Talia Walker didn't feel human.
The doctor leaned in front of the mirror, her head hung low, carrying the weight of her decisions upon her. Rachel, the detective, the beast - they each occupied a piece of her mind, pieces of her soul, pieces of her guilt. What was right, was what wrong, that didn't seem to matter. How could what she felt matter when she wasn't always herself?
Reluctantly, Talia fought against the dread that was weighing her down. She craned her neck upward, forcing her eyes to gaze on her reflection in the mirror, to see herself.
The mirror, however, was staring back at her.
Nervously, Talia tilted her head to the left, and the reflection followed as it should've. She tilted it to the right, and her image followed again. She let out a sigh of relief.
"You're human, Talia," she reminded herself. "You're human."
The reflection leaned forward, reached through the mirror, and grabbed her by the shoulders. "Are you so sure?"
Talia woke up in darkness. Her heart pounded against her chest as she lay upon her back, her lungs sucking in shallow breaths.
Quickly, though, her senses came to her rescue. She realized she was on her back, laying on something soft. A bed. She brought her hands to her side and used her arms to push herself up. Sheets, which had been draped over her, fell off as sat upright.
She paused for a moment, and allowed her breathing to slow. To her relief, unlike after her last nightmare, she didn't feel the now-familiar pangs that usually signaled the metamorphosis. She was going to stay herself, at least for now.
As Talia collected herself, her eyes began to adjust to the darkness. She began to scan her surroundings carefully, taking note of what she began to realize was a place she had no knowledge of. A motel room? The layout was consistent with one. She was laying on a bed in the center of the room, there was random furniture scattered about, an in-wall air conditioner rattling and outdated boxy television weighing down a cheap dresser.
As she continued to see more and more of the room every second, Talia noticed a chair in the corner that held a body. The doctor felt herself tense up, but she held her breath and immediately forced herself to regain her composure.
The person lay asleep in the chair, clutching a small blanket that was draped over them. Talia recognized the long, sand-colored hair, and instantly felt more at ease. Rachel.
She slipped out of the bed quietly and landed softly on her feet. Her legs buckled under her own weight, as if she hadn't been on them in a long while. Moving slowly until she got her bearings, she made her way toward a door that had a sliver of light leaking out from beneath it. She opened it slowly and slipped inside, closing the door once more behind her.
As Talia stood in the bathroom and looked up, she instantly froze. Once more she was face-to-face with her reflection.
The reflection remained frozen across from her in the mirror as she continued to stare and assure herself that this one wasn't going to have a mind of its own. It was just a nightmare, she reassured herself. However irrational, she still felt a bit uncomfortable as she forced herself to walk up to the bathroom counter. And she knew it wasn't just because of the nightmare.
She still didn't feel human. That part hadn't changed. She looked the part, yes. But her nightmare doppelganger's words hung with her as a heavy truth.
Breaking eye contact with herself, Talia looked down and noticed for the first time that she was dressed in a pair of purple pajamas adorned with cartoony yellow dogs and white cats across her top and bottoms. "Rachel, you're too good to me," Talia whispered. She paused, allowing a sad sigh to escape her lips. "Too good."
To be human was to err. She was good at that. To feel human, however, she had to see it with her own eyes.
She slowly unbuttoned the pajama top and pulled it off of her torso. She let her bottoms fall to the floor after, the clothing crumpling in a pile at her feet.
Talia stared at herself in the raw, nothing to cover her, nothing to hide behind, except her own form of doubted humanity. A humanity that looked almost the complete opposite of the thing she turned into.
Her reflection continued to match her movements, and for a brief second their blue eyes locked. She shifted her gaze uncomfortably to her head, and brought her hands up to her dark, shoulder length brown hair. She ran her fingers through the thick strands, lifting it above her head and watching it as it fell back to rest behind her.
Her hands continued their journey down her face, tracing pronounced cheekbones and a narrow chin. She had never seen herself as pretty, though she had never wanted to be noticed, either. Made it easy for me to focus on my studies and research. Her unextraordinary neck followed, which led her fingers down to angled shoulders framed by a pronounced collarbone beneath. She allowed her fingertips to meet at the top of her breastbone, before drawing them down her torso between her breasts, which she had never minded were smaller, if not average.
She crossed her arms around her stomach, then traced her hands around the narrow hips that adjoined her pelvis, skirting around her pubic hair, and letting her arms finally fall back to their sides next to the lean legs that were still struggling a bit to keep her standing. She bent her knees carefully in order to allow her arm to feel the back of her right calf, where in one of her last memories a bullet had torn into triggering her last change. There was no sign of it anymore, however, almost as if it had been a bad dream.
No, the bad dream is what followed, Talia reminded herself darkly, as she remembered losing control and being overridden by...it.
Drawing her eyes up again, Talia took notice of her light skin which was tinged with a hint of olive, a gift of the Greek heritage she had inherited from her mother's side, alongside her name. The irony of always having her skin maintain even the slightest green was not lost on her, though it was not something she found to be very amusing, either.
