[I will crush your sister's head like a pimple. Is that what you want?]

"Empty threat, Saga. I'm in here now, and she's holding the door open. If you wanted me trapped and dead in here, killing her would be your best option."

[I said GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!]

She screamed inside my head like a banshee. In the distant darkness through the window, I could see Lia reeling as Saga's voice pierced her mind.

"Saga, stop screaming and calm down. Let me help you, please."

[I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP. I CAN OUTLIVE THIS WHOLE GODDAMN MOUNTAIN IF I NEED TO. NOW GET THE FUCK OUT.]

I felt something creeping into my body, like an egg slowly slipping down the back of my neck. I felt my mind going blank and the sensation of the room dissolving around me.

I had to focus. I'd been through this before in her dreams. If I fell under her sway, it would become impossible to shake off. Willfully, I did whatever I didn't feel like doing. Instead of following my feet, I walked further into the chamber. Instead of emptying my mind, I began to sing that stupid jingle Karu mentioned, it was the first thing that came to mind.

[OH NO YOU FUCKING DON'T. YOU DO NOT BLOCK ME OUT, NOT IN MY OWN ROOM. NOT YOU, ATHAN. NOT YOU, TOO. AND NOT WITH THAT FUCKING INSIPID SONG.]

"I'm sorry, Saga. I am. Just let me…"

I took another step forward and then couldn't. Simply couldn't. I hadn't fallen into her trap, I'd fought it with everything I had.

[You honestly think you can fight me and win?] Her voice had gone quiet, but was now full of venom. [You think that tricks that work against my sleeping mind can protect you here from the full extent of my power? You're an infant, Athan. I left your mind alone because you amused me and you may have been useful. But you're proving me wrong.]

"Saga...just...let...me...help you--" I grunted out. It was almost impossible, my own body wouldn't do as I told it. I was floating in black space, the whole world dissolved from my sight, and I could hear and feel nothing, not even my own breathing or pulse. Just the menacing echo of Saga's words in my mind.

[You crossed a dangerous threshold, and now I need to decide what to do with you. Can you be a good boy and turn around and leave?]

"I won't. I'm...helping…"

[I didn't think so. You know your problem? You're too stubborn. Nobody likes that.]

Suddenly, as though from the sky, Saga was there in front of me, sitting legs-crossed in what I could only call a throne made of an even blacker emptiness than that which surrounded us.

She looked just as I'd seen her before. Lanky and lean, almost but not-quite to the point of looking unhealthy, with long arms and legs and pale-white skin. A dark blue prison uniform emblazoned with the XPCA logo, and straight black hair falling to end at her barely-there breasts as she leaned forward leering at me. In the blackness, her brown eyes glittered at me.

"I'm sorry for this. I never wanted to do this to you, but you see...you really aren't giving me much of a choice. I could just pulverize your brain and be done with it, but nobody wants that. So be reasonable."

"You should know by now," I said, gritting against her power and stubbornly refusing to bend "I am not always reasonable."

"Then I'm sorry for this."

As she said it she turned and looked away, and as she did, an empty black shadow emerged from the floor, made of the same insubstantial nothingness as her throne and this realm. As it approached, I realized it was a shadow of Saga herself, discernible only by the lanky limbs and flat hair, swaying as it advanced on me.

"Saga?" I asked as it closed on me. She kept her eyes closed and her gaze averted as the thing approached.

Then, faster than I could make out, it punched me right in the gut, hooking one of those slender fists right under my ribs. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, tried not to vomit, for fear I'd choke on it.

"Ready to leave?"

"N…n-no…" I wheezed, trying to get breath back into me.

It slowly shambled behind me. I waited one pregnant moment and then fell to my knees, slammed from behind, both fists locked together, striking from overhead against the back of my neck.

"Ready now?"

"I...I…" I coughed. She stared down at me and uncrossed and crossed her legs. "I can't. I...only just...sat down."

She frowned and watched this time as the shadow kicked me across the face.

"You're not doing anything by being here. You can't even move or fight back. All you're doing is hurting yourself."

"All I'm do-doing," I whispered, shifting back onto my knees slowly. "Is saving y-you. Just like I said I would."

I got kicked in the face again, falling to the other side this time. My arms couldn't catch me and my head bounced off the ground with a crack. I saw spots flashing in my eyes and laid down for a moment.

"You're nothing here. I don't enjoy this, Athan. Now leave so we can be as we were before. You violated my domain and my trust. Don't do it again."

