Walking elegy (tensura/MCU true dragon self insert): Chapter 13: the end of a shitty day

The day had been shit.

Not the kind of shit where one thing went wrong and you could point at it later, laugh maybe, say "well that sucked" and move on. No, today had been the slow accumulation of a thousand tiny failures, each one small enough to ignore until they piled up into a mountain that pressed down on Linda's chest like concrete.

The printer at work had jammed four separate times. Four. Each jam required calling IT, waiting twenty minutes while Derek took his sweet time walking down from the third floor, watching him fix it in thirty seconds with that smug little smile that said "why can't you do this yourself?" The answer was because she wasn't fucking trained on the new system, Derek, and maybe if management actually invested in proper training instead of expecting everyone to absorb knowledge through osmosis, she wouldn't need to call him every goddamn time.

Then there was Carol from accounting, who'd decided today was the perfect day to question every expense report Linda had filed in the past month. Every. Single. One. "This receipt is dated wrong." "This meal was over budget." "Did you get approval for this parking fee?" Like Linda was trying to embezzle money from a mid-sized insurance firm in the middle of nowhere. Like the extra three dollars on a lunch receipt was going to fund her early retirement.

Her lunch had been a stale sandwich from the break room vending machine because she'd forgotten her wallet at home. Again. Third time this month. She was fifty-three years old and still couldn't remember to check for her wallet before leaving the house.

The meeting that was supposed to last an hour had stretched to three. Three hours of watching her supervisor, a man ten years younger than her with half the experience, explain things she already knew in excruciating detail. And she'd had to smile. Had to nod. Had to pretend this wasn't a complete waste of time because god forbid she show any sign of the exhaustion crawling through her bones.

Her back hurt. The chair at her desk was broken, had been broken for two months, and despite five separate requests to facilities, no one had replaced it. So she'd spent eight hours hunched over like Quasimodo, feeling vertebrae compress with every passing hour.

And then, because the universe had decided she hadn't suffered enough, her ex-husband had called.

Mark. Fucking Mark.

Twenty years of marriage, three years of divorce, and he still thought he had the right to call her about their daughter's college fund. The one he'd promised to contribute to. The one he'd contributed exactly zero dollars to while she'd scraped together every spare cent from a job that paid barely enough to cover rent in Albuquerque, let alone Puente Antiguo.

That was the other thing. The commute.

Linda lived in Puente Antiguo because it was cheap. Because after the divorce, after Mark had taken half of everything despite being the one who'd cheated, despite being the one who'd decided their marriage wasn't "fulfilling" anymore, she couldn't afford Albuquerque. Couldn't afford anything close to her job.

So she drove. An hour and fifteen minutes each way. Through desert that looked the same every single day, past the same gas station, the same billboard advertising injury lawyers, the same stretch of nothing that made her wonder what the hell she was doing with her life.

She worked in Albuquerque because that's where the job was. That's where the insurance firm had its regional office. And when you're fifty-three with a resume that says "generic office work" and "adequate computer skills," you don't get to be picky about location.

The commute ate gas. Ate time. Ate pieces of her soul every morning and evening as she watched the miles tick by and thought about all the things she could be doing if she just had those two and a half hours back.

But she didn't. So she drove.

Tonight the drive felt longer than usual. Maybe because her shoulders ached. Maybe because she'd skipped dinner, her stomach growling protests she ignored because stopping meant adding another fifteen minutes to a trip that already felt eternal.

The radio played something forgettable. Pop music that all sounded the same, interrupted by commercials for car dealerships and personal injury attorneys. She'd switched it off halfway through, preferring silence to the artificial cheerfulness of voices that didn't give a shit about her day.

The highway was empty. Not surprising for nine-thirty on a Tuesday. Just her, the broken yellow line, and the vast expanse of New Mexico darkness pressing in from all sides.

She was thinking about whether she had anything in the fridge that didn't require actual cooking when she saw it.

Her.

Movement on the side of the road, barely visible in the reach of her headlights.

Linda's heart stopped.

Not a deer. Not an animal.

A person.

No. A girl.

