On the Nature of Violets

**Danger Room, Big Team Base, Halcyon City; Wednesday the 2nd of September, 03:46**

Carmilla bursts through the building with a snarl, claws cutting the concrete and steel into ribbons around her as the remains fall to the streets far below. She jumps from fragment to falling fragment, violet shields flaring into existence around her as bursts of fire rain down.

Far above her in the projected space of the room is a vortex, a singularity in the vague shape of a person in the center of a swirling cloud of debris. This is Escalation Protocol XE6, a recreation of an attack on Halcyon by a being of pure antimatter.

The scenario it recreates never happened - the science behind the antimatter project proved ultimately flawed, bringing a quick end to several years of global panic. Still, the research made for a great training ground, one of the most challenging the danger room had to offer.

The vortex throws more debris at her, a bridge and a section of parking lot that she easily bats aside. She digs her claws into the latter, using it to bat away some of the cloud in between her and her target. She makes it to the creature, almost close enough to reach out and touch it.

It looks at her.

She is launched backwards, colliding with more and more of the falling debris on her way down before landing hard on the cracked concrete street of a ruined Halcyon.

"Escalation Protocol XE-6, phase 10," GAIA's voice rings out, seemingly sourceless. "Increasing difficulty."

From the sky around Ultraviolet, duplicates of the antimatter-being descend to surround her. They advance but keep their distance, almost as if waiting for permission to continue the fight.

Tay rises out of the crater, trailing dust. Her eyes are blazing red beacons in her face and she \*screams\*, the sound reverberating through the simulated city and (probably) out of the danger room. Her claws and teeth elongate as she launches herself at them.

The impact on the first is quick and savage, claws and fangs sinking in, drawing a bright luminous ichor from the wounds that effervesced once exposed to the air. The second closes in, antimatter a tapering cone of antimatter busting from its arm the air frying as it shaved molecules apart. As it singes the outermost edge of her hair Tay leaps off of her target repositioning for another strike.

The wall of the danger room slid open with a *woosh*, empty space where there should have been a physical obstacle, leaving Tay to careen into the hall before rolling to an acrobatic landing on all fours. Did Tay always land on her feet?

Weaver stood in the doorway, in what passed for her workout clothes, having narrowly ducked a snarling vampiric projectile who was now regarding her with some annoyance, and visibly raised hackles.

“Sorry,” the newcomer cringed by way of apology, clearly aware of her faux pas. “I couldn’t sleep-- I was just trying to see who was up at this hour. Didn’t mean to interrupt you-- is there a better way to check?”
Antimatter lances glistened a fizzy magenta behind her.

The silence was awkward, and Weaver felt a need to fill it. “I’m not really sure how all of this *works* just yet, and--- “

Tay’s eyes were still glowing, a purer shade of red.

Her tail flicks as she straightens up, claws and fangs receding. "Ugh, it's fine, I guess. I just started phase 11, so it should like… bookmark it anyway." She runs a hand through her hair, fixing some of the stray grey locks in place. The danger room doors closed with the same woosh and click, GAIA having clearly surmised that the training was over.

Tay is dressed in athletic wear, a simple black sports bra with athletic shorts. It does little to hide her physique, which would be unimpressive if it wasn't for the hint of monstrosity. She is very thin, none of the unholy strength showing in muscles underneath the dead grey skin, none of the exertion showing in sweat - all there is is grey, broken up here and there by patches of burnt, ashy black and golden implants on her thighs, forearms, chest and cheekbones. Her ears twitch and she flexes her claws.

"...Sorry if I woke you, I guess. Got too into it, maybe screeched too loud. You're one of the new girls, right?"

Weaver’s forehead glistens with sweat; she’s just tried unsuccessfully to exhaust her restlessness by punching bags in the gym. She was wearing one of the athletic gear presets from the costume maker (which, of course, made up essentially all of her actual wardrobe), with a loose faux-silk scarf around her neck. Somewhat unseasonably, she’d opted for long sleeves and full leggings, trying to conceal her body as much as possible. The clingy fabric made this difficult though, and her muscle tone was obvious; she was impressive by design. Where Tay’s strength was otherworldly, Weaver’s was decidedly physical-- the product of some engineer or designer or scientist going ‘oooh, you know what’d boost asset mission performance performance and/or look cool? *Abs*.’

“Yeah, that’s me. But I couldn’t sleep anyhow.  You live just down the hall, right? I think somebody pointed you out to me during orientation. I’m Violet-- you must be Ellen?”

