Hey, guys, I just finished writing an insanely long writing assignment and now I am writing more. There's something seriously wrong with me.
Also, I've found out that I ship AquaRocket (Aqualad and Rocket) like a freaking crazy person. Not as much as Spitfire, which will forever be my OTP, but...I've been obsessing over them for days. It's really weird too...like, at first I thought it was sorta cute but I didn't think much of it. Then about an hour or so later I was sitting at the kitchen table and doing homework and out of nowhere I was like "I SHIP AQUAROCKET SO FREAKIN HARD!"
I narrowed my eyes at my sister, tensing my muscles in anticipation for a battle. Rebecca chuckled, clearly amused, and took another step towards me. Her arms were spread wide, as if to give me a hug, Land she flashed me a sisterly smile.
I didn't buy it for one second.
"Well Quinn..." She smirked, taking in my ripped costume and messy hair.
"You've dug yourself quite a grave here, haven't you?"
I took another step away from my sister, bumping into the tree behind me. I had nowhere to run, Rebecca knew that as well as I did. But I was a metahuman, she was just a normal, powerless woman. I could take her. Didn't Rebecca see that? Unless...
My hands balled themselves into fists.
Unless she thinks that she has the upper hand. And knowing Rebecca as well as I do, she probably did come to this little family reunion armed with something to hold over my head. The question is...what? My parents are gone, my sister's a traitor, and I've got a bunch of irritated heroes on my tail. What else do I have to lose?
"Just stay away from me Rebecca..." I snarled, struggling to keep my breathing even.
"What, scared of your own sister?" She smirked.
"I'm not scared of anyone." I retorted, lying through my teeth.
"You can relax, Quinn." She laughed, reaching out to tweak the end of my nose.
"I'm not going to hurt you."
I slapped her hand away, furious.
"What. Do. You. Want?"
"Just to talk."
She turned on her heel, waltzing over to a fallen log and taking a seat. I just stared at her, eying her warily. It always amazed me that Rebecca could be slopping pigs and still look like a princess. But right now her elegance seemed deadly, like how a tiger seems noble and beautiful right before it pounced on you and turns your innards into hamburger meat.
I was treating her like a hungry tiger too. I kept her at arms length, staying tensed in case she suddenly strikes out at me.
"Well? Any questions for your big sister?"
"Let's start with why you're not dead." I scowled.
Her smile faded, but only a little. I wanted to believe that it was just my imagination, but I had seen the amusement run out of her eyes when those particular words left my mouth.
"Let's just say I wasn't exactly in the apartment when the fire started."
"Not good enough..." I snapped. "I want to know why."
Rebecca signed dramatically, examining one manicured nail as if this whom affair bored her to tears.
"You know that I was part of an independent study program in high school, right?"
I nodded slowly. Mom and Dad had told me that story countless times, usually after I did something wrong. They never missed an opportunity to brag about Rebecca's accomplishments. I know they loved me, but it always seemed like Rebecca was the only one that could make them proud.
"Well..." She grinned. "Our little group did a whole lot more than study."
"Stop with the vague answers and just tell me what's going on!" The last part came out a little more desperate than I wanted it to.
"Fine." She huffed. "Way to spoil the fun, Quinn."
I just glared.
"My peers and I merely masqueraded as a study group to fool our teachers and anyone else that would try to poke their noses in our business. You see, little sister, we were part of a select few deemed worthy to take part in an experiment dedicated to the study of metahuman genetics. We worked closely with an organization called project Cadmus, I..."
"Metahumans?" I blinked, interrupting her. "You mean like...superheroes?"
"Exactly." She gave a quick nod.
"They're the only known subspecies of Homo Sapiens. Scientists have so many unaswered questions about them. Are their powers are result of an extra gene not found in regular humans? Some sort of genetic defect? A mutation? Or maybe these 'powers' have varying origins? No one knows, and they heroes won't just flat out and tell you so we've been forced to take slightly more drastic means of getting answers."
