Aaliyah was angry.

She was angry a lot, but today she was angry for a multitude of reasons. First of all, when she had walked out of her room in the morning, she had been confronted by Ajax’s door being wide open and Tracker—dressed in her well-fitting black suit—helping an incredibly hungover Mirah towards the bathroom. Ajax had popped his head out to give a cursory explanation of what had happened when she asked.

Aaliyah was surprised that Mirah had even confronted the man, she certainly hadn’t pegged her as the type to confront someone or try to work something out with words. Not that Aaliyah could read the girl very well, mind. What had tipped her off that something more than just Mirah getting wasted had happened, was when Ajax wouldn’t stop smiling—the whole way through the conversation.

Ajax always tried to wear a smile, in some form or another. He was a personable person, it came naturally to him, unlike herself. However, he was smiling a full smile today—much happier than she had seen him for days at least. Aaliyah’s mind had instinctively narrowed the options down.

One; they had sex.

Two; Ajax thought Mirah being drunk was funny.

Three; they had formed some sort of connection.

Number one is so far off the table that it was on the other side of the planet. Ajax was also the last person to take advantage of someone who was drunk—his morals simply wouldn’t let him. Mirah was already reserved about her appearance, for clear reasons. So, no.

Number two was more plausible, but Ajax wouldn’t find that funny. He’d deem it too cruel, like kicking someone while they were already down. Plus, if he did find it funny, he’d probably be talking about it in that way with Aaliyah, which he wasn’t.

So that left number three, and that made Aaliyah mad. But what made her even madder, was that she didn’t know why she was so angry about it. She could feel the little red spots surface on her skin again, the insidious little things appearing like an allergic rash. The frustration of not being able to push them down quick enough led to even more anger, the spots surfacing from within her like trapped air in water.

“Stop.” An ironclad voice rung out within the small training room, making Aaliyah’s eyes snap open and the anger dissipate when she saw her coach’s stern visage. Willem let his eyes bore into Aaliyah’s own, and she could feel them on her even when she turned her face from him.

“This is the fourth time today.” He said quietly, “It usually takes you much longer to come to a boil, and you usually simmer for longer at your limit. You are angry.”

His voice wasn’t a question, or a demand, but a decree. She felt a flush of the red splotches on her skin, painting themselves along her arms like a child had poked her with a paint covered finger, but she pushed them down—not wanting to end up in the infirmary again by Willem’s hand.

“Take five.” He said quietly, before standing smoothly from his cross-legged position on the floor and walking off and out of the private training room. Aaliyah let a sigh through her lips as she unfurled herself from the awkward position.

She might have turned up her nose at the ridiculousness of her training being little more than sitting on the floor with er eyes closed and breathing exercises—but Aaliyah knew better than to totally disregard a man like Willem, a man as powerful as Willem. It had taken her a few hours of research and learning how to read scientific papers, but Aaliyah had found the science to be at least tangentially in agreement with the stocky trainer.

There was some part of her that wanted to throw the dubious papers displaying transformative results in the man’s face, but the softer and more intelligently spoken papers—the ones that obfuscated less behind fancy buzzwords and strange wordings—quietly agreed that there was at least some benefit. Even if that benefit was difficult to understand or quantify.

Aaliyah stood from the mats that they had used for fighting only a few days before and walked towards the Training Room—eyes being drawn to the screens that captured what was happening inside its metal walls.

The displays were brightly lit with a flare of red and yellow, the Asian boy inside only barely visible as he sat in his own pseudo meditative pose beneath the towering flame he produced. The flame was impressive, no matter how you looked at it, and the fact that Walter could produce it as long as he could focus only made it more so. But it came with the distinct downside of being almost stuck at that intensity.

Though, now that Aaliyah looked at it, the boy had made some progress. What was once a towering pillar of flame—burning so brightly that it obscured everything else from the camera’s vision—was now a much smaller pillar, only a few feet taller than Ajax was. From almost reaching the high roof of the Training Room, to being an almost reasonable human size was impressive progress. As far as Aaliyah knew, Walter had made by far the most progress out of all the trainees.

