For Treason: Act II, scene iii
May. 6th, 2026 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsFourteen deals with being alone for the first time ever. Except she’s not exactly alone? It’s confusing, and even the inside of her own mind is no longer a safe haven.
TW: Medical Experimentation, Indoctrination, Identity Issues
Within the collective consciousness that was Fourteen, a battle wasn't raging. It wasn't raging because battles, by their nature, require at least two combatants, and within the gestalt that was this new Council, there had always been and as ever only was a single one.
That single One who had been five but was now only two was literally split. She was an entity of thought, created not of a single mind but of two combined, one original and one deeply and irresponsibly edited by science and designed with neurological pathways already established according to a design, rather than a life already lived. And one that, inexorably, moved to eclipse the other bit by bit as days passed.
There was no battle raging, but if there was, it probably looked something like this.
--
Celeste looked out over the visual representation of her mind and raged, because rage was easier than despair or fear. She stood on the bough of a massive tree, which did not so much rise above the landscape as it seemed to hold up the ceiling of the world. It towered over the land, and the shadows from its branches plunged the land below into perpetual twilight. The canopy stretched like a dome, shaped in a perfect arc as if tended by the hands of god, high enough to be unknowable from the ground.
The bark of the massive tree, which Fourteen had modeled after a monkeypod tree, was bronze and gleamed in the light of the brilliant pink sun above. Its leaves were shining steel. Their razor-sharp edges added another layer of protection to the fruits hidden within, carved of gemstones of every shade imaginable. Trapped within their facets, Fourteen could see reflections of her own memories.
It stood in the middle of a massive maze, one that snaked from one horizon to the other. The walls were high and smooth stone, looking as though they'd been carved from the bedrock of the world rather than erected by mortal means. White metal ivy with shimmering golden leaves ran along the top, thinner and more delicate than a necklace chain yet impossibly strong and no less dangerous than the leaves of the tree itself. It was like the labyrinth of old; invaders may enter, but the prize would always be tauntingly just out of reach above them.
It was Fourteen's pride, a product of a decade of careful cultivation of mental defenses and careful pruning, meant to be as majestic and enigmatic as the woman that Fourteen desperately hoped to become some day.
And it was in ruins.
Massive chunks of the canopy were missing, as limbs and even an entire bough simply ended in twisted metal as if the branch had been torn off. The maze, seemingly infinitely vast and impossibly complicated, had been gutted. Sections had gone missing entirely, replaced by small clearings where the walls were entirely missing. Other sections were crumbling, or the walls were misaligned, or they went nowhere and to nothing as if it had been created by bad AI art.
All around the tree, just out of the range of the dangerous steel canopy, mountains stretched to the clouds, turning her endless maze into a very finite and very cramped valley of stone. Where the maze met the valley walls, Celeste could see the start of corruption spreading among the vines and over the ruined walls.
In the sky, peeking through the canopy of the massive bronze tree, a rogue moon had appeared, as it crept towards the sun...
Across the maze, still miles away but closer than before, the sixth Frost sister crept ever closer, closing in on Celeste as the moon encroached on the sun. Rot seemed to hover in the air around her like a miasma, clinging to every solid object she passed and eating away it.
She did not seem to be in any rush. As if she knew that Celeste would be there waiting for her no matter how long it took. She seemed to drift more than walk, like a ghost making her way through the winding maze. Rotting everything in her wake.
Up in the bronze tree, Celeste hummed a nameless melody and let the cold burn of her fury guide her actions. Delicately, ivy curled around her fingertips and through it, she could reach out and touch each and every distant corner of her inner world. Walls began to slowly shift and grind. The rot that clung to the walls made a bed for the rapidly spreading vines that shot up from the cold earth, holding back the decay like a mockery of a bandage. Occasionally, a thorned vine would snake across in front of her, attempting to wrap around the sixth Frost's flawless neck.
Anything that tried to touch her would immediately rot away, though. She looked almost amused by the attempts - like a lioness watching her cub "attack" something. Her eyes snapped up to fix on Fourteen, a cold smile curling at the corners of her lips.
With a hard blink, Celeste scrambled the maze in the area where the sixth Frost sister stalked. Paths had been open shifted to stone walls, and certain stone walls disappeared into open pathways that stretched ahead.
It had the added benefit of repairing most of the damage that the sixth Frost sister had done. In that moment, it was almost like nothing had happened to begin with.
Almost.
But it only ever takes a crack.
One break in the surface for the rot to creep in. Even if the skin heals immediately after, the damage is done. It would continue to work from the inside, to wear away unseen until it was too late to stop.
She looked up at her sister again, offering her one last smile before disappearing. This battle was over. But the war had barely begun. And Celeste didn't have the stamina to win.
---
Fourteen awoke slowly, with a sort of sluggish and heavy feeling pressing in behind her eyelids. It felt like a weighted blanket had been placed over her, pressing down on her limbs and locking her in place. An unpleasant taste sat heavy on her tongue, one that she recognized from her 'hands on' medical training with Weapon X: sedatives. Her lips were chapped; she did her best to clumsily run her tongue over them.