Tay laughs. “Nah, dude, that’s - Ellen’s my... “ She thinks for a second. “Girlfriend, I guess? We’ve been together for a long time. I’m Carmilla. Or Katayoun. Or Ultraviolet, when I’m with E.” She turns, starting towards the kitchen. “You want a drink, new girl?”

“Yeah, I guess I--”

Tay doesn’t stop for a response, instead turning into the hallway and walking into the kitchen, towards a big fridge in the corner. As she pulls it open, the top shelf is filled with blood bags and a hand-written sign saying BLOOD, DO NOT DRINK (UNLESS YOU’RE TAY).

“Good god. I thought those were for *transfusions*,” Violet blinks, a bit flabbergasted. “I, uh-- “ she begins rapidly rummaging the cupboards looking for something else to drink, in mild dread that she’s about to be offered a glass of O-Negative in a way that would be awkward to refuse.

Was it at least a good sign that they weren’t storing vital medical supplies in the kitchen pantry?

“Are you, uh…. supposed to be drinking that?” she asked, doing a double-take at Tay’s beverage of choice, as soon as she’d managed to secure herself a mocha flavored protein supplement.

Tay *\*plops\** a straw into the blood bag. She leans back against the counter, looking at Violet.

“Yeah, ‘m a vampire. Only thing I can eat. Well, like, I can eat stuff, but it doesn’t taste like anything and I don’t get anything out of it, y’know. Unless it’s garlic. Or peppers. Sooooo,” she sips, the straw colouring a deep red, “I’m undead, why are you awake? What’s your damage?”

Violet sips on her protein drink, digesting this information. First off: ‘oh, hey vampires are real!’ -- I guess that’s just the kind of thing you learn to take in stride when you’re living at Big Base. Did all vampires have cat ears and gold --armor? --bits?  And which parts of vampire lore were true-- crosses, garlic, running water? Was it rude to ask?

“I don’t sleep much these days.” she said with a laconic sigh that said all it needed to about her particular damage. “Bad dreams.”

The vampire narrows her eyes, scrutinizing the other girl over her drink. She did look tired - exhausted, even, under the glow of her recent exercise. But more than that, there was an… acidity, perhaps, to her smell that hinted at insomnia. It was not uncommon in the Base - teens with powers tend to attract sad backstories like live love laugh posters attract suburban moms.

“... Fair enough. I don’t think I woulda slept much in the first year or so after I got turned if I hadn’t had to to preserve energy. Some shit just doesn’t really let you go.” She sighs, expelling air from a pair of lungs no longer used to doing so.

She briefly wonders why she’s being so forthcoming with Violet. There’s something about her that feels familiar, relatable - even beyond the obvious similarities in name. Tay decides she likes the girl, for whatever reason. Wants to protect her.

“You could talk about it. If you want. I guess.” She avoids looking in Violet’s general direction, instead appearing entirely transfixed by her meal. Her tail flicks anxiously.

“Not really,” Violet lied, sliding into a seat on one of the barstools that lined the counter of the base kitchen. She’d told parts of her story to Dr. Harrison over and over so many times she was bored with it, a little more getting teased out each time.  But that was like yelling into a box. Therapeutic, not something that existed in the real world.  “I-- “ she looks around. “It’s stupid.”

“Mmm?” Tay sipped.

“I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and wake up back in my cell, and all this will turn out to have been some cruel dream, you know? It’s like I’m not *here* yet” she gestures around, before tapping her temple “at least, not up *here*”  She connected it with a rueful little laugh and a nod, before, echoing what Katayoun’s words-- “ ‘Some shit doesn’t really let you go.’ ”

Tay nods. It did sound familiar. “Yeah. I’d tell you some dumb bullshit about it getting better and like, it wouldn’t really be a lie but it’s also not the whole truth, y’know? You still gotta live with it,” she grins, “Or dead with it, in my case. But adapting is totally possible. And if you can get back on whoever did it to you…” She peers at the girl, hoping her intuition is right, that is is a \*who\*, “...Catharsis helps a lot. I dealt with the woman who turned me. I can’t say I’m at peace or something, but it sure fucking helped. As does company.”

“Catharsis is...  not something I’ve gotten to, yet.” Violet sighs.

Tay’s blood pack rested on the surface of the counter, the tiniest bit leaking out from the straw and splattering on the countertop, leaving a distinctive shape on its surface. The camera pulls in: a crimson circle.