Aaliyah herself had increased the amount of time that she could keep herself at her ‘angry limit’ without trying to kill someone, Ajax had made a miniscule amount of progress doing his squeeze ball thing, and Aaliyah wasn’t even sure what Mirah’s goal is with the reaction light board. But all of this was still limited, the results lukewarm.

Aaliyah ran a hand over her face with a small amount of exasperation showing through in her expression. Aaliyah was letting her emotions get the better of her and she hated it.

Before it was so easy to hide how she truly under a mask, one that could display any emotion that she so desired. But now it all fell apart at the drop of a hat, not only was her link messing with her ability to put on a convincing mask, but also with a member of the team that was entirely distrustful of her.

She had expected that she would be able to pull the team together around herself, and she had even been somewhat successful at it with Walter. But Mirah had blown her intentions wide open, even making Walter cognizant of Aaliyah’s social games. Aaliyah had wanted to pull together the team and use them to get through training, putting forward just the right amount of effort to pass through without worry and just little enough that they wouldn’t be exceptional. A team that she’d disappear in and wouldn’t be noticed.

Then Ajax had messed with a High Order kid.

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Aaliyah had half a mind to pack her bags and run, leaving behind the two idiots who still naïvely believed in any amount of heroism, and Mirah, who looked like she was willing to go along with their farce.

But she didn’t leave, even if her bags were packed and hidden inside her drawer—only the bare essentials, like always. She didn’t leave even though she knew she was powerless in this group, any social manoeuvre relying on Mirah buying into it. She didn’t leave even though she knew that Jeremy Baxter could do any number of heinous things inside the AASAU training facilities and never see repercussion.

The reason she didn’t leave was because Willem’s words still resounded in her skull, the echo of their impact never truly leaving her mind despite Aaliyah’s best attempts.

‘If I let you walk out of here, one day I would be forced to come and kill you.’

Willem had destroyed her sense of security that day. The innate belief that she could survive by herself, that she could make do. She had always been in a position of some power, even if that power was over drunk men’s wallets in a strip club. But now she had no power, no social string to pull on or favours to cash in, no blackmail that wouldn’t blow up in her face mor than it’d help.

The reason she wasn’t leaving is because she was scared. Scared of herself, scared of those around her and their motives, what they knew and didn’t know. What her teammates would do when she didn’t have the ability to significantly influence them. Scared of the eventuality of Aaliyah herself going postal and her link taking over.

Aaliyah pulled herself from her musing, the colours on her skin were confused alternating like a terrible modern art piece; a deep dark-blue, a snivelling green, a venomous yellow all mixing and matching on her skin. But surprisingly, with a distinct lack of red.

“Aaliyah.” The short man called from the mats, his stocky body already twisted into a formal meditation position, a remined that the man was more flexible than you’d think. Aaliyah trudged over to the mat, returning to her own sitting position, and closing her eyes like she had so many times before.

She spent a few moments centring herself, allowing her body to relax ever so slightly—a difficult task when the man who sits only a metre from you can and had pummelled you into submission. She took a large breath in, relying on a mental count to dictate the rotation. Breathing in, hold, breathing out, hold.

After twenty seconds, Aaliyah introduced the first angry thought. Today it was Ajax’s stupidity, making such an obviously risky move and pissing off Jeremy Baxter. It had made it difficult for Aaliyah to think that entire day, the anger giving way to more anger in a cycle that Aaliyah could only just control. She had almost convinced herself to go to Willem’s office and ask him to watch over her, just in case she really escalated, but she couldn’t leave herself to someone else’s whim like that.

Even now, just sitting in front of the man felt dangerous and revealing. She had danced in front of small crowds of disgusting looking men almost entirely naked on too many occasions to count but sitting in front of Willem made her actually nervous.

The anger rose unbidden, more angry thoughts naturally conglomerating around the first one like magnetism. She could feel the spots on her skin as the vibrant red burned across her skin, as if it’d be actually hot to the touch. Aaliyah tried to stamp down on the rage and anger, but it only fed it—the magnetism so powerful that it was pulling the memories from the past that truly infuriated her.