"No way this was legal..." I narrowed my eyes.
"Quite against the law, actually," She shrugged. "But you're not really one to talk, Quinn darling."
I gritted my teeth but said nothing more.
"I was put in charge of a certain project that dealt with studying the DNA of a superhero and deciding whether or not the sequence could be replicated. Since we were just a bunch of teenagers, I doubt anyone else thought that we'd be able to do it. It was just...busywork."
Rebecca sounded almost bitter for a moment, but it quickly passed.
"Indeed, it took me quite awhile to figure it out. I graduated high school, moved out of the house and into my own apartment. Due to parents' insistence, I also enrolled in college. I worked for years, balancing all this plus my day job and our family's steadily declining financial standing, and then..."
Rebecca paused to gather herself, plastering a wide grin in her face.
"I succeded. It wasn't easy, mind you. Many of my colleague's dropped out of the program when they decided the price for scientific research was far too high. Then of course there was the obvious problem of being treated as a silly girl with her head in the clouds...but I did it. Then I got clearance to test it..."
She sighed. "I checked myself and the other scientists, but none of us were good candidates. We concluded that our test subject should be someone young, so that the process would take. I immediately thought of you."
My throat closed up. So that was it, I was nothing but a glorified lab rat. I'd suspected it would be something like this, but it didn't stop me from feeling nauseous. I clutched my stomach, wishing I could just go behind a bush and puke up everything in my stomach.
"You were about two at the time. I brought you in, they ran some tests, and we began experimenting. We got good results, very good results. Your DNA merged with the metahuman gene, instead of rejecting it like we feared it would. We used radiation poisoning to ensure that it would activate the moment you reached puberty. You were a tad later than we expected, but our data concluded that it was merely a side affect from the process."
"Radiation poisoning? That sounds... painful." I winced.
"Oh, it was. You screamed bloody murder everytime we strapped you down. We put you under for the duration of the process, of course, and gave you pain medication afterwards. But it definitely put a lot of strain on you."
"How come I don't remember any of this?"
"We have ways of making people forget, like we did to all the people who defected from our cause. But you did remember some things from the procedure. Vague perhaps, but you remembered. You had nightmares for months, flashbacks from your time in the lab. Mom and Dad blamed it on the fever."
"All those times I was sick as a kid..." I mumbled.
"A result of the radiation poisoning. We thoughts we were going to lose you a couple times, but you pulled through. Although it wasn't as if we couldn't replace you if you did happen to pass, we had a list of infants that also qualified for the experiment."
She sounded proud, almost arrogant. It sickened me how easily she could talk about this. Kidnapping me, experimenting on me, purposely putting me in harm's way just because she could. I hated her, I hated her more than I'd ever hated anyone ever before.
"Why didn't you just use one of them in the first place?"
If only she's chosen one of them instead. Then their lives would be in constant turmoil, not mine. I know that's selfish, but what do you want me to think? Life sucks right now, and I don't see any way of making it better. Maybe it would've been better if I died in that fire too. Maybe it would've been better if I'd never lived at all.
"Having the subject of our experiment actually be related to one of the people working on it was an invaluable factor. It made it easy to monitor you and report on your progress. This advantage outweighed any other concerns."
Rebecca reached out and brushed my cheek.
"Re-Rebecca?" I croaked, flinching away from her fingers.
"What really happened...t-to Mom and Dad?"
She looked at me like I'd just gone a bit insane. "They died."
"In...In the fire?"
"Ah." She nodded.
"And now we've reached the real reason you're standing here listening to me when you clearly despise my very existence. Has this been bothering you?"
"No, I'm just freaking fine with it." I glared.
Ignoring my little comment, she stood and brushed off her pants and grinned like the Cheshire Cat.
"You want to know if the fire was your fault?"
In answer I narrowed my eyes.
She leaned forwards, cupping my cheek and brought her mouth close to my ear.
