POWER MANIACS (girlxgirlxgirl)

36. A water ballet

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⚠️ murder, death, blood, open wounds, violence, kidnapping, drugging, dangerous and/or sharp weapons, guns ⚠️

Sometimes, what a person needs is pure determination. Without it, everything is useless.

Dahlia pushes herself to leave the room in her head where Enya's thoughts are loud and clear. She looks for a way out, head turning from side to side in the long corridor of doors stretching both to the left and to the right. It's going to take a long time for her to figure all of this out, and there is a chance she may never return. But Dahlia is convinced that this is just what she needs to do. Leave, so that she may wake up against all odds, medications and doctors and face a common enemy together with Enya, Irie and the rest of the Powered.

She runs down the hallway with stars for a ceiling and a galaxy for a floor, runs and runs but there doesn't seem to be a way out. Growing more frustrated by the second, Dahlia decides to simply just stop running. She swears the door next to her looks exactly like the door she first saw when she came here, she must be running in circles. There is no way out, not to the sides. The only way to go would be... down. Dahlia's head twists down to stare at the floor, which feels real but looks like a direct hole, or window into space. Gathering all of her strength and might, she lifts up her foot and brings it down, hitting the floor again and again. There must be a way out of here somewhere.

Her subconscious is stubborn and the medication keeping her asleep must be doing wonders, but Dahlia is not someone who gives up easily. So she keeps stomping on the ground, harder and harder, even when it feels like her foot is breaking. It's an illusion, Dahlia knows that, so she continues. Nothing can stop her.

Her father died and so did her mother, but she still grew up to be a good person, she still managed to survive.

Her father left hundreds of thousands in debt on her shoulders, debt she didn't even know he had. And still she managed to stay positive and hard working, knowing that one day all of her work would pay off.

She was abandoned by her best friend before they could even graduate high school, and still she searched for her for months, not giving up hope until she eventually found her again.

Her dream of going to university and studying computer science was ruined with one simple letter, and yet she continued to hope and dream, working hard to uphold a life all on her own.

There is nothing that can stop her now. This might be a more dangerous issue, this might be something more serious than getting rejected from university, but for Dahlia it isn't. For Dahlia, now, this is nothing. And slowly cracks in the floor begin to spread, from her foot hitting the ground, but also from her strong will and determination. She tries every trick in the book, every way she has ever been taught to wake herself up from a bad dream. And slowly but surely, the cracks continue to form and spread, until the whole space beneath her looks like a shattered mirror.

One last push. She needs something more to finally break the threshold. So Dahlia decides to get herself worked up.

She thinks about all those hours she spent suffering, working, out in the cold rain or in her stupid shared, mold infested apartment and tries to make herself wake up from the horrible imagery. But no matter how horrible her old bosses and customers were, no matter how harshly she shivered in the cold or how early she had to wake up despite being sick and hungry and tired, it's not enough. It doesn't wake enough emotion in her.

So instead she thinks of Irie and the Powered. She thinks about all the different things they could've gone through at the facility, imagines every possible scenario of horror and torture and brutal loneliness and sadness. She might know her own pain, she might be used to her own pain, but she just can't handle the thought of the Powered suffering here for no reason at all. At least out there, in the city, she had her freedom. In here they are imprisoned. It's a nightmare for her to imagine everything they could've done. When looking for Irie, she had always hoped she would at least be safe somewhere. To not be dead in a ditch, to not be kidnapped by human traffickers. But this is just everything she had feared and more. And all the things she has learned over the weeks spent here combine into one, big burst of emotion, that finally lights the idea of rebellion in her head brighter than ever before.