"N-not…" I groaned into the ground. The shadow flipped me onto my back with a deft flick of its foot and gently placed its heel on my...my man junk. Threateningly, it began to increase the weight it put on me.

[Not what? The next word out of your mouth had better be 'staying'.]

"N-not…" the pressure increased and I felt a white burning crushing pain spread through my whole body. "...leaving…"

There was a moment's reprieve as the foot left me. And then it kicked me, straight in the sack. White pain flooded through me, and this time, I did puke, and the taste of acid and spinach and mushrooms filled the void in my senses. I felt Saga retch as I spit and coughed and writhed as much as I could with little to no control over my body.

"You'd go this far?" she asked, wiping her own mouth like it was she who'd just vomited.

"I'd…" I coughed and spat again. "I'd go...any di-di-stance. I pro-promised you."

"Then I absolve you of your promise. Get the hell out!"

"No," I whispered.

"Are you trying to make me kill you? Because that's what we're heading towards."

"I'm trying...to...help you. Let me go...and I can…"

"No! I told you already. Stop it. Stop it!"

She froze and stared at me as I slowly shifted, groaning, vision popping in and out of view. Still I struggled. After what felt like minutes, I was back on my knees again.

"Sigh. What am I going to do with you?"

"Let me go? I just want to help. Read my mind if you have to, read my whole goddamn everything."

"That's not the problem and you know it. Humans are the problem, Athan. But I'm really beginning to question how much of an Exhuman you really are."

The shadow advanced on me again, taking slow luxurious strides, hips swaying as it closed on me.

"I can do this all day you know. All month, all year. All eternity really. How long do you think it will be before your mind is completely broken? How much pain can you withstand before you'd do anything to make it stop?"

"You tell me. Isn't this exactly what the XPCA did to you? Tortured you for years until you finally snapped?"

She froze, her face a mask of fury, and then the shadow lashed out, a straight kick to the throat.

I dropped instantly, gasping for breath. Pain flooded through me, and I clawed at my throat, pointlessly.

"Don't worry," she said. "This is all still just inside your mind. You can still breathe, your brain just thinks your windpipe is crushed. Which is why I can do…"

Even as I rolled on the ground, eyes full of tears, lungs empty and shrieking for air, she kicked me straight in the face. I felt my nose snap and saw red in my vision. If I had any air, I would have used it all for screaming.

"...whatever…"

Again, right in the face. My neck snapped back painfully. I could see and feel nothing outside of myself. My world was gone, her world was gone, there was only pain.

"...I want."

Not a kick this time. Straight-up curb stomp to the face. I felt my skull fragment, felt pieces of viscera squishing out over my skin. My eyeballs popped, my jaw, nothing left to attach to, hung diagonally, my tongue lolling out. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing but pain, and the soft heel of her bare foot, half-sunk in my brain.

A moment paused where I was nothing but dead, and then I was whole and complete again kneeling in front of her. I gasped as my lungs and body worked again.

"How did dying feel?"

I couldn't answer. I just shuddered and gasped. It had all felt so real. I kept touching my face, somehow finding it intact.

"You told me I was just like the XPCA. That was the second way I ever died. I was nine. At the hands of XPCA." Suddenly, she screamed, "I was NINE Athan. What good is there in this world of yours!"

I just sat, my mind a blank white haze.

"So, are you ready to be a good boy and leave, or would you like to sample the first way I died? Or some of the hundreds of others?"

"...not…" I said, struggling to find words. Struggling to find meaning in anything. I was dead, what use were words to the dead?

"What? Get your thoughts together. And leave."

"...said, not XPCA. You aren't."

She laughed and it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

"Of course I'm not. I'm Exhuman."

"So...s-stop acting like them."

Again, she just glared at me as her shadow advanced on me wordlessly.

"Maybe you think you're being brave. Maybe you think, honestly, that you're doing the right thing. Maybe you're just using this experience to work out your overdeveloped martyr complex. Maybe you realized that everything you feel, I feel too, and think you can outlast me. I don't know, and I'm not going to bother reading your mind to find out. The simple fact is, whatever you think is wrong."

"I know this because, as you've so kindly pointed out twice," she said, fuming, "I endured all this, too, at the hands of the XPCA. And it was all a mistake. If I had it all to do again, I would have murdered them the first moment I saw them."

"So what, you want me to murder you?"

"No, you idiot. I want you to leave. I want you to realize that at some point, you're going to break, and suffering long and enduring pointlessly before then is useless. Everyone has their limit, even you. Even I did. Everyone does. So just fucking hang your pride up and walk through that door."

"I could say the same," I spat.

"What?"

