When Poe spoke, Emma relaxed. Whatever adrenaline had ripped through her system and given her the energy and the anger to down Regina had long since dissipated. This wasn’t the way that she fought. She fought with her mind. Her abilities, of course, played a grand role in that. Being able to read the thoughts of others put her in a good position to say what they’d most like to hear to do the heavy lifting for her. But in these caves, that advantage was gone. But existing without her mutation wasn’t only an inconvenience, it also just left her miserable. She knew that everyone who populated this and every experiment had been taken from their homes or individual fights by the scientists, but losing her powers felt like she’d been taken from herself.
The discrimination and fear that mutants faced was a reality that had shaped her from childhood. For a long time, she’d believed that the best way forward was to let (or help) humans die off not because she hated them, but because they hated her. The only way for mutants seemed to necessarily depend on freedom from them. It was her powers and her status as a mutant that defined her, thus whenever those abilities were taken from her by the scientists she felt like a fish thrown on a boat deck, open-mouthed and gasping for the chance to breathe again. Without her mutation, she wasn’t the person she’d grown up to be.
She ran her tongue over her bottom lip, it was cracked and dry. This cave seemed to be all the wrong amounts of dry and humid at the same time. She imagined she must look terrible, having given up on trying to dust herself off or keep the dirt from her face sometime the night before. Or the day before, it was impossible for her to know how much time had passed. Emma always felt the same amount of hungry and tired, but she had no food to satisfy the first need and Hank’s death had left her unable to sleep. The sound he’d made when he’d fallen at the Cornucopia still seemed to be echoing through the narrow passages as though it never stopped bouncing around the cave walls.
“Sure,” her voice was a little weak, this was the first time that she’d spoken since she’d left the bedroom with Hank, but somehow she still managed a small smile. The company was welcome, and if this was some kind of lure because he wanted to kill her, that would be welcome too. “I haven’t been down that way yet, but I think I felt a breeze? Seems about as promising as anything.”