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When El sleeps, she’s free.
Awake, she drowns in memories, suffocating under a past she didn’t know she’d forgotten. She lets them fill her full of drugs and submerge her in water, stripped of her dignity and pride, and it feels like justice for her sins.
El’s a monster, it’s unavoidable. People look at her like she’s a freak, a thing that doesn’t belong. She’s hurt and killed and is only as good as her ability to do both. Everyone knows this: she knows this, Owens and Papa know this… Mike knows this.
It’s why she’s here, so she can get her powers back… so she can be useful again.
That thought is the only thing keeping El from trying to run again. The two times she’d tried, it was because she panicked. But she has it under control now and she’ll put up with anything and everything if it means she can save her friends.
But it doesn’t stop the memories from threatening to wash her away, doesn’t stop her from feeling like she’s losing herself to a past she thought she left behind. When she gets to take a break – to eat, to breathe, to wait for another injection of the drugs that will make her susceptible to the Nina Project’s machine – El’s bombarded with sense memories that make her skin itch and stomach turn.
Bright fluorescent lights, sterile hallways and soulless rooms, the stinging smell of antiseptic, the flat stares from an army of white coat torturers… it’s too much, god it’s too much! It’s like she never left the lab, like the last 3 years have never happened, like she’s still is and always has been a prisoner.
(maybe she’s always been a prisoner, maybe she’s been living in a dream for the past 3 years, maybe she’s lost and crazy and broken, maybe she’s going to be trapped forever)
So, instead, when she gets a break, El thinks about everything that happened before the police came knocking on the door. Because as much as it hurts, she’d rather hurt than go crazy.
She thinks about what happened at the roller rink and can’t stop Mike’s voice from echoing around in her aching skull. What did you do? What did you do? Harsh, judging… accusing. The way he looked at her after only piled onto it: with worry, yes, but frustration, disappointment, and fear. Mike was scared of her, disappointed in her.
No wonder he doesn’t love you, her brain whispers whenever she thinks back over the incident like a child with a worry stone. Who could ever love a monster?
Maybe if El was still a superhero, Mike would still love her. She still had her powers the one time she heard him say it – maybe her powers are the only thing that make her worthy of being loved. If she gets them back, will he love her? (if she gets them back, will she even want him to? yes, her stubborn heart cries out – the answer will always be yes)
She’s tired, so very tired. She thought, maybe, Mike was different, that his love for her wasn’t dependent on what she can do, that it was because of who she is. But she was just fooling herself. You’re a superhero, he’d told her, like that made everything better, like it made her worthy.
But she’s not a superhero – she’s not even a hero. She’s broken, unlovable, lost with no place to call her own. There’s nothing left for her but this, this horrible facility where people only care about her abilities no matter what it costs her.
So she lets them put her in the tank, lets them make her relive the worst parts of her short, miserable life. And she thinks, if she can save the people she cares about, it doesn’t matter if they don’t care about her – it’ll have been worth it to know they’re ok.
Occasionally, they let her have a longer break, time not just to eat and breathe, but with time to sleep.
And when El sleeps, collapsed in an exhausted heap on an unforgiving bed, she leaves the lab behind.
When El sleeps, she flies.
She dreams of what could have been, of what-ifs and should-have-beens, of the hopes and wishes she’d worn on her sleeve for the world to see.
In El’s dreams, she gets the spring break she’d spent weeks imagining. In her dreams, the roller rink is perfect. She and Mike share milkshakes while they laugh with Will and skate awkwardly beneath the disco lights. In her dreams, she has friends, real friends, ones she didn’t lie about so Mike wouldn’t know she didn’t fit in. In her dreams, Mike gets to meet her friends (who aren’t Stacy and Angela) and he gets to see that she is indeed thriving, that she’s not a failure, that she can survive without him even if she doesn’t want to.
In her dreams, once they go home from the rink, once dinner is over and evening has set over their sleepy neighborhood, she and Mike go on a walk beneath the starry, Lenora Hills sky. He holds her hand, holds her close, and they talk, talk for hours without having to worry about staticy signals and long-distance fees.
In her dreams, Mike finally, finally tells her he loves her, tells her that he loves her more than anything, explaining that he was just waiting until he could say it to her face, that he didn’t want the first time being over the phone or on the page. In her dreams, he kisses her with heart-aching sweetness and doesn’t ever stop because in her dreams, they have nothing but time, nowhere to be but with each other.
And it’s perfect, it’s so, so perfect.
But dreams never last.
She wakes up, cold and alone, gravity pulling her crashing down to the ground. She wakes up caged, wings shorn like her once beautiful hair, and knows she can never be free.
Faceless doctors in sterile white coats show up to lead her away, to take her back to her watery prison, and El doesn’t fight it.
What’s the point? This is what she deserves, she knows this now – after all, she is a monster.
And monsters don’t get happy endings.