A young woman, maybe, though from this distance it was hard to tell, collapsed on the shoulder like someone had dropped her there and forgotten she existed.

Linda's first thought was drunk college kid.

Her second thought was dead body.

Her third thought, the one that made her foot ease off the gas, was broken doll.

That's what she looked like. A doll someone had played with too roughly, bent at angles that weren't quite right, limbs arranged in a way that suggested she'd fallen and hadn't bothered getting back up.

Linda's hands tightened on the steering wheel.

Keep driving.

The thought came automatically. This wasn't her problem. She didn't know this girl. Didn't owe her anything. And there were a thousand ways this could go wrong, a thousand reasons why stopping for a stranger on an empty highway at night was the kind of decision that got you killed.

Could be a trap. Could be one of those sick schemes where someone pretends to be hurt, waits for a Good Samaritan to stop, then their buddies jump out and rob you. Assault you. Worse.

Could be drugs. Could be someone high out of their mind, dangerous, unpredictable.

Could be any number of things that ended with Linda becoming a statistic.

Keep driving.

But.

But.

Linda slowed the car.

Because she might be a shitty person. Might be bitter and tired and so goddamn exhausted with life that most days she could barely drag herself out of bed. Might snap at cashiers who moved too slowly and ignore phone calls from friends who wanted to "catch up" because she didn't have the energy to pretend she was okay.

But she wasn't so far gone that she could see something like that, someone like that, and just drive past.

"Fuck," she muttered, pulling onto the shoulder.

Her hands shook as she put the car in park.

Please don't be a trap. Please don't be a trap.

She grabbed her phone, made sure it was unlocked, 911 ready to dial, then opened the door.

The desert air hit her, cool and dry, carrying the faint smell of sage and dust. Her shoes crunched on gravel as she circled around the front of the car, headlights illuminating the figure in harsh white detail.

Oh god.

"Hey!" Linda called out, breaking into an awkward half-jog. "Hey, are you okay?"

Stupid question. Obviously she wasn't okay.

Linda reached her, dropped to her knees on the rough ground, hands hovering uselessly over the girl because she didn't know where to touch, where it was safe to touch, if anywhere was safe.

The first thing she noticed was how beautiful the girl was.

Which felt wrong. Felt stupid and shallow and inappropriate given the circumstances, but it slammed into Linda's brain anyway, immediate and undeniable.

She wasn't someone who spent time comparing beauty. Wasn't someone who rated women or men or anyone on some arbitrary scale. But the girl, this young woman, maybe late teens or early twenties, was the most beautiful person Linda had ever seen in her entire life.

And she meant that. Meant it with complete certainty that she would never see anyone more beautiful than this, not in person, not in movies, not anywhere.

The kind of beautiful that made actresses like Angelina Jolie look... not plain. Ugly.

Actually, genuinely ugly by comparison.

Linda's brain tried to process the features, tried to understand what exactly made this face so arresting. The girl had something almost strange about her. Foreign. Other. Like someone had taken human beauty and refined it past the point where humans should naturally reach. Like looking at a different species that had been selectively bred for aesthetics over generations until they'd achieved something humanity could only approximate.

The features were mostly European, maybe. High cheekbones, sharp jawline, straight nose. But there was something else too, something that edged toward East Asian but wasn't quite right, wasn't quite anything Linda could name. A blending that shouldn't work but did, perfectly, impossibly.

The second thing Linda noticed were the eyes.

Golden.

The girl's eyes were open, staring up at the night sky, and they were golden.

Not amber. Not light brown. Not hazel with yellow flecks.

Gold. Metallic gold. Like someone had taken actual gold leaf and somehow made it into functioning pupils and irises.

And her hair. Vibrant blue. Not dyed-blue that faded after a few washes, but blue like deep ocean water, blue like the kind of color that shouldn't exist on a human head.

Okay. Okay, the hair could be explained. Really good dye job. Excellent hair care. Some kind of expensive treatment Linda couldn't afford.

But the eyes?

Those eyes looked like molten metal.

The third thing, the thing that finally broke through Linda's stunned cataloging of impossible beauty, was the damage.

The girl was a mess.

