GODSENT | reyge

2-5; born to be broken

Reyna's sister is in the in-between. It's not that Sage can have any true way of knowing, but she can feel it — how her soul hangs in limbo, having too much to leave and having too little to stay.

Viper stands over her, checking her vitals, tired lines underneath her eyes. Knowing her, she had been losing sleep trying to figure out how to improve Lucia's condition. Among other things.

"She is stable for now," Viper's voice is hoarse as she leans back, taking up her clipboard from the side table and scribbling furiously. "There is no telling how long this can stay for."

Sage bunches her jaw. Lucia's skin has lost most of its colour, lips cracked. "If only I had been strong enough."

At this, Viper snarls. Her grip is white on the clipboard. "Well, there's no point in bringing this up now, is there?"

Sage should've known it was a bad idea to let that slip. It was all her fault, it was. She had been too young, too inexperienced to shoulder that many burdens all at once. It nearly broke her. On some days, they still do, in momentary weakness. But she's learnt enough to not let herself crumble.

Viper looks taken aback by her own outburst. Sighing, she drops her clipboard back onto the table and picks up her mug of coffee; it's chipped from when Omen had accidentally knocked it over that one time.

Whenever Sage stops to get a good look at him, at his pain and agony, it is almost enough to shatter her entirely.

"They were my mistakes." The familiar lump in her throat returns, a frequent visitor during sleepless nights. "I need to atone for them." She looks back down at Lucia. A lovely, sweet child she had been. "This can be my redemption."

"Just...do what matters now," Viper says in a strangled tone, gaze flicking down to her watch as she lifts her wrist. "Reyna's been given authority to access Lucia's ward, I take?"

"Granted yesterday."

Viper hums, a clipped sound. She bends over to take one last look at Lucia. "I should make my move."

The door slides open. There's a lull — Sage almost reaches for a non-existent pistol. A knife hangs in the thinness of the air, ready to slice down at any moment. She swallows.

Reyna does not take her eyes off Viper. Does not say a word. Brushes past her like she was nothing more than a ghost. She stops in front of Sage, staring her down with the rings of her eyes glowing an eerie purple.

Viper slips out of the room, the door closing shut with a soft hiss.

Sage daren't break eye contact. The anger is there, simmering, in the pierce of Reyna's gaze.

She finds the ability to use her mouth again. Rising, she manages to pipe out: "I should go."

Yes, she should. Reyna should have privacy.

"What do you want with my Lucia?" A hand around her wrist prevents her from leaving. Suspicion colours Reyna's gaze, and when Sage turns back around, her grip only tightens.

"Her recovery," is all she provides.

There's a dark beauty that hangs around Reyna — with every word she speaks and every move she makes. It arrests Sage in a chokehold, takes hold of her heart and squeezes. Like Reyna's soul-devouring powers extended outside of her own conscious control. She's a magnetic force, and Sage doesn't have it in her to be afraid, not when she she can see the protective snarl on Reyna's red lips.

Reyna narrows her eyes and searches Sage's for any deception. But there is no deception to be found. Not that Reyna appears convinced, however, as she glances back at her sister in the bed, torn.

"Brimstone has asked us to lay low for a while," Sage says, before Reyna could say anything else. "We caused quite the commotion in the Caribbean. K/SEC has been keeping tabs of the abandoned teleporter there, it seems. Missions will be minimal."

Reyna stared at her a while longer, nods and releases Sage from her clawed grip.

There is no amount of apologies that Sage can provide to Reyna that would make her even an ounce forgivable. A pang in her chest pokes at her when Reyna settles in the chair, leans forward and strokes Lucia's hair, whispering something she cannot hear.

There is nothing Sage can do to make Reyna forgive her. So she gives her this respite.

Sage leaves the ward, bile in her throat. She needs a distraction, so she moves to the common room, where Omen's sat, trimming one of his many bonsai trees.

He's already looking at her when she enters the room.

Her mask cracks.

"How is the patient?" He redirects his attention to the bonsai tree in front of him.

"Stable." Sage sighs, taking the chair next to him. Omen's hands are careful as his scissors snip at the thin branches.

It falls into the soil. Omen lets out a pleased hum. "I can hear them. The souls you feed her. I can hear the souls Reyna takes, too. Like how you call back the souls of the people you revive."

The blue fire behind the slits of his hood pulsates. His soul is still there, though not all of it, and Sage curses her incompetence. If only she had been faster, smarter — this power of hers is useless if her mind is weak. Maybe it'll hurt less if she didn't remember much of her adolescence.

"The robot has it out for her," he says in afterthought, collecting the fallen branches neatly with a bandage-wrapped hand. "If it's from the future...would it perhaps know about my past?"

"No!" Sage slams her hand down onto the table, her palm stinging where her skin had made contact. He mustn't know. He cannot know what both her and Viper had failed to do. "Never ask him that."

Omen's dropped the branches in stupor, all energy and hope of routine conversation having left the room with Sage's outburst. It drives the fear home when she can perfectly picture the exact face he'd make while he had been human.

死了. She's messed up. Dropping her hand, she bolts out of the common room. Her feet slam hard into the metal floor, carrying her to anywhere, anywhere, so long as she didn't have to confront the image of Jabez strapped to the examination table, hoping to hold all the remaining parts of him together. Sabine crying, screaming, yelling at the doctors for them to do something because he can be saved — then turning, desperately, to a young, ignorant, immature Ling Ying—and then, flashes of dark skin, hair, and glinting white teeth, the silhouettes of two sisters—

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

It's Reyna (because of course it is), one foot out the door to Lucia's ward. She steps out fully, scanning Sage's sweaty face, the heaving of her chest. The shadow is still in her eyes, how they dart to Sage's own, and it's something that Sage has been running from, yet pulls at her with a magnetism, pulls her back into the pits of hellfire.

But she won't acquiesce to it. Not today. So before Reyna can say a word, she's taken off again, praying that she won't be followed.