Simultaneously from the next bed over, Fourteen jolted awake quickly, nearly flinching her way straight off the bed. She desperately grabbed onto the edge for support, doing her best to ensure that she would not find herself face first on the floor. Her breathing was rapid, heart beating painfully in her chest like she'd just run a marathon. She struggled to force her eyes to focus, but they kept sliding out of alignment,
Next to them... that was it. There were no other Fourteens nearby. Even if they'd been sedated as well, she'd be able to feel them as she came out of her sleep. It was one of the few constants with her unique situation: she fell asleep as one and she awoke as one. Always. If she couldn't feel some combination of Sophie, Irma, Phoebe, and Esme, they weren't here. That was worrying.
Somehow, she still had her mind. That, she would have said before now, was impossible. That was also worrying.
A mustachioed man in a white doctor's coat looked over at them, holding a mug of coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other. "Ah, I see you're awake, Miss...do you prefer Frost?"
Fourteen brutally quashed her first instinct, to rip into this person's mind with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and pull out the information she needed. As satisfying as it might feel in the moment, haste would just as likely get her killed as it would get her answers.
"Who are you?" she asked, even as she probed around in what felt like an extremely well-ordered but otherwise unprotected mind for the answers.
"The doctor, of course." He smiled, with a condescendingly paternal sort of look. "In the interest of fairness, though, I asked you a question and you responded with one." His tone spoke of the sort of magnanimity that only comes with being the one holding all the cards.
"And what," Fourteen continued, giving the new her a brutal side-eye, "is that?"
"She's you, of course." The tone was definitely more into amused and condescending the second time around. "I'm well aware that even the most organized and disciplined of minds cannot last forever against telepathy, and I am sure you are even now gleaning things from mine. So why do you ask questions to which you already know the answers?"
Because without Phoebe, her ability to dive deep into the man's memories was severely limited. Not that there was any world in which she would admit such a thing to an ally, much less an enemy.
"Consider it my small way of expressing my displeasure," she said instead.
With a twist of her will, she attempted to scramble the man's brain hard enough it would be coming out in clumps every time he blew his nose. She was bitterly unsurprised when it did not work.
The new Frost sister - the sixth sister, the one that has always been here of course, why would you ever think otherwise? - watched Celeste's struggle to accomplish something she absolutely could not be allowed to accomplish. And a sort of peace seem to extend from one Fourteen to the other.
It's okay. Everything is okay.
TW: Medical Experimentation, Indoctrination, Identity Issues
Within the collective consciousness that was Fourteen, a battle wasn't raging. It wasn't raging because battles, by their nature, require at least two combatants, and within the gestalt that was this new Council, there had always been and as ever only was a single one.
That single One who had been five but was now only two was literally split. She was an entity of thought, created not of a single mind but of two combined, one original and one deeply and irresponsibly edited by science and designed with neurological pathways already established according to a design, rather than a life already lived. And one that, inexorably, moved to eclipse the other bit by bit as days passed.
There was no battle raging, but if there was, it probably looked something like this.
--
Celeste looked out over the visual representation of her mind and raged, because rage was easier than despair or fear. She stood on the bough of a massive tree, which did not so much rise above the landscape as it seemed to hold up the ceiling of the world. It towered over the land, and the shadows from its branches plunged the land below into perpetual twilight. The canopy stretched like a dome, shaped in a perfect arc as if tended by the hands of god, high enough to be unknowable from the ground.
The bark of the massive tree, which Fourteen had modeled after a monkeypod tree, was bronze and gleamed in the light of the brilliant pink sun above. Its leaves were shining steel. Their razor-sharp edges added another layer of protection to the fruits hidden within, carved of gemstones of every shade imaginable. Trapped within their facets, Fourteen could see reflections of her own memories.
It stood in the middle of a massive maze, one that snaked from one horizon to the other. The walls were high and smooth stone, looking as though they'd been carved from the bedrock of the world rather than erected by mortal means. White metal ivy with shimmering golden leaves ran along the top, thinner and more delicate than a necklace chain yet impossibly strong and no less dangerous than the leaves of the tree itself. It was like the labyrinth of old; invaders may enter, but the prize would always be tauntingly just out of reach above them.
It was Fourteen's pride, a product of a decade of careful cultivation of mental defenses and careful pruning, meant to be as majestic and enigmatic as the woman that Fourteen desperately hoped to become some day.
And it was in ruins.
Massive chunks of the canopy were missing, as limbs and even an entire bough simply ended in twisted metal as if the branch had been torn off. The maze, seemingly infinitely vast and impossibly complicated, had been gutted. Sections had gone missing entirely, replaced by small clearings where the walls were entirely missing. Other sections were crumbling, or the walls were misaligned, or they went nowhere and to nothing as if it had been created by bad AI art.