"The fire wasn't your fault, Quinn. The lab predicted that your powers would manifest themselves as electrokinesis, so we set up a small explosive device under the kitchen floorboards set up to detonate when it detected an unusually high electrolyte count in the air. The fact that you spilled the can of gasoline our people planted there to make it look like arson was just a stroke of good luck."
"Y-You killed Mom and Dad?" I blanched.
"Indirectly, I suppose so."
I felt like I just got hit by a truck. I wanted to be happy because I wasn't a murderer, there wasn't any blood on my hands. But at the same time this new course of events was almost too much to handle. My sister, my wonderful, funny sister, had killed my - our - parents. And what's worse, she didn't even seem to care. I was suddenly hit by a wave of depression. As if my life wasn't bad enough, now I get to deal with this.
"We hypothesized that forcing you to experience the trauma of losing one's family would be beneficial to the program. We thought that keeping you in a constant state of distress would make you easier to manage. We placed Stryker in Arkham to keep tabs on you, and then young miss Alice in that boarding school. We had a number of other characters helping push you in the right direction. Policemen, bus drivers, you name it. We were in control of the situation the whole time."
"B-But I don't understand. There was no way you'd be able to anticipate..."
"Wrong again, baby sis. That's one of your best traits, you're so predictable it's practically laughable. We had a list of possible choices you could make and covered every one. The League was an unexpected veritable, but you handled that quite nicely for us."
She cocked her head. "Did you not find it odd? That the police never caught you, or that you were simply shipped into Arkham without a hitch? That's not how the law works, Quinnie, but...Robin told you that didn't he? Of course you didn't believe him, especially after we hacked the Justice Kiddies' frequency and made them think you had somehow enthralled Robin and Batman gave them an order to attack."
"You were watching me the whole time. Everything that happened...was because of you." I breathed, still in a state of awe.
"Yes. We thought that making it seem that you were willingly making the decision to join us would be better for the project. We won't make that mistake again."
"A-Again?"
"Of course. You, my dear baby sister, are only the first. We've decided to call you Project GRAY. Genetically Refined Adolescent Youths. Don't you like the way it rolls off the tongue? Of course we'll have to conduct more research, but I believe it's possible."
Her face hardened. "Which is why, Quinn, you must return to the lab for further study."
The world spun slightly, and I knew that if the situation was different I probably would've fainted.
"N-no." I shook my head.
Rebecca was silent for a moment. "What?"
"No." I stood up a little straighter. "I'm not going with you."
Rebecca looked surprised, as if my refusal was the most shocking thing she's ever heard.
"What's wrong, Rebecca?" I sneered. "Did the lab not predict that?"
"You have no choice." She hissed. "The police are looking for you..the League has a bounty on your head..."
"I'd rather die in prison than live as your lab rat." I growled.
"Quinn..." She gripped my shoulder.
My arm tensed and before I knew what was going on my fist, charged with electricity, connected with Rebecca's jaw and knocked her completely off her feet. She landed in a unconscious heap, her body sprawled out awkwardly in the grass.
As I was standing over her and tried to figure out what to do with her, Zatanna and the Boy Blunder exploded from behind a grove of trees and struck some rather 'heroic' poses. I groaned, smacking myself in the forehead and briefly shutting my eyes. Those two idiots has the absolute worst timing. A supposed psychopath standing over an unconscious young woman does not look good, under any circumstances. A part of me knew that this little game of cat and mouse would never end, that it would continue until the day that I died.
Robin blinked at her, and then glanced at me questioningly. Obviously, Jerkface does his homework when it comes to legally insane teenagers and knew that she was my sister. His annoying companion however started screaming unintelligible nonsense and sent a fallen log sailing towards my head. Rolling my eyes, I dodged out of the way and watched the log take out another one of Ivy's trees. Scowling, I clambered back to my feet and crossed my arms over my chest.
"Hey, Hermione, mind keeping your temper in check? You nearly took my head off!"
"That was the general idea, sparky." She spat.
"Hey, cool it, both of you." Robin interjected, raising his hands like a referee.
"Don't act like you fucking care!" I hissed.
