X-23; Too Dead to Live
It was as if I had lost the will to breath. All the years of abuse and mistakes taking a hold of me and squeezing the desperation for life, that everyone is cursed with, from my being. His hands were not the ones killing me. They were my own.
As I lie among shattered stone I looked back at the slaughterhouse that my life had become. The friends I'd killed. The love I'd slaughtered. The innocence that had died beneath the metal of my claws.
I'd give you my name if I knew for sure what it was. I go by many things. Animal. Thing. Monster. Mutant. X-23. Laura. Clone.
Feel free to take your pick like the others have. I have no opinion that could possibly be kept in mind. Don't hesitate to pretend that you know who I am.
Anyway, allow me to adjust my chatter into something cohesive for you to understand. After all I was created to serve.
First, a little back-story. I shall not go into the gore and crudeness of detail now, but instead I will divulge this; I am a female clone of Wolverine. I was created in a lab for one purpose. To kill and to serve. I escaped from the lab that created, abused, and used me. (Pardon the rhyme). Later in my life, they invented a trigger scent, an odor undetectable by normal people, and enraging to me. I would destroy anything that reeked of it.
That is all you need to know now, and thus I shall continue on with my tale. You may read it to your young if you wish. Go on. Try to explain to them the confusion of a girl who shouldn't even exist.
Allow me to recount from the beginning.
Upon my battle with Wolverine and then capture by Captain America, I fell once again into the use of another party outside myself. The X-men.
How I fell into their hands, I chalk up to my own foolishness. I came to them, seeking refuge. Normally I do not resort to assistance from other people; I loathe the very idea of it. However, I needed a safe haven to protect me from the facility that created me. They wanted me back, and I could not allow myself to become a tool of theirs once again.
I came to the Xavier's Institute in a grave condition beyond physicality. I fell upon their doorstep in a stupor of grief. The only person who had shown me love in my life, a mother figure, had been murdered. The killer was not me. At least it wasn't the part I want to be. Consider the girl responsible as my alter ego, brought about by the trigger scent rubbed upon my mother's clothes. In other words, I refuse to accept myself as the same person as my mother's killer. However, I must inform you of this and remind myself that I am not a hero and I will never be one.
It took the x-men's most advanced telepath to reach me, Emma Frost. Though she is my consciousness' savior, she continues to be the bane of my existence, taunting me with horrendous scenes of my past.
After two days of telepathic probing, I awoke from my catatonic state in a holding cell. I could hear arguing beyond the fluctuating electrical currents that made of the cell walls. I recognized wolverine's voice, and saw a flash of the moment I almost killed him. An act I had been trained from birth to commit. He was arguing in my favor, while Emma Frost and Scott Summers asserted the opposite.
"She's just a kid, Summers" Wolverine growled, and the scent of adrenaline emanating from him suggested an aggressive position he held his body in.
"On the surface, yes, she is a child." I could imagine Emma Frost pursing her lips. "But I've been in her head, and she certainly is not a child."
"She's too dangerous to be here." Cyclopes said.
"She needs help!" Wolverine yelled. "Charles would have helped her."
"Get your head straight, Logan. The girl killed her mother." Emma said, and then paused as if listening to the unknown whispers of the universe. I realized she knew I was awake as she continued. "She is a monster, and no matter how hard she tries she can never undo what she has done." I recoiled; she said it as if speaking directly to me.
I immediately closed off my mind as to not reveal the turmoil within. I would not give her the satisfaction. I shook my head, wondering what I had been thinking when I came to the institute's doorstep. This had been a mistake.
I stood and paced around the cell, already noticing the faults in it. One fault, the most obvious to me, was the exposed spout where the electricity was coming from. I unsheathed my claws, and plunged one of them into the origin of the electrical current. A minor ripple of wreckage blew me back slightly as a portion of the cell wall dispersed into the air. I kneeled for a moment, awaiting my healing factor to restart my heart and heal the burns on my body. The break in the current of the wall allowed me to slip in between and slither out. I came to a hall just outside the electrical cube that had imprisoned me, and closed my eyes, sniffing the air to find the smell of the outside. I must have been far underground, for I only found the scent of industrial walls.
I bolted through the halls, picking up trails of people who had since come and gone. I chose one and followed it to an elevator. After the rising room engulfed me, I dethatched a ceiling panel, and pulled myself atop of the elevator. A lifetime of training had taught me never to use an elevator in an enemy fortress. That sort of knowledge was common sense to me.
I replaced the panel and stood from my crouch. The elevator was coming to a halt, which meant the x-men now knew I was free. I retracted my claws and leapt from the top of the elevator and grabbed onto the many cables and pulleys attached to the elevator shaft. My arms pulled me up at a decent pace, and I emerged from the dark shaft through a hole I made in the wall with my claws.
I tumbled out and sprinted blindly through various doors until I came upon a crowd of other mutants. I halted, eyeing the crowd who had stopped to scrutinize the girl with electrical burns on her clothing. Whoops. Wrong turn.
In an attempt to blend in I walked forward, causally heading for the window across the room. People were still watching me and I tried to bat away their gazes with a glare.
"Kid, wait." I heard Logan say behind me. At this point I walked faster and slipped easily through the maze of people, while he simply pushed them out of the way. I looked back and saw Cyclopes alongside him. But where was Emma Frost? I failed to assess the importance of her absence, until I stood upon a lunch table near the window, ignoring the protests of the children who resided there. I unsheathed my claws, and all who lay their eyes upon me gasped.
"Now now," I heard a voice in my head, understanding the significance of Emma's absence. "There will be none of that." I felt a pain in my head so excruciating that I fell to my knees upon the table, blood slithering from my nose as I fought to stay awake.
I growled searching the room for Emma Frost, however she remained hidden. I held the side of my head, the point of my claws digging into my face. Logan reached me, and grabbed my shoulder. "Alright, Frost. Cut it out. I've got her."
She didn't stop until I collapsed. The last thing I heard was Logan shouting at her to stop.
(More coming soon)