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= BEFORE =
IN THE DAY and age of Tony Starks, Bruce Banners, and Hope Pyms — superheroes were more and more common than one, many years ago, may have thought. Scientists tinkering with space shrapnel, toying with wires in order to grant themselves the powers they can never naturally possess, but can create. Rarely these days did people think too long about where the powers came from, the meaning of it all, what it takes to be special, not when some of the smartest minds in the worlds were figuring it out all on their own.
Wakandian titanium-alloy and other sourced and mined materials, gadgets made for years in a lab, serums used to experiment on all those who volunteer — and trust, there were more than plenty, all sweaty and nervous and teeth bared and snapping — with eager eyes and a thirst to prove themselves. A hunger to play God.
It strikes Serena Sanchez as odd that no one has ever taken the time to address the other way it can happen. The one that science has yet to fully explain, even in their years of advanced technology and space relationships and people flying in the sky and punching through planets. No — people don't like the ways that are ugly.
People want the science. The glittery glamour of being able to at least understand, on a textbook level, what has happened to them. No one wants the second way. If she's being honest, Serena didn't either. But it's what she got.
What modern-day scientists refuse to talk about, what with all their distractions of using leftovers of Stark technology and poking and prodding at rocks and minerals that glow in the dark and burn if you get too close; what people don't understand is that there's another way to become the more-than-human being they crave. And it's not pretty.
Serena Sanchez died. Then, she came back, and she left no survivors with her.
There was no bright light, no warm feeling as she reached for her grandfather's hand in Heaven, no angels singing in a choir. Just cold, empty darkness, and a skull-shattering pain that made her want to tear out her own eyes, that made her scream so hard her body jolted back awake, covered in blood. Her own, her parents', the girl doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in the seat across from her's. It was carnage and disgusting and awful and — and — and — and she shouldn't have survived.
There was physically no way she should've survived a subway collision that horrific, that extreme, with only a few broken bones; and when she was sent to the hospital ribs sore and bruising, coughing up blood through the blubbering tears, the doctors marveled at how she managed to be the lone survivor in a tragedy of nearly fifty-six people.
That was playing God.
It was the third week in the hospital that she realized something was different. Off. She was freezing, and she had been freezing ever since she woke back up, alone and terrified in a crushed, metal box, shrieking for help until her throat went raw and she saw the glimmers of a an industrial flashlight. Her skin felt like her skin, soft and torn and stitched up; but she was cold, the kind of cold that traveled to her bones and settled there, so cold and hollow, it almost felt like absolutely nothing.
She grabbed her blanket and pulled it up against her body tighter, praying it would go away on its own. She'd read something in school that year about the effects of shock on the body, and she had no reason to doubt that this was yet another one of them. Focusing on being cold felt a hell of a lot better than focusing on the fact that her family was dead, and instead of being with them — wherever they were — she was still here. Hooked up to a heart monitor.
It was an hour later that she realized that something was wrong.
She went into the bathroom in the dark of night, legs stiff and aching but still mobile, which was yet another miracle, and she flicked on the light and stared into the mirror to look at her shattered cheekbone and the stitches on her temple. When she saw her reflection, however, a scream ripped out of her at an octave she didn't even know her body could reach, the sound reverberating throughout the entire room and bouncing around her pounding head.
When the nurses came running in, Serena was crying on the ground, raising her finger up to point at the now broken shards of glass that collected around her. Because she didn't quite know how to explain that instead of her reflection, what she saw was a black shadowy, tendril mass staring back her, wrapping itself around her like a vine.