All around the tree, just out of the range of the dangerous steel canopy, mountains stretched to the clouds, turning her endless maze into a very finite and very cramped valley of stone. Where the maze met the valley walls, Celeste could see the start of corruption spreading among the vines and over the ruined walls.
In the sky, peeking through the canopy of the massive bronze tree, a rogue moon had appeared, as it crept towards the sun...
Across the maze, still miles away but closer than before, the sixth Frost sister crept ever closer, closing in on Celeste as the moon encroached on the sun. Rot seemed to hover in the air around her like a miasma, clinging to every solid object she passed and eating away it.
She did not seem to be in any rush. As if she knew that Celeste would be there waiting for her no matter how long it took. She seemed to drift more than walk, like a ghost making her way through the winding maze. Rotting everything in her wake.
Up in the bronze tree, Celeste hummed a nameless melody and let the cold burn of her fury guide her actions. Delicately, ivy curled around her fingertips and through it, she could reach out and touch each and every distant corner of her inner world. Walls began to slowly shift and grind. The rot that clung to the walls made a bed for the rapidly spreading vines that shot up from the cold earth, holding back the decay like a mockery of a bandage. Occasionally, a thorned vine would snake across in front of her, attempting to wrap around the sixth Frost's flawless neck.
Anything that tried to touch her would immediately rot away, though. She looked almost amused by the attempts - like a lioness watching her cub "attack" something. Her eyes snapped up to fix on Fourteen, a cold smile curling at the corners of her lips.
With a hard blink, Celeste scrambled the maze in the area where the sixth Frost sister stalked. Paths had been open shifted to stone walls, and certain stone walls disappeared into open pathways that stretched ahead.
It had the added benefit of repairing most of the damage that the sixth Frost sister had done. In that moment, it was almost like nothing had happened to begin with.
Almost.
But it only ever takes a crack.
One break in the surface for the rot to creep in. Even if the skin heals immediately after, the damage is done. It would continue to work from the inside, to wear away unseen until it was too late to stop.
She looked up at her sister again, offering her one last smile before disappearing. This battle was over. But the war had barely begun. And Celeste didn't have the stamina to win.
---
Fourteen awoke slowly, with a sort of sluggish and heavy feeling pressing in behind her eyelids. It felt like a weighted blanket had been placed over her, pressing down on her limbs and locking her in place. An unpleasant taste sat heavy on her tongue, one that she recognized from her 'hands on' medical training with Weapon X: sedatives. Her lips were chapped; she did her best to clumsily run her tongue over them.
Simultaneously from the next bed over, Fourteen jolted awake quickly, nearly flinching her way straight off the bed. She desperately grabbed onto the edge for support, doing her best to ensure that she would not find herself face first on the floor. Her breathing was rapid, heart beating painfully in her chest like she'd just run a marathon. She struggled to force her eyes to focus, but they kept sliding out of alignment,
Next to them... that was it. There were no other Fourteens nearby. Even if they'd been sedated as well, she'd be able to feel them as she came out of her sleep. It was one of the few constants with her unique situation: she fell asleep as one and she awoke as one. Always. If she couldn't feel some combination of Sophie, Irma, Phoebe, and Esme, they weren't here. That was worrying.
Somehow, she still had her mind. That, she would have said before now, was impossible. That was also worrying.
A mustachioed man in a white doctor's coat looked over at them, holding a mug of coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other. "Ah, I see you're awake, Miss...do you prefer Frost?"
Fourteen brutally quashed her first instinct, to rip into this person's mind with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer and pull out the information she needed. As satisfying as it might feel in the moment, haste would just as likely get her killed as it would get her answers.
"Who are you?" she asked, even as she probed around in what felt like an extremely well-ordered but otherwise unprotected mind for the answers.
"The doctor, of course." He smiled, with a condescendingly paternal sort of look. "In the interest of fairness, though, I asked you a question and you responded with one." His tone spoke of the sort of magnanimity that only comes with being the one holding all the cards.
"And what," Fourteen continued, giving the new her a brutal side-eye, "is that?"
"She's you, of course." The tone was definitely more into amused and condescending the second time around. "I'm well aware that even the most organized and disciplined of minds cannot last forever against telepathy, and I am sure you are even now gleaning things from mine. So why do you ask questions to which you already know the answers?"
Because without Phoebe, her ability to dive deep into the man's memories was severely limited. Not that there was any world in which she would admit such a thing to an ally, much less an enemy.
"Consider it my small way of expressing my displeasure," she said instead.
With a twist of her will, she attempted to scramble the man's brain hard enough it would be coming out in clumps every time he blew his nose. She was bitterly unsurprised when it did not work.
The new Frost sister - the sixth sister, the one that has always been here of course, why would you ever think otherwise? - watched Celeste's struggle to accomplish something she absolutely could not be allowed to accomplish. And a sort of peace seem to extend from one Fourteen to the other.
It's okay. Everything is okay.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-14 02:34 pm (UTC)