed away like they were nothing, and the city could breathe again. No longer stifled by the imposed joy, the terror returned ten-fold, and I drew in a gasp, clenching every muscle in my body before screaming, my arms flying to my head and attempting to rip the once more overwhelming noise out of my brain myself.

The monster objected, and I felt my arms pulled away from my scalp, bloody fingertips struggling futilely against the much stronger thing forcing my arms down to my side.

Tears that had begun in overwhelming laughter now flowed down my face freely as I whimpered and cried, the momentary reprieve from my usual emotional state renewing its severity. My hard-earned calm ruined by the whiplash of being thrown from one extreme to the other. I tried hard to pull my limbs free again so that I might slash at my arms with my fingernails or tear my skull open to relieve the pressure. Mad flailing did me no good as my arms were returned to the strait jacket, tightened in a hurry by the monster on top of me.

"Why stop? She hates this," the girl claimed. I somehow hated the flood of joy more. It hadn't killed the pain, hadn't silenced the noise. It simply covered it with something that wasn't mine, wasn't right, and the uneasy blanket it had made within me only served to amplify the horror of what was happening in my mind once it was pulled away. "Don't you want her to feel better?"

That voice held no concern. I knew her better than that. She only wanted to watch me suffer. A sadist just as much as Cassandra, but she was different. Empty. She wasn't scheming, she simply wanted to watch me suffer. I was the easy target, after all. The failure of a psychic who held no purpose beyond being a lab rat for the others.

It took me several minutes before I managed to pull the fragile strands of sanity I'd managed to gather before her intervention back together, and my exhausted body slowly went limp beneath the monster's weight.

Give into it. Just let it take me. I'll only be okay if I let it take me. I immersed myself in the frightening noise. Became a part of it again. A cog within the ineffable horror to which I was a conduit. I pushed myself down into the incomprehensible pain and my eyelids drooped, my body went numb, and I stopped moving. I was where I belonged again.

Normal. I managed to force myself back to normal. My normal. The normal where I was a thrall to pain, slack-jawed and bleary-eyed. A mere vessel. Barely conscious. The monster slowly lifted me up, posed me back into a sitting position like a bound-up doll, and turned back to her. The girl. Sarah.

I stared back at her as well, too immersed in the harsh burning comfort of the pain I knew to judge or to feel much of anything at the moment, but at least I knew I was grateful she was out of me. Out of my head. Out of whatever internal chemical manipulation she somehow forced through my brain. Out of the noise's way. I was not a creature of joy. I was pain. I was noise. This experiment was a failure.

"She was happy," Sarah insisted plainly, that wide, placid smile of hers uninterrupted by any of what had just occurred. She had that wild gleam in her eyes that she only seemed to show after she used her talent. I had thought of it as scary before. The noise didn't permit me that thought. I was simply an observer now. But I recalled it.

Sarah kept staring at me even as she spoke to the monster. "You were right. I can do more than rage." It somehow still unnerved me that she remained so fixated on me, like she was eyeing up prey. "Meryll is good for this. Can I keep her?"

I couldn't parse exactly what she even meant by that, but it still alarmed me. The idea that she would swallow me up in an ocean of suffocating foreign emotion again sent so many alarms going through my head that I opened my mouth and began trying to piece together an objection.

Thankfully, the monster spoke sternly at her again, and she finally broke her gaze with me to plead to him "Please? Lily gets to spend so much time with her."

Lily is my sister, you bitch. She saved me. She's special. Don't you dare-

A spike of pain shot through my head and my rage was rendered down to just a twitch of aborted expression. My outburst of self-awareness breaking through the haze so soon after that ordeal was too much to ask for. The muscle tension I'd managed to build up in preparation to yell at Sarah was released again, my body slackening once more as my mind fell back into acting its part of an unthinking amplifier for the noise. I couldn't even muster the control to defend Lily right now. I was too weak. I wasn't even there at the moment.

More monsters rushed into the room and restrained Sarah. I could barely follow what was happening in her objections, but she must have tried to manipulate someone she wasn't supposed to. Using our talents on them, or beyond what they could control, was treated harshly. It was a rare occasion where I was thankful for the monsters.

I sat as I was, trapped inside of myself, as Sarah was taken away, and I was left alone. I think. I might have been carried somewhere at some point. I was too busy making up to the noise for the transgression of allowing something else to control me. It was an unforgiving thing, even if none of this had been my decision.

The next thing I remembered was my eyes coming into focus as Lily stood in front of me, the echo of my name on her lips. I tilted my head up at her, and she smiled at me. I managed to smile back. She sat down next to me, and without a word between us, I tilted my head onto her shoulder.

Everything hurt a little less for a bit.

—

I didn't startle awake like I usually did from my nightmares. Lily had saved me the trouble, and my head fit as snugly into the crook of Ray's neck as it did Lily's shoulder.

Ray's quiet, steady breathing was a comfort in itself, the mammon still asleep with her body wrapped gently around me, cocooned in her warmth. "This... It's all w-worth it. To f-feel what's real. To be what I r-really am." I whispered to myself as I settled in, letting the tension of nightmare drip off me while I waited for the day to start in the comfort of her arms.

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