"In here, it's just you and me. Maybe you're right, and this will end when someone breaks, but that doesn't mean it's me."

"You are truly impossible. Did you catch the bit where everything you feel, I feel as well? Did you see me flinch when I put my foot through your skull?"

"And after you've killed me a hundred times, a thousand times, will I be any different?"

"You...I hate you so much. Why are you so impossibly stubborn?"

Her face was twitching with anger. Her shadow moved, holding something now in its arms. It put one end of the shadow object it held to its shoulder and levelled the other at my face. A gun.

"Death number one. Execution by firing squad."

I felt my head collapse before I even heard the boom. I couldn't even feel the pain, it was just like a vacuum had opened up where my face had been and everything got pulled through the hole like it was sucked through a straw. My face was the first thing to exit the back of my head, and if my eyes were still connected to my consciousness, I'd see the trailing arc of my own gore following. My face, brain, blood, and skull slapped and splattered against the ground behind me and my body fell lifeless.

This death was brief, and I snapped back to consciousness in a moment, again, incapable of understanding the feeling of being whole again.

"Is that what you want? Forever? Intend to do that a thousand times so you can be as dead inside as I am?"

I couldn't answer. My mind just reeled.

"Shall I ask again in another, say, five deaths? Nice round number?"

"--ga...why…"

"What? I can't understand you if you don't think clearly."

The very definition of an unreasonable demand.

"Saga. Why." I got out.

"Why? Why? You do all this to me and you don't even understand why you're doing it?" She stood up from her throne, mad as hell. "Why? How fucking dare you ask me why. You violated me, Athan! You betrayed me! You were the one person...the one Exhuman in the world I put my trust in...the one thing in the world I put my trust in, anywhere! And then you do the one thing I tell you not to. You put my life in a human's hands."

She turned and strode down the steps, stalking towards me with hate and tears burning in her eyes, and slapped me across the face herself, her shadow looming like a bodyguard.

"I told you...that's one thing I will never do. NEVER do. And you just waltz in here and decide that you know better. 'She's my sister, she won't hurt you.' I don't care who she is. I am never putting myself in that position again. Never! Do you have any idea what that means, Athan? Never is a long time for you people, now imagine what it means to me!"

"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry for betraying your trust."

She bit her lip and tried to hold it together as tears fell from her eyes on their own.

"But you're still wrong. Please, Saga. Let me help you. Let us help you."

"No! Goddamn it, Athan. No means no. Why can't you understand that? Do I need to plant that as a compel in your brain before you'll be satisfied?"

"I can't understand because you're wrong. Saga, you could be free today."

"Or I could be free in ten-thousand years? What's the difference?"

"The difference is I'll be dead in ten-thousand years. I want you to be free, and I want you to be a part of my life. You're a strong person, and a good person, and I don't want you languishing in this cell for the rest of my life. And I promised you I would."

"So you're just greedy. Like all the rest."

"Of course I'm greedy! Everyone is, you included. People who don't want anything out of life just exist for no reason. I can't live that way, and I know you can't either."

"You're wrong, Athan. I can live that way for thousands of years if I have to. And I'd do that over one day of putting my life in the hands of a human."

"I don't even see what you have to risk here. Worst-case scenario, Lia closes the door and I die in here. Obviously my death is worth less and less to you with every second, so how is this a problem?"

"The coffin, idiot."

"What about it?"

"The first thing that happens when you use it is it puts me to sleep. Forever. Until someone turns it off."

"Okay, so--"

"So I can't stop Lia or anyone from doing anything if I'm asleep, dumbass. You...I could trust...I thought...I could trust to handle me when I was sleeping. But that's not a state I am willing to enter as long as there is a human in the picture. Period. Get it?"

"She's not just a human. She's my sister."

"Oh, my god, this again!? Sometimes I have to wonder if you're really even an Exhuman, the way you worship those fucking things."

"I don't worship humans. We're all just people. Some are good, some are bad. Lia is good."

"I'm sick of wasting my time talking to you. Let me know when you're tired of dying and ready to leave." The shadow advanced on me again.

"Saga, you forgot one important thing," I growled as the shadow bore down on me, this time holding a baton or something.

"Is this going to be some other grim proclamation of how I'll never defeat you? I find that very unlikely."

"No," I said, still unable to move or rise, my muscles locked as the shadow loomed over me with its baton raised.

Suddenly, light flashed out and filled the black void. Four blades made of pure light manifest and sliced the shadow into five equal pieces, which disappeared into nothingness in a black mist.

"I'm still an Exhuman, too."