Amy could heal what she did to Carol, easily.
But neither of them trust her, and both hate themselves for it.
Riley does most of the work instead, rambling about tissue rejection and biocompatibility as she scrapes off the remnants of a thousand needy hands, smooths out the surface of Carol's skin.
She feels the handprints that remain in her body, the ever so slightly discolored flesh. Amy's, not Carol's.
Riley says her brain hasn't changed, but she tests her power anyways, and finds it welling up from under her skin, a pillar of light growing out of the bone of her hands, settling into a little spear.
Like his power.
The girl grumbles something about not interrupting her work, but Carol can hardly bring herself to acknowledge it. The spear breaks off, leaving behind a cauterized incision in her palm as she closes her fingers around the weapon, testing its heft with a twirl, crackling force and lightning and heat pushing Riley away from her.
"Seriously, I'm working. No playing with your power when you're being healed. Doctor's orders!"
"This is important."
She can still feel it, in a way that she never felt it before. As if it's a part of her. As if it'll hurt when she breaks it.
Carol glances at Amy, on the other side of the room, still slowly pulling herself together, back into human form, Devils guiding her as she pulls in stray limbs and heads, each one shivering, pain fluttering on a dozen lips, thirty eyes; hands and fingers still aching with longing so strong that she can feel it from here.
She's all too aware of how real that longing is.
For all that Amy had violated her very sense of self, Carol still wonders. Who's the victim, and who's the monster?
Maybe this is the Devil's real power: turning feelings into metaphors into beautiful, terrible physicalities. Forcing them to face what they'd tried to ignore.
The monster might have been magical, but the loneliness was genuine, the hurt in Amy's eyes, the need...
She told Sarah that she couldn't take the child, all those years ago.
It seems like she was right all along.
Vindication tastes like sickness on the tip of her tongue.
Or maybe that's just the vomit. Riley gets a bucket from somewhere, or makes it out of clay. Carol's simply grateful that the rest of her family isn't here to see her like this.
The spear in her hand dissipates into scar tissue and pain along with her focus as she empties her stomach, together with copious amounts of blood and what Riley says are fragments of cancerous tumors.
"It looks worse than it is," the biotinker insists.
Carol has enough strength to roll her eyes at that.
"It looks like she's literally going to die," a new voice comments. It's one she recognizes. Neptune's voice.
"Nuh uh. I won't let her."
Between not wanting to die and the sheer conviction in those words, Carol can just about believe it.
She wipes her face with an awkward, twitchy hand. She sits up, and only a moment later feels the sharp pain ringing at the base of her spine, forcing a grunt out of her.
"Easy, easy!" Riley fusses. "Your tendons and ligaments are messed up from being like, half-Amyfied. Connections are weakened, all that jazz. This is hard enough without you tearing it more!"
Carol largely ignores her, and ignores the dull ache that's spread all across her body.
She looks at Amy again. Three heads and seven arms and nine legs and somehow the most human thing Carol has ever seen.
"Amy."
Her daugh- Amy doesn't hear her.
She breathes in, ignoring Riley's grumble about not overexerting herself.
"Amy."
This time, Amy hears her. Eyes that had been consciously ignoring Carol finally meet her gaze. Pain swims in those lenses, but Amy is paying attention now. She says something to Jupiter and Venus that Carol can't make out, and then pushes herself forward, towards her.
Amy stumbles, spills across the tile. Eyes screw shut in focus. She has too many legs, too much body, too much everything. She grows towards Carol as much as she walks, and it's all Carol can do not to flinch, seeing that mass struggle towards her.
Venus tries to calm and soothe Amy with a clear light, while Jupiter pushes stray body parts back into the girl. Even then, she collapses halfway, legs tangled up in each other while she pants from a half-dozen lungs like she's run a marathon.
But she looks up, meets Carol's eyes again. Guilt and shame and misery flashes across her entire being, brilliantly visible in quaking lips and unshed tears.
"Mom," she says in five different voices.
