Supernova

Chapter Fifty Seven - Found Family Values

A/N: I'm just getting more unhinged with my chapter photos as time goes on but hey that's how the cookie crumbles, I guess. Anyways. 

I vaguely remembered being transported back to campus.

Elias promised he'd care for me, and his hands moved me through getting undressed, shedding the dirt and the grime and the guilt and the shock in the shower, and redressed. I kept the pins. I wanted them close to me. I didn't have the energy or mental capacity to wonder if that was wrong. I needed someone and he was there. That's all I knew for sure. Finally, he tucked the pouch of bullets deep into my closet. After all that was settled, he took me back downstairs and into one of the corners of the room where he wouldn't sully the sofas or chairs with paralytic. I didn't know how or when he'd managed to change, but he had, I noticed as I curled up my body as tightly as I could, head rested on his lap, and asked him over and over in shaky Swedish what she was doing, why she was here, was I going insane? He didn't have answers and he didn't try to give any. He pulled my sweater's hood over my head. In response to every question, all he told me was that I had protected him, and he would shield me, he would shield me, he would shield me.

And despite everything, I actually believed him.

I must have fallen asleep in my delirium, because I remember waking to footsteps and feeling indifferent towards them. There were soft words being exchanged over my head, the content and tone of which was unreachable to me.

"What is she saying?" I did hear Momo ask at one point.

"Nonsense," Elias answered. "Today's mission spooked her."

Was he giving a diplomatically shallow accurate answer? Was that the correct word for how I was feeling about what had just happened? Melanie had been so effectively shoved to the recesses of my unconscious mind all these years, clawing her way to the surface very rarely and briefly before I drowned her in the black waters of my subconscious again, but she had effectively made it to shore and stood in front of me now, her hands on my throat, and it was collapsing under her grip. I'd missed her and mourned her, but she had been like dust in the wind, barely visible and barely existent. Now, she was here and she was real and there was a lot I understood about her abandoning and turning her back on the family. There was also a lot that I didn't understand. I'd once understood why she'd run, but most often I did not. How did I feel now?

The next thing that I could audibly register, after who knows how much time had passed, was a sharp inhale and a set of heavy footsteps. "What the fuck happened to her?"

"Katuski," Elias said, with a lot of relief. "Take her."

I didn't open my eyes, but I allowed the warmth to bring me halfway back into real life. I pressed my face into it, wrapped my arms around it, pushed into it. I stopped crying and stopped stammering. I could hear voices and words and the tones that drove them, but I still refused to open my eyes, lift my face, or respond.

"How'd it go?" I heard Demon ask flatly.

"Well," Elias answered. "The girl was saved."

"What the fuck happened to her?" I heard again, close to my ear, with a tone of harshness that was especially reserved.

"She's alright," Elias said. "Just spooked."

"Why?" Demon asked, his voice dark and cold.

Elias told him that they'd discuss it later. That answer was not satisfactory. Luckily for Demon, among the previously faceless and voiceless people that had come into the space, were Uraraka, Tsu, who were there, as well as Kaminari and Todoroki, who had heard enough. Demon paused and asked surprisingly intelligent and inquisitive questions, with an even more surprising lack of scoffing. I was ever so grateful for the warmth, because what I was hearing and all that we'd missed made me absolutely sick.