AN: Second part, YAY! Anyways, I started trying to rewrite the second chapter of Lab Rats, but then decided that there should be some explanation of the time in between those two points.
With out further ado, part 2:
After she had escaped from the labs and the adrenaline had worn off, Cathreda had found herself with no place to go. She knew that she had just been shot up the list of targets for Umbrella's assassins, and no place would be safe for long. Before she knew it, she was at her front door fumbling with her keys as she hurried to get inside. She had lost most of her composure as she'd run away from her past, and as the front door closed behind her, she collapsed onto the floor in a flood of tears.
'What have I done? How could I be so stupid? I'll be dead within the hour and hauled back to be dissected like a frog!' Her mind screamed at her, and she couldn't agree more, but she still needed to know what she had become. She pulled herself up off the floor and stumble into her bedroom. There was a mirror on the her closet door, and as she reached it, Cathreda couldn't believe what she saw.
There were no burning red eyes staring back at her. No horror movie monster dropped to it's knees as she fell to the ground. Just her. She looked the same as she had any other day that she'd looked in the mirror. There was no way to tell what she'd just gone through except for her disarranged clothes and her untidy hair. For a second it all felt like a bad dream, but then the pain started again.
Her blood began to boil and sear her veins as she clutched at herself, not knowing what to do. It hurt throughout her body, and she could barely think through the pain. Se swung out her right hand, looking for something, anything, that could help ease the pain somehow. She heard a crash as her hand slammed into the mirror with enough force to bend the door into the closet. She looked down at her hand and found that it had been sliced open like raw meat and was bleeding profusely. Some of her blood dripped off her hand and hit the floor, then promptly began to burn a hole through the floor.
Cathreda's mind was suddenly released from the pain, and she gasped in shock. She quickly grabbed a piece of her coat and wrapped it around her hand, but it was quickly burned away as her acid blood continued to pour from her wound. She stared at her hand trying to think of a way to clot the blood. It didn't seem to burn though her own flesh, but she had a feeling that it could easily do so if given the chance. As she noticed the growing hole in the floor, Cathreda put her other hand around the bleeding one and stood, her worries pushed to the wayside as she tried to think of a way to clot the wound. As she hurried toward her kitchen, she felt her hand tingling and looked down to see that the skin of her hand had stared to creep back up over the wounds. She had to look away from the disgusting sight of her own body healing.
When the tingling feeling had stopped, she looked back at her hand. There wasn't a single mark left on her flesh, and it was the same slightly tan color that it had been before. Everything was back to normal.
'For now. When will it happen again though?' She thought restlessly. She moved back to the bedroom and began to survey the damage. There was a hole big enough for a person to get through that seemed to go down to the foundations of the one story house. She guessed that it had probably run out of juice the further it had gone down.
"Well so much for normal…" Cathreda mumbled as the truth set in. She could look normal, she could act normal, but she could never actually be normal again. That possibility was now gone, and she'd never get it back. It was time to move one, and if she didn't get a hold of herself now, she'd never survive.
Her inner argument resolved, Cathreda picked up a backpack from inside the closet, and began to pack her life into that small bag. This was what her life had amounted to so far, but she'd been given another chance. Another chance to make things right, and she'd take hold of it with all of her might.