“There… would have to be quite a lot of them,”  Violet rubs her hands unconsciously as she adds “So much more blood on my hands. Uh. No offense,” she suddenly looks up, afraid she’s made a vampire faux pas.

There was a beat.

“Wait, Big Team doesn’t kill,” Violet hastily adds as she comes to a realization.  “How did you deal with the woman who .. turned you?” she asked, hoping she was using the term correctly.

Tay grins, her fangs glinting in the artificial light. “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re asking. But I don’t really subscribe to the strict morals AEGIS wants us to, either. They can be on their high horse if they want, they can’t do shit to me or E. We’ll just leave if they get uppity.”

A moment passes. The grin fades, replaced by a somber frown. Her tail swings slightly behind her where she is sitting on her haunches on a barstool. Her ears lie flat on her head. “But… I have killed. Wasn’t my fault, that’s what everyone tells me, and I believe it sometimes, but.. it was me, and I had other options. Sorry if that like, invalidates anything I told you or some shit, like it’s coming from a murderous creature. Just… you don’t gotta kill ‘em. But if you do…”

Tay looks up, and her eyes are almost human now - wide, dark brown irises, with only a hint of a red glow in the pupils. “Everyone told me it didn’t make me a monster. Don’t believe ‘em, but I’ll tell you too.”

“In a more just world, AEGIS should have thrown me in a cage and tossed away the key so I can’t hurt anyone else.”  Violet shakes her head. “I wouldn’t have run.”

“They tell me the things I did weren’t my fault, too-- but I don’t have any grounds for thinking of anybody else as a ‘monster’.” She finishes her protein drink.

Tay leans forward, enraptured. She tries her best to mold her face into something sympathetic, an expression that seems supportive - how does the shrink do this? She’s not used to it. She just hopes it doesn’t look like some sort of disgusted grimace. Her tail, which never listens, betrays her emotions by growing big and fluffy like a scared housecat.

Violet uses her hands and eyes expressively  for a moment, because she is running out of the space her words will let her express without choking.

“They got inside my head,” she tries to explain. “Changed who I was. They made me obey.  They made me --”

They made her kill.

“And worse, they made me-- “

They made her like it.

Tay’s heart would have skipped a beat if it was beating in the first place. It’s the same. The same situation. Different people, perhaps, and what - what they were made into, that’s different, sure, but beyond that it is the same.

“Look, if you’re a monster, what am I? I’m the literal stuff of nightmares. I’m what parents use to scare their children into going to bed at night. Look up “Monster” on WikiBedia and there’s a picture of a vampire, right there. I pretend it’s cool, and, like, it is, but it’s - I feed off the life of others to sustain me. I should not exist.” She idly wipes the blood pooled on the countertop with a finger and licks it off. “When I fled Berlin, trying to get away from - from her, from them - I tried to tell myself I could make up for it by being a hero. Use my strength for good, yeah?”

She’s quiet for a moment, the rest of whatever she was trying to say caught in her throat as she realizes she doesn’t have the faintest clue what to tell this girl in front of her.

Violet nodded, in rapt, cautious, terrified agreement.

Her heart was in her throat, because she’d bought in, however briefly, to the same notion: be a hero, make up for the harm.

A recent memory, perhaps the happiest since her rescue: a celebration on the beach, when Big Team’s newbie squad rescued some hapless civilians that had been Wrenched into a dark alternate future. Violet almost vibrating up and down in a hug with excitement: we saved people! We saved people! A moment of hope.

*Tried to tell myself.* The older girl’s words almost plucked this hope from thin air, presenting it, delicately toying with it, a sort of unspoken doom lingering over the statement, and thus over the notion Violet had placed so much of her recent hopes into: tried and failed?

Though she didn’t intend it, in that moment, Tay had placed herself into the pose of a cat playing with a thing with feathers.

“What - Who do you think you are now?” Tay finally asks.

Violet exhaled, the tension broken for a moment. “Oh. That.” She cleared her throat, not sure how to explain the weave of destiny; it was probably too late at night to begin a description with metaphysics. Especially when you weren’t sure if it was better to claim physical reality emanated directly from Fate or was merely preceded by it as a coterminal expression of a higher order reality; and Violet  definitely didn’t have the math to back any of it up anyhow. “That’s… kind of a complicated question?”

Violet screwed up her face, looking for more words. She’d had a lot of trouble in the past, trying to express what happened to her. “When I say they changed me, I don’t mean ‘the experience affected me,’ although it did; I mean, in a very direct way they *changed* me. If that makes sense?”

