[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/80hOaVN.png[/img][/center]
Emma didn't care about it anymore. Siena came. Callan charged. Marcus charged. The other, the old man that she didn't recognize, likely a survivor from the city was hit by a spike as the APC sped away. It just didn't seem matter to Emma. Not now. Savannah was dead. Lawrence was dead. A sudden crisis of faith. What were they fighting for? What was the point? Child soldiers forced to fight at the behest of a power hungry bureaucratic bitch, waiting to die an inevitable death at the hands of some horrible abomination. Fighting a war for humans that didn't want them, humans that hated them. Weren't they people too? Didn't their feelings matter? It seemed from where Emma stood that they didn't. Not to Zhang, or to the people of CC1, the very people that Alexis and Padma had died protecting. They'd just as quickly spit on them as thank them. None of them would remember them for their efforts, none of them would give a shit if she died. All USARILN saw her as was a human weapon to sacrifice and then throw away. All she had was her fellow subnaturals, wasn't it?

[color=00ffbb][i]If you end up investing everything in the people around you as your foundation instead of yourself, then when they die here it's going to destroy you.[/i][/color]

She couldn't get his [i]fucking[/i] words out of her head. The one answer she could always come back to. If she couldn't live for herself, couldn't live for some higher purpose, that was all she had, wasn't it? Relegated to watching her friends die around her. She didn't even know Savannah or Lawrence that well and she felt like just had her fucking heart ripped out. So what was the recourse when it was Marcus, or Cal, or any of the people that she had suddenly found herself caring about. Once again she'd had to remind herself that she'd known them for a little more than a week, but now? In this world that seemed to be dying around them, in this world where her family had been ripped away from her? They'd suddenly felt like her best friends. So what the [i]hell[/i] was she going to do when they'd died horrible deaths too?

[color=8A3DFF][i]You know exactly what you'll do, you spineless fuck. You'll do what you always do.[/i][/color]

Suddenly, Emma slipped away. 

[hr]
Another dream. The beach was gone.

A cliff. Emma stood on the edge of a sheer cliff, stretching far above a rocky sea. The waves crashed with force below as Emma gazed distantly from above. Distant physically and distant mentally. She wanted to fall away, separate from herself and become one with the ocean. She wanted to revel in her sadness. She wanted to scream how she felt into the sea below, unload the feelings pent up inside her for all to hear. But her mouth wouldn't move. She couldn't will the words out of her. The lie was too hard to break, the unspoken deception that she played out every second that she had lived. Instead she could only do what she always did- scream on the inside. Hoping, as stupid as it sounded, that someone would understand her without her having to explain. That someone would recognize how scared she was... how weak, how tired, how alone.

No one would. She wouldn't tell them. But she could still wrestle with the thoughts in her head.

[color=8A3DFF][i]This is hell, isn't it? This... this is so horrible, there's really no other explanation, is there? I just wanted a simple life. Was that so much to ask for? To be pretty. To be liked. I didn't need much, did I? Just to be happy. Just to meet someone that I could love, that I could hold, that I could tell anything to. I could grow old and flicker out of existence, forgotten but happy. But now? This is some kind of curse. Having to live with these voices screaming in my head, begging for me to hate myself, turning me against myself. Never certain if it's me or the stigma. I can't be a hero. I can't be a savior. I'm not dependable. I'm not strong. I can't keep this up. A rare, strong power with unlimited potential? What a fucking joke that is! Dreamcatcher must have a shitty sense of humor to give something like that to a useless bitch that can't use it. Someone that can't save anyone with it, that's a constant disappointment to everyone around her, that instantly shuts down when a stranger dies in front of her. 

Everyone is going to die, and it's my fault. I'm not useful. Dead weight.[/i][/color]

The sound of the waves. It was soothing, almost. But suddenly with but a slip of the mind it melted away and the waves weren't waves and the cliff wasn't a cliff. They were stars, colliding, receding, meeting again in a constant cycle, constant struggle. The world around her was infinite, distances around her vast limited only by her ability to understand the vastness of that which was everything. The greatness that was both everything that has been and that will be, at the center of it all a pointless creature called Emma Halwell. She was held by some great invisible hand, protected from the boundless space and separated from it. the sheer noise of it all roared and surged, crashed against her and against the cliff. The waves pounded harder, the waves that weren't waves and a cliff that wasn't a cliff. 

A drip. A silken thread extended towards her. It glimmered with an incomprehensible brilliance, but all the same Emma could see the taint that covered it. She still reached for it in spite of herself.
[hr]

Emma was suddenly brought back to that street in Wisford, Maryland where Savannah and Lawrence had died. But now her feet weren't on the ground- she was levitating, and her ascent wasn't stopping. If she had her Tulaps she might've done something, but all she could do was try to fight the flow to no avail, flailing as she struggled to return to the ground.

If this was indeed a joke, Emma didn't find it very funny.