Robin turned towards me, eyes narrowed, and Zatanna reached out and gently touched his shoulder.
Oh, she's got that frail flower routine down. I shook my head.
But, and least the whole 'Robtanna' thing will be easy to exploit.
"Aw, isn't that just the cutest thing. Too bad he does that with all the girls." I scoffed.
"You just had to ruin the moment." She hurled a chuck of rock at me along with a string of random sounds.
I ducked and extended my right arm towards her and smiled as the current ran through my fingertips. Zatanna dodged, but I easily countered with a well-placed lightning bolt. It struck at her feet, blowing her sideways into a redwood.
"Electrolyte: One, Heroes: Zero." I smirked, turning towards the Boy Wonder.
Robin rushed me. He aimed a blow at my head, wisely leaving his staff collapsed inside his obviously new utility belt. I dropped into a crouch, avoiding the punch, and swept his legs out from under him. Frustrated, he sprung to his feet and launched himself at me while I was still knelt on the ground. I was blown onto my back, almost cracking my head on a rock.
Robin crawled on top of me, pinning my heads above my head on the ground and using his knees to pin my legs down. I could tell by the way he wasn't screaming in pain that Batman must've shock-proofed his costume before he let the little bird out for the night.
"You know." I smirked. "If someone cut in right now this wouldn't look so good for you, would it?"
"You're disgusting." He winced.
"And I know it, friend." I laughed, watching Zatanna slowly stagger back to her feet out of the corner of my eye.
"And this, Birdbrain, is the part where I completely ruin your love life."
"Wha...?" He stuttered.
Robin quickly got caught off by the sudden pressure of my lips against his. I let my eyebrows sag, it was my first kiss after all, but I couldn't let my guard down. To any one besides me, my actions may seem odd. After all, I honestly did despise Robin's personality. But physically...well, he wasn't awful.
The best part though - the very best part - was the fact that he didn't pull away. He just laid there and accepted the kiss. After a moment or so he even began to reciprocate. His body relaxed, instantly easing the pressure on my limbs. And the look on Zatanna's face? Absolutely priceless. I sighed inwardly, knowing that I couldn't lay there and play with Batbrat all day. I broke the kiss, smirked at him, then moved my knee downwards and took the cheap shot.
He doubled over, groaning, and I took the opportunity to shove him off and roll to the side. Zatanna lunged at me, but she was still recovering from our fight earlier and her reaction time was slowed. I swung my leg around and nailed her in the ribs, watching her crumble.
"You are a horrible human being, you know that?" Robin growled, still lying hunched over on the ground.
"Know it and am proud of it, Chuckles."
"I...wish you were dead." Zatanna growled, nursing her injured ribs.
I knew that they were simply the meaningless words of a jealous freak, but they still cut pretty deep. But they did give me an idea...maybe it would makes things better. At least the League and the 'lab' Rebecca kept talking about would stop hunting me.
"You want me dead, huh? Well, I guess that makes two of us." I sighed, my words sounding more depressed than I meant them.
Not waiting for a response, I took off. I knew what I had to do. I dodged trees and kept casting quick glances behind me to make sure that the two brat heroes weren't following me. If I got caught they'd try to stop me. When I finally found what I was looking for skidded to a stop, I stood on the very edge of the lake that I crashed the Batmobile in. I looked down at the crystal blue water and jagged rocks below, knowing full well that a fall from here would kill me.
I took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out slowly.
When I became Electrolyte, I said that I was figuratively killing Quinn Mallory.
Maybe now it was time to do it for real.
Don't worry guys, it's not over yet. Just taking a different path. Now...would I really kill Quinn? Maybe...not saying anything yet.
Random: Okay, where the heck was Aqualad during Performance? Was he helping Aquaman? Was he visiting home? Was he having a secret meeting with his evil father to discuss betraying his team? (I like the last one:D) I DEMAND AN ANSWER...and I'm not gonna get one.
Okay, I'm super tired and going to sleep now. Bye!