Tay frowns. “What do you mean?”

“OK,” She sighs heavily. “They have this sort of…. a technology that can redefine you on an-- I want to say on a *narrative* level?”

“Short / tall; slow / fast; weak / strong; kind / cruel.” She continues. “Put things in your nature, in your soul; take other things out. Change who you *are* on some kind of way that goes way, way beyond just rearranging atoms. It’s-- a kind of experience most people have trouble wrapping their heads around.” Violet looked up, focusing on Tay for the first time in a bit, as if only dimly beginning to piece together the similarity in their experiences.
“I dunno. Maybe you can?”
A pause.
“What was it like when you….?”

Tay is quiet for a moment, nervously clawing at the counter, leaving thin curls of wood in a pile.

“I don’t remember very well. I remember… pain, obviously, and a coldness, and a sense of… falling? Like into a bottomless well. Then… nothing, for a long time. Maybe forever. Then darkness again, but a physical darkness, a real darkness. Dirt under my fingernails. The moon....” She stops, shaking her head. “I could smell everything. Every person who had been at my funeral, their scents lingering on the grass. I could tell that one of them had a cold, which ones were family... I could see every leaf on a tree on the other side of the graveyard, feel instinctively how close to sunrise it was - I was filled with more strength than I ever had in my life. Not that that’s weird, I guess, I had been sick for all of it, just - have you ever looked at a - a rock, or a car, or a metal wall, and just… known you could rip it apart with your bare hands and it wouldn’t even be hard?”

Violet’s rapt expression indicates that she has. Though physically enhanced, she probably wasn’t exactly as strong as Avesta-- but where Tay could revel in the raw physicality of her power; Violet looked at the world and saw where it was weak, the point on the wall that would bring the house down. She lived in a world that told you exactly how to break it.

Tay laughs uncomfortably. “It was exhilarating. And terrifying. I thought I had a new lease on life. Death. Whatever.”

“It didn’t take me long to realize other things were different too, though. I looked at people and I saw prey. You can’t be around people when you have to stop yourself from hurting them, and even when I wasn’t hungry I just got so \*angry\* and - and the only people who understood were not good influences.”

“I mean, *right!?*” Violet blurts, loud, before covering her mouth, because it’s like four in the morning. More quietly, she continues. “Not-- not the hunger, but I feel so angry *all the time*. I want to hit things; I *like* hitting things, I like violence, in a way that-- just wasn’t part of me before. And it feels thrilling and joyful and terrifying and sick and awful all at the same time. And I don’t even know how much is because they altered me, or how much is stuff I didn’t know about myself before being given the opportunity, or how much is because I’m different because I actually have something to be angry about.”

Tay nods. Life as a superhero certainly was full of good causes and terrible people with very punchable faces; she is sure she would be angry even if she was normal.

Violet’s diminishing tones continue: “I… know what it’s like to be afraid of hurting people, too…” and she’s back to doing that thing where she’s only half talking to her interlocutor. ”It’s…. why I don’t leave the base without supervision. Because I’m always afraid I could lose...” and the final word is silent.

Tay nods.

"I was afraid of that for a long time, too. It's one of the reasons I came to Halcyon. I figured if something goes wrong at least I'd be surrounded by people with the best chance of taking me down. That worked, too - one time during training I lost control and tried to bite Seth and just couldn't get through his skin." She laughs. "It was funny - the exact thing I was afraid of happened and all that resulted was me dangling from his arm like an angry limp noodle."

Violet laughs, because the image was genuinely funny. “That’s certainly what I’m hoping,” she says, growing more serious. “But I wasn’t… designed for mob hits or special forces operations or to muscle recalcitrant oligarchs; there are a lot easier ways of doing all those things. The people who made me intended me to be a weapon to use against superheroes. Odds are a lot better here, but there’s nobody I’m really *confident* I definitely wouldn’t be able to hurt if I just let go. Maybe EliZe?”

"Hmm," Tay muses, "Maybe, but there's a lot of us. I also think I could take most of the people on the team, to be honest, but we're pretty much always out in groups of like four or five. Like, I went berserk more times after that, but I was never alone, especially after I found Ellen. I hurt people but not too badly and I got better at controlling it over time, and now I'm like, obviously not completely normal and safe or anything but I can mostly trust myself and I know the people I am close to can take it and most importantly," She looks straight at Violet, "Most importantly I now know from experience that even at my worst I won't kill my loved ones." She winces. "Not anymore."

