InsaneJournal

Who: Laura Kinney
When: +/- 2.25pm Sunday
Where: Outside Mount Weather
What: First she thought she was going crazy. But the reality is so much worse.
Warnings: Physical and emotional abuse, underage sex work, coercion, self harm, violence, near-death.

The last hour had been distressing and disorienting for Laura. One minute she'd been lying on the lawn, earbuds in, hat over her face so the sun wouldn't blind her as the grass tickled between her toes, the next she'd been hit by a shock of images - disturbing and graphic in their violence, things she would have said she'd never have been able to imagine. She wasn't a particular fan of the shock and gore brand of horror movie, and though she had a temper that had landed her in trouble more than once it was really limited to spur-of-the-moment punching people in the face. Not… these movies suddenly playing in her head. She'd thought she was going crazy. It wasn't like she could actually unsheathe magically unbreakable claws or heal from any wound like a character out of a comic book. And yeah, that had been pretty terrifying, not knowing how to make it all go away, no idea where it came from, scared that she was going to fly into some psychotic rage on the first person she saw and do horrible things to them with the nearest sharp object. But to find herself now outside the entrance to Mount Weather, proof that these new memories were her real life and it was Laura Collins that was a lie? She thought she'd rather be insane. "No, no, no, no," she chanted, her voice so low with dread that it was almost under her breath, a feeling she couldn't identify except that it was bad bubbling up until it spilled over and she turned away from the doors, pushing past people around her as she broke for the forest. She didn't need to think about where she was going; she knew this place as well as almost anywhere now, the memory floating back to the surface from where it had been hiding somewhere in the depths of her lizard brain. She knew where the different trees were that she sometimes slept in, her route for checking traps, the best places to look for deer or boar, the locations of caves and outcrops and valleys that ended in handy ways to drive animals into. She knew far more about this forest than the one around Storybrooke, and that thought drove her onwards, wanting to escape the familiar. She wanted the forest to be scary and strange, everything to look the same like it would to someone who'd just wandered into it after growing up in a house with parents and a big brother and a town where everybody knew who she was and she could order her usual at Granny's diner. She wanted it to be significant when her feet came down on sharp sticks, leaves with thorns on the edges, old bones worn clean by scavengers but still new enough for the breaks to cut her skin, but the pain was nothing compared to her memories and her momentum, both pushing her forward even as the low shrubs tried to seize at her legs, hold her back, pull her down. Already her memories of her childhood in Storybrooke were getting fuzzy around the edges. She tried to remember her first day of school and the first thing that came to mind were of that one day with Megan, where she couldn't do anything right even though she was just answering the teachers' questions, but eighth graders didn't learn how to murder people in biology class and there was a limit she couldn't see around how much trouble it was cool to get into. (That it was cool to get into trouble wasn't even something she had realised until later, anyway.) It was the same for everything, her life as Laura Collins starting to take on a dream-like quality and being replaced with violence, hers and other people's. She'd lost her virginity last year after a school dance, but now she had to think for a moment to remember the name of her boyfriend at the time, instead of Zebra Daddy's face when he told her that she owed him for the food and bed, the first stranger he wanted her to keep entertained while he was out, and the first time one of them went far enough to scare her into fighting back. Things had changed after that. Violence, hers and other people's. Her first assignment, nine years old, a whole room of dead bodies lying against each other, their blood spattered across the floor and walls and even splashes on the roof as she lay among the corpses and waited for someone to "save" her. Captain America taking her in his arms and delivering her to an ambulance where she slaughtered the medics with as little remorse as the others. Kimura pinning her to the wall with one hand, slowly pressing the heel of an invulnerable thumb hard against her eye. Her mother snapping at her when she leaned too closely against her and her face silently watching as the scientists took her to the radiation chamber, not saying anything, not objecting, not protesting, not asking what they were doing or where they were going. Her mother giving her a picture of Dr Rice. Her last assignment. X-Force. Murderworld. Purifiers, setting the bomb that they were sure would finally kill her. Waking up in a shallow grave with her body still piecing together. She tried to remember her favourite book and all she could think of was her mother reading Pinnochio, tucked inside a copy of The Art of War. She was losing the sense that that life had been hers, but not the awareness that no matter how awful she'd thought her life there was, how boring and narrow and stuffy, that was what other people had. That was what she should have had. She'd thought she'd understood that before but she hadn't, her constant confusion shielding her from the worst realisations. Her mother's complicity, her mother who wasn't even really her mother but her incubator and creator, the one who'd made the horrors of her childhood possible, who'd taken her away once only to use her as a tool for as long as it took to get her niece back and then simply returned her to her hell. Her relationships with Julian and even Warren, attempts to be what they wanted, a normal girlfriend instead of a degraded object to exploit for sexual pleasure, her age a key part of the package rather than an incidental feature - or maybe it wasn't a normal girlfriend they wanted at all but her sharp edges and the sense that they were safe from them, in a privileged position by virtue of their relationship. Or something else entirely. Her fakery of a normal life hadn't given her supernatural insight, after all, only this stunted version that was still so much more than she'd possessed before. The paths were smaller now, animal paths rather than human, and she didn't know how far she'd come or how long she'd been running, only that it was a long way, a long time. There was a burn in her throat but it was from tears, not physical exhaustion like it would have been yesterday, Laura Collins not fit enough to run so far - a normal human rather than a monster pieced together from bits of DNA and claws and bone and metal and torture. What was she but blood-splattered adamantium? A machine built to kill, to be used according to the whims of others, for death or sex or the superiority of the people who wanted to fix her. She was blood-streaked and unwounded, even the worst of the cuts healing in minutes. She hated it, and finally she stumbled to her knees, to the ground, in a hollow she didn't intimately know like all the land around the mountain, unleashing her claws and turning them against her own flesh in a frenzy of anger at her skin for daring to erase the damage, to present itself unblemished to the world as though the past could be ignored so easily. And then she moved the assault from her arms, her thighs, her chest, to her hands, the anchor points for her claws, taking turns with them so that when she had tortured the muscles enough she could dig her fingers into the bloody mess and pry them out, slicing her fingertips and palms on the sharp edges and letting them drop to the forest floor, all six of them, the bone bases just visible under the gore of still-attached ligaments that ended in nothing. Her body heaved, but it was with sorrow and grief instead of disgust or pain, too accustomed to those to react so much anymore. She let herself fall completely to the ground, curling around herself as though she could at least pretend she could protect the core of herself, somehow, or that it was even still worth protecting. A low, broken noise escaped her throat, eighteen years of pain transformed into sound.