Her father and the insane dichotomy between the love for his daughters and the man of pure evil he was to the rest of the world. The mother that had left her children at the hands of a monster. The burning hatred she felt in the darkest days, the only that still kept her together, stopped her from falling to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. Aaliyah could remember the violent satisfaction she’d taken when she crushed everything her father had built under her bootheel, taking down everything she could around him.

Then the scorn and hate that appeared the moment that someone learned her last name, a link to who she was and where she came from. A name that made used to make those on the streets run in fear, and now only cause its bearers to run from those who would take their revenge on them.

Well, there was only one true bearer of that name now, and that was Aaliyah herself.

Aaliyah Flinn, the last surviving daughter of Harry Flinn. The Monarch.

The rage boiled over, the lid of the saucepan exploding from the pressure inside—the scathing hot liquid expanding in bubbles, leaking from the pan rapidly. Aaliyah couldn’t control it this time, just like it had been when she had fought Ajax. She tried to force the lid back onto the pan, but the bubbling liquid forced against her with an endless tide, a rush of emotions that made Aaliyah feel as if her mind was on fire.

She could feel her body tensing itself, hearing the calls from Willem as he tried to stop her from escalating further. But it was too late, the red dots had become blotches on her skin, angrily flashing and morphing across her pale features like a two-dimensional lava lamp. The red splotches grew as the flood of hateful and angry memories flooded her mind, the burning red covering the majority of her body underneath her clothes across her arms and legs.

Aaliyah had no control now, she could feel the anger take control of her body, standing against her own will. She could only imagine that it would attack next, trying in vain to kill the absurdly powerful coach she had lost against once before. But Aaliyah was left with a soft discontent in her otherwise fury-soaked mind.

Was this it? Was this all that could be done? Could Aaliyah only wait and watch as her body and mind conspired against her own control? She was still inside herself somewhere, even if she couldn’t do much but desperately try and reign in her own anger—an impossible task.

She waited for the sudden darkness to subsume her, Willem’s fists knocking her out in a fraction of a second, but it didn’t come. She could barely see or hear through the intense fog of red that clouded her senses, but she could feel herself struggling against a grip. Willem was holding her body back and…

Giving her time. Willem was giving her a chance—a moment to prove herself capable of bringing herself down from her disastrous rage. A strange emotion wormed its way into Aaliyah’s mind, a bright, light blue contrasting against the raging colour around it. Aaliyah reached out and gently poked at the colour, feeling strangely reassured as she touched it. Like a cool breeze on a warm day, soothing the raging mind with just a little bit of…

Trust.

Aaliyah brought it into herself, guarding it like you would a kindling flame against the wind, and let it grow. It was slow at first, but then it caught onto emotions all of its own—the bond she had shared with her sister, the memories of a small bracelet they had made for each other, long lost as a child does. The light blue expanded on the back of Aaliyah’s memories, not doing so much as pushing the red, but gently occupying the space it had, quietly surrounding and herding the rage inside.

There was no force, no stamping out of emotions, simply two separate emotions existing simultaneously. For what was a human that could only feel one emotion at once?

Aaliyah was an animal in a cage of her own design, both stopping herself from experiencing good emotions and viciously taming her anger at once. But with just one other dichotomous emotion, Aaliyah could feel the reason return to her, the strength she had assumed with the rage dimming, but some still remained. Now, though, she was left with a portion of herself with a calm rationality, a trust in herself and in the man in front of her, no matter how tenuous.

Willem waited a while—still gripping the taller girl in restraint—but after a minute where Aaliyah barely moved, he released her from his iron grip, moving back to where he had been sitting. Aaliyah sat up as well, giving the trainer a good look at the colours on her skin.

Red and blue shifted across her skin slowly, the two colours staying close to each other in roughly equal amounts—almost as if they were bonded together. Instead of the overwhelmingly bright red, the colour had mellowed itself a little, becoming a little duller. Across the rest of the skin that had neither red, nor blue, were dots of other colours, the small specs being a new development entirely. There was some nasty looking yellow and green, but a little light grey that almost seemed reliable.

“Good work.” Willem said finally, his eyes coming back up to the blonde-haired woman’s eyes, the hazel corneas almost displaying relief. “Now, tell me how you did it.”