Her eyes finally arrived level with her reflection, noticing her blue eyes, which remained cold. Though she continued to stand naked, she still felt like she had layers to shed. She wanted to tear her skin off, claw through her flesh, and keep digging until she could reach the monster that lived within her. She wanted it gone, she needed it gone.
The doctor walked over, her human body and the creature within in tow, and cranked the small, rectangular shower into action. As hot water sprayed from the showerhead bringing steam in tow, Talia looked over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror one more time. She watched and waited until the mirror fogged up and her mirror image disappeared, then climbed into the shower. As the hot water began to roll down her body, she sunk down to the floor, hugged her knees to her chest, and began to cry.
"Rachel, what happened?"
Talia sat on the motel's bed once more, clad in a white towel, hair dripping cooled water onto the sheets as she stared at her friend, who stood looking like a lost puppy that had fallen off the pajamas that now lay on the bathroom floor. "Rachel, please."
"Why don't you get dressed and relax a bit, first," her friend pleaded. "You've been through a lot recently."
Stop trying to protect me, Rachel! You're already in too much trouble because of me as it is! Talia bit her tongue, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. "I can't relax precisely because of everything that's happened. The problem is, I don't know what happened, or how long ago it was since I knew what was happening." She looked around at the motel room, which was now more visible due to yellow glow of fluorescent lights. "I don't even know where we are."
"We're in upstate New York," Rachel answered. "First motel I could find."
Talia took a moment to process the information. "Upstate New York? How?"
"The She-Hu-the creature," Rachel corrected herself, "she took us here. It was as far as she could go before you changed back." Talia felt her eyes meet hers. "You...it was being attacked by the people I had been trying to rescue you from. Before that jackass shot you, and, well…"
"Yellow vehicles," Talia remembered. Rachel's eyes widened.
"That's right."
"Deafening sound," Talia continued as she cradled her forehead, images flashing in fragments through her mind. "None of it is clear, but I remember you being there, you were in danger, and I was angry."
Rachel paused, and Talia felt her eyes searching her own, almost as if her friend were looking for imprints of the memories on her eyeballs. "I had gotten you to change back briefly, but their imminent threat made you re-transform."
"How long?" Talia asked.
"Three days," Rachel said. "You've been passed out in here for three days and I wasn't sure you were going to wake up. But you're OK now, thank goodness."
"Rachel, are you OK?" Talia asked, looking over to her friend. She still found it hard to make eye contact. "Did they hurt you? Did Colvin hurt you?" She felt herself holding back tears. "Did I hurt you?"
"Colvin up and vanished, and those vehicles tried to hurt you more than anything, but the She-Hulk didn't let them." Rachel got up from her chair and moved over to the bed, placing herself beside Talia, who felt her friend's warm hands upon her shoulders. "Listen to me, Tal," she said with an additional shoulder squeeze, "You didn't hurt me. You never hurt me. In fact, here we are, out of danger. The She-Hulk, she protects me."
In a flash of anger, Talia brought her arm down from her head and broke Rachel's grip on her, jumping off the bed.
"No! Stop calling it that!" Talia shouted. "It doesn't deserve a name. It isn't a person, it's a monster! It doesn't share my body, it steals it! It doesn't have a mind, it oppresses mine! I had this body first, one tiny incident shouldn't have changed that, but it did! There is no us, there's me and a curse, a problem, a condition! And look at all that it's caused! One tiny bit of good doesn't rectify that."
"I know, Tal," Rachel stumbled, "but it's out of your control -"
"It's ALWAYS out of my control!" She turned her back toward her friend, ashamed to face her. "I try to work on gamma research, it gets out of my control. I try to work on a cure for the demon that mistake put inside me, and it gets out of my control. I get desperate and break into a lab to steal technology to help me understand what's happening to me, and it gets out of my control. I try to use that tech and selfishly ask for your help, and it gets out of my control. I then decide to try to do the right thing and turn myself in, and even that gets out of my control. This creature is defined by loss of control!
"And want to know what the common theme is?" she asked. "You're getting hurt. I've already lost my life, but why are you giving up yours for me?"
Rachel wiped away a stream of her own tears. "Because I choose to." She got up and walked over to Talia, spun her around to face her and wrapped her arms around her. Talia felt her mind hit with another flash, from the brief moment she had been herself outside her labs, with the yellow attack vehicles. She remembered starting to change back into the monster, and Rachel…
...Rachel hugged her as she changed. Was there with her as she was there for her now.
"Rachel," Talia said, her anger melting into hopelessness. "I don't know if I can take much more of this. I don't want to change anymore. If I step through those doors, it's almost a guarantee that the beast will come out. It's in there, I can feel it waiting to burst out, to take over. Every time I do, the thread unravels, and I don't know how much is left to hold me together."
"That's what I'm here for," her friend said, withdrawing from the hug and staring straight into her. "Plus, don't pretend like you weren't there for me a million times over the last several years long before the She-Hulk came into the picture."
Talia felt an ounce of light enter her being. "That's what friends are for, right?"
Rachel's smile was a worthy reward.