She raises a hand as if to try and comfort the other girl. It stops midway, Tay looking at it uncertainly, then she retracts her claws and puts it on Violet's shoulder, trying to be reassuring.

"You can get there too. If we can tame a vampire I know we can tame whatever you've got going on, and you're not alone."

Violet flinches involuntarily. Not a lot; it's real hard to touch her when she doesn’t want to be touched, and she relents after the briefest of moments. As much as she finds herself identifying with Tay, it’s predicated on also identifying Tay with the part of herself that she sees as monstrous. Even so, contact is comforting.

“You and Ellen…?” Violet asks, dangling. It sounded like something happened there, something at her worst.

Tay grimaces, both at the question and at the flinch. *Great job, Katayoun. Scare the new girl.* She retracts her hand.

“We were stuck in a spaceship once and my stores ran out. It… wasn’t great, but… that’s actually what taught me that I can, uh.” She blushes, awkwardly running a hand through her hair. “You know…. Feed… Without killing. The only time I did it before that…” She trails off, figuring it was obvious enough what happened without having to say it.

“My point is, I learned I don’t have to be a murder machine.”

Violet nods, solemnly, quietly assessing Tay as a role model for healthy management of one’s largely unhealthy aggressions.

“Maybe. I’m not sure. ‘Murder machine’ is a good way of describing what they wanted out of me.  I don’t have your hunger; I was supposed to be controlled, a weapon. I… fight the stuff inside, and I can do that mostly. Keep from slipping, keep from falling in too deep,” she hoped Tay understood what she meant, the way it felt to lose control like that. “But when the Crimson Circle was using me, I was different; I didn’t care, I just obeyed. They had systems in place to make me comply.. I have these… command codes stuck in my head. My…”

She paused-- how does one explain Lachesis? Best not to dig too deep there.

“My sister used one to remove my loyalty conditioning, to deprogram me. But I think the commands are still there. One day, I’m going to be out there in the field, or I’m going to be watching TV, and somebody’s going to say the wrong phrase, and my soul’s going to pop like a soap bubble.“

"Okay," Tay responds, nodding, "I won't argue that then. You know best the ways in which you're fucked up and some rando trying to convince you otherwise isn't gonna help. But like, if there's things you can't change then focus on the shit you can, yeah? Like," She stands up, walking over to the fridge and gesturing at the shelf full of blood. "If you can't stop drinking blood, then get it somewhere that isn't directly from the source." She closes the fridge again and turns back to Violet. "If you can't remove your triggers, then learn what they are and how to avoid them. And if you can't do that…" She shrugs. "Make the best of the time you've got until you get… re-activated, I guess?"

She walks back to her seat, sitting back down opposite Violet, and taking another sip of the bag she had left on the counter.

“Make the best of the time I’ve got…” Violet murmurs, nodding. It sounded good?  “To be honest. I don’t even know if I’m *deactivated*.  I’m not really back to what I was, exactly. I don’t know if I’m some weird hybrid state, or if the conditioning was wiped but the data and brain chemistry changes stuck, or if she just reprogrammed me for her own purposes.”

Tay nods. "So you're different than you used to be, or you might not be the same person or whatever. I… I worry sometimes that the real me is dead, you know? Like, dead dead, not like me. That Katayoun Avesta, the soul that used to be in this body, is in heaven, and I am just some demon or whatever running around in the shell she left behind. The thought scared me and I am not gonna pretend it doesn't still, but like, so what?" She grins. "If I'm not her, I'm still someone, and i can't change that but I can change what I do about it."

"That’s…. That’s fair,” Violet considered, nodding; she hadn’t previously worked through what that kind of existential trauma must be like for Tay. But she seemed to have worked through it--  had a much better handle on it than Violet did, at any rate. How?

“Either I am now, and have always been me; in which case I am morally culpable for the things I did under their influence,” Violet considered, drawing the parallel. “Or else, the opposite is true-- if I’m not the same person, then I’m not to blame for those things, but I’m not really Violet Park, either,  just some… thing walking around in her skin. Complicit in my own murder. In some ways, I’m not sure which possibility scares me more?"

Tay looks at Violet for a minute, then walks over to the fridge again. She opens the freezer section, then walks back to where Violet is sitting and deposits a tub of ice cream in front of her, shoving it towards Violet.

"I'll be honest, I got no answers for you. But there's this?"