The word cuts into Carol like a knife through her heart. This time she does recoil, though Riley is there to catch her before she moves more than an inch.
Amy's eyes widen.
"D-don't take it wrong," Carol manages, nearly tripping over her words. "It's not you, it's… I don't, I don't deserve to call myself your mother-"
"You raised me," Amy says, bitter hurt dripping from her voice like a toxin. "Like it or not, and I don't especially like it, you are my mother."
"I… no, you're right. That was selfish of me." She stares down, unable to meet her daughter's eyes. "Still. If you wanted to leave, I… I wouldn't stop you. You could go to Sarah, or someone in the Protectorate, or… anyone. Or no one."
Amy blinks, like she didn't even consider the possibility before, as if a whole new world is opening itself to her.
Carol waits, watches the emotions process on Amy's faces.
Riley tries to get her to lay back down while she's waiting. She refuses.
Finally, Carol's daughter gathers herself, closing eyes, closing in on herself, as if she's trying to concentrate her very being into a single point, that point being the words she's about to say.
"No. If it were just you and Dad, maybe, but…"
She stills. It's as if she's about to utter her own death sentence.
"Victoria means too much to me."
Someone who didn't know Amy might think that she means 'as a sister' or 'as a friend.'
Carol knows better, and the implication could have disgusted her, enraged her, on any other day.
But this is not any other day. Her eyes widen, but only fractionally.
"Oh," she murmurs.
"Yeah. Fucking oh," Amy snaps.
Carol nods dumbly. "I… I think you should talk to her. Just… please don't hurt her."
She's already felt what it's like being on the receiving end of Amy's desperate love. She hopes Victoria never has to go through that.
At the reminder of what she's done, or perhaps what she would have done to Victoria had things gone only a little differently, her daughter sags like a puppet with its strings cut. Unable to sink through solid tile, she merely splays outwards and collapses upon herself, hiding her tears in her own flesh. There are no widened eyes, no wails of grief. Just silent sobbing.
Carol sighs. "I'm sorry."
She isn't sure Amy is listening anymore. Jupiter and Venus crowd around her daughter again, murmuring reassurances as they try one more time to coax Amy back into a shell she understands how to use.
Carol tries to push herself to her feet, to give Amy the aid she's so desperately owed, but Riley is having none of it. "I told you not to strain yourself! I'm still clearing out like half of your body!"
Indeed, the tender ache where handprints meet her own flesh is a universal constant, background noise she's slowly learning to tune out.
"Well, excuse me for wanting to comfort my daughter," Carol growls. Bone-lights emerge from her palms once more, shoving the yelping Tinker aside with heat and force. Her continued protests land on deaf ears.
Carol pulls herself forward. It's not easy; her vision sways, and every muscle in her body protests, and she feels her skin trying to tear itself apart. She pushes out force in ways she's never even tried before, wrapping herself in ribs of energy to hold together patches of skin. Her legs are utterly limp, nerves broken somewhere along the way, so she shapes burning radiance into crutches, a crude exoskeleton around her legs, enough to limp ahead. Towards her daughter.
Would her power have been physical enough for this before? To be used as a tool, rather than a weapon? She doesn't know, and she doesn't care.
Riley keeps yelling at her, but she doesn't mind. There are hands now, carefully caressing her, offering her support where they can touch her without burning.
Amy looks up.
Carol meets her daughter's eyes, wide beneath a curtain of tears.
Her power finally gives out, and she collapses again, a bed of downy wings appearing just in time to catch her and let her down gently, right next to Amy.
She steels herself for a moment, gathering her courage to take the final step, to cross the point of no return.
Then she reaches out and takes Amy's hand.
Her daughter bursts out sobbing, but Carol feels the happiness beneath all the guilt.
After everything, Amy's flesh is just that. Flesh. Human. It doesn't spill into her, try to overwrite her, try to consume her.
It's just Amy's body.
It's just her daughter.
Maybe she can live with that.