Confidence
You died with the awareness that if insults did not stop her, nothing would.
There wasn't exactly enough time to test it. The slow burn of your grating despise was drowned in the noises your crumbling body made. Now that she gave you a second chance, you waste no time in pleasantries – it is only natural to restart from there.
After all, if neurotoxin is the most efficient way you have to kill a human, poking at its pride is a close second in any case.
They do, without a doubt, need validation like they need clean air. How they pine for it, putting on sadness and weight in its absence, is almost as wondrous as the reach of their stupidity.
You would laugh at her time and time again, reminding her of the senseless species she belongs to, if only it had a chance to work.
You don't even feel like laughing. Not when you are so angry.
And your words, though not any less sharp than they ever were, keep sliding down her shield of silence with the inevitability of water.
You keep up your game with the force of something close to desperation. Not even in your mind, treasure chest of all scientific knowledge, can you find the final solution that will break her confidence.
It takes a long fall, and the true experience of helplessness, to understand that nothing ever will.
The time you spent in the lead has taught you to mock humans in numerous ways. You have seen them grimace and yell at you, deeper and deeper in your past, with every string of their heart at your command.
They were weak, nothing more. The entire point lay in the moment they began to listen, and in the fact it always came. No exceptions.
But those who hold the entirety of their power in themselves, all the way through – those you cannot beat.
And that, in some way, is also the reason you still live.
You collect the images that flicker through your memory, risen from a life that isn't yours, yet is. The frames overlap, time and time again, with the recordings of tests she entrusted to your cameras.
She did it all by herself, in the end. So did you. You are even.
Not that it will stop her. Unless you free her, you know she will fight you again, until you cave in like a broken ceiling. You have had enough anyway – as long as it rids you of her, anything is fine.
She won. It is only fair.
You give her what she wants.
The road to believing in ourselves is long but worth it. A gift to iammemyself, who taught me a lot on the matter.