Victoria's eyes flooded with tears and I knew I was in.
"We all just wanna win, Victoria. Which means that can't be what makes us different. We both know we are. But it's got nothing to do with whether or not we want to win." I stood up.
"Are you evil, Victoria?"
She didn't move. She didn't respond. She stayed right where she was, not moving a muscle.
"Are you evil, Victoria?" I pressed. She wasn't deaf. She could hear me. And I knew she knew the answer.
"Victoria. Sunt tibi mali?"
She didn't respond. She probably didn't understand. Heavens knows how she couldn't it was the same thing, same tone, same number of words. Now I think back it was strange that the warrior from before spoke latin. He had understood and responded latin. I didn't know where I learnt it from but I knew it wasn't common. It was a dead language and now only people taking classics really studied it. Maybe he'd studied classics.
"Victoria." She remained unmoving. "Victoria."
"VICTORIA, I ASKED YOU A QUAESTIO, SUNT TIBI MALI, ARE YOU EVIL? ARE YOU BAD? DO YOU HAVE SOCIOPATHIC TENDENCIES?" She shook. Not her head but her whole body. Violent shakes wracked through her bones.
The sky grew impossibly more dark, and the rain, which had at some point calmed completely, came back in full force. She stood drenched in rain, wand clenched tightly in her left hand.
Then she opened her mouth and a single sound was elicited from her lips.
"NO."
And then she looked up at me. I was very close to her, practically nose to nose and she would not back down.
"I AM NOT EVIL. YOU AND I ARE MILES APART AND I DON'T NEED TO KNOW WHY."
I felt something strange in that moment.
Why.
The word circulated through my mind like a bumper car, crashing into my thoughts and invading each memory I had.
Why did my dad hit me? Why was Professor Daemon always disappointed? Why did that man say he was an old friend?
And why did I feel there was more calling me, even when I had all I could ever wish for. I felt complete and yet something out there was calling me. There was something out there and it was waiting for me.
Victoria blasted me with a large jet of water. I was flung backwards. I floated up a bit and blasted an equal stream of fire. She countered it with water and it was like a scene from a movie. Water and fire blasting each other, neither giving up for fear of being blasted into oblivion.
I thought about how weak the elements were in comparison to fire. You can touch earth, you can touch water, technically you can touch air, but fire? That's out of range. You can't touch fire. Thus humans can only master three elements. And it will always be that way. They are so heavily reliant on the three elements you have that you don't bother reaching out to the fourth. You've decided you can survive without the fourth element.
Victoria began to strain, and the fire moved closer to her.
"Water isn't dangerous." I whispered under my breath. and Just before the fire touched her she flinched away and I knew she wasn't ready to die. It wasn't her time, I could feel it. I retracted the fire and she must've felt the loss of heat because she opened her eyes. I was flung down the street by the water and I hit a car, I rolled over it and landed on the other side. I lay,perfectly still, holding my breath so she'd think I was dead. Then I lay.
I heard her walk over and look at me. She kicked me with her boot and I rolled over. Still, my eyes remained open and I didn't breathe.
"Dead already, Mortua Diabolus. I doubt that would've killed you."
I thought that would've tricked her. I prepared to face her smirking face but before I did she spoke again.
"I knew you were weaker than me." And then I heard her walk away. Was she really stupid enough to believe she'd killed me? I guess that was working to my advantage today but she was going to make a really bad hero.
I waited a few more minutes before getting up and walking home. I had a large cut on my face.
This is probably a good time to mention I'm a superhuman.
Along with powers, my great grandmother also had abnormal bone density, meaning she could walk away from a plane crash unscathed. Theoretically. Obviously there weren't planes in her time so she couldn't have gotten into a plane crash in the first place. Anyway, the increased bone density was due to a mutated gene, which also happened to skip a couple generations but it hadn't skipped me. Thus, I had always gotten into scrapes as a kid, and I had always gotten away fine, even when other kids had been scarred for life.
I was once on a train and it had randomly crashed into a wall. It was never discovered why this happened, but witnesses described a light like it came from the heavens had appeared before the train hit the wall, and then after, a figure had flown out of the train, and her eyes shone like the sun. The witnesses described the light from her eyes as almost blinding, but they claim they couldn't look away from the beauty of the girl. Apparently she had sprouted white wings and flown away. They thought she was an angel. Which could obviously have been true. But no one quite fitting her description had ever appeared ever again.
Students at my school had started rumours that she had returned to heaven. Or that she had been me. But I told them it wasn't me and I knew that because A) I am me so I would know. and B) I saw the woman, and she was a woman, and I couldn't have seen myself, so it had to be someone else.
And that was that. I forgot about the event so I never thought about that woman ever again. But I was thinking about her now. She was strange. She must've been a woman on the train. And yet she couldn't be found on any records. No woman matching that description had bought a ticket that day.
She was a total mystery woman.