Burns covered her arms, angry red and blistered, the kind that came from intense heat held too long. Blood had dried in dark patches across her clothes, which weren't really clothes anymore, just rags. Torn fabric barely covering skin that was covered in cuts and bruises that formed patterns suggesting sustained violence. Methodical violence.

This girl looked like she'd been tortured.

And yet.

And yet she didn't react to it. Didn't flinch or cry or show any sign that she felt the agony she must be experiencing. She just lay there, golden eyes fixed on the stars above, breathing slow and steady like this was normal.

Like pain was just another condition of existence she'd learned to ignore.

Linda looked closer, realized the girl hadn't reacted to her presence at all. Hadn't turned her head when Linda called out, hadn't acknowledged the frantic woman now crouched beside her.

The only thing she seemed to care about was the sky.

She looked like a broken doll someone had discarded.

"Oh god, oh god, oh god." Linda's hands fluttered uselessly. "Okay, okay, what do I do?"

First aid class. She'd taken first aid class fifteen years ago for some work requirement. What did they say? Check for breathing, check for pulse, don't move someone if they might have spinal injuries—

"I need to call an ambulance," Linda said, pulling out her phone with shaking hands. "You need a hospital, you need—"

"There is no need."

The girl's voice was quiet, flat, completely at odds with her condition.

Linda's panic spiked into something close to hysteria. "What do you mean there's no need? Look at you! You're—you're bleeding, you're burned, you need medical attention, you need—"

"I will heal."

"Heal? Heal?" Linda's voice climbed higher. "Nobody heals from this without a hospital, you need doctors, you need—"

"I have not healed yet only because of the nature of the injuries." The girl's eyes didn't move from the sky. "My sister's power lingers. It will fade. Then I will heal."

"That's—that's bullshit!" The word burst out before Linda could stop it. "Listen, I don't know what you're on, what you've taken, but people don't just heal from burns like this, from wounds like this, you're in shock, you're not thinking clearly—"

But even as she said it, doubt crept in.

Because the girl's voice was calm. Too calm. And her breathing was steady. And despite looking like she'd been put through a meat grinder, there was something about her that didn't match the image of someone dying on a roadside.

"You're probably concussed," Linda tried again, forcing her voice to steady. "You don't know what you're saying, you need help, real help—"

"What year is it?"

The question derailed Linda's spiraling panic. "What?"

"What year?"

Another sign she needed medical attention immediately. Confusion, disorientation, asking about the year. Classic concussion symptoms.

But Linda answered anyway. "2010. It's 2010."

"2010." The girl said it like she was tasting the number. "Hm."

Then, still staring at the sky: "If it is 2010, and if I remember correctly, America created a super soldier using a serum decades ago. A billionaire operates as a hero in a suit of armor. The Hulk, a giant green man, destroyed part of a city some years past."

Linda blinked. "What does that have to do with—"

"If those things are possible," the girl continued, voice still eerily calm, "why would it be impossible for my words to be true?"

The logic hit Linda like cold water.

Captain America. Iron Man. The Hulk.

She didn't follow the news obsessively, but you couldn't live in America and not know about those. Couldn't ignore the footage of a giant green monster tearing through Harlem, couldn't miss the headlines about Tony Stark announcing he was Iron Man.

Impossible things that were real.

"I..." Linda's hands lowered slowly. "Okay. Okay, say you're telling the truth. Say you can heal. Why haven't you healed yet?"

"Because the reason I am in this state is because of my older sister."

The girl said it calmly. Conversational. Like commenting on the weather.

But Linda felt it anyway. The hatred buried in those two words. The loathing. The rage so profound it made the air feel heavier, made Linda's skin prickle with instinctive fear of something vast and dangerous barely contained.

Older sister.

Spoken like a curse. Like the worst insult imaginable.

Linda sat back on her heels, then slowly lowered herself to sit beside the girl on the dusty ground. She pulled out her cigarettes, hands still shaking slightly, and lit one. The familiar ritual helped. The burn in her lungs, the exhale of smoke into desert air.

"Shitty older siblings, huh?" She took another drag. "Yeah. I can get that."

Silence. Then:

"If you trust my words, why are you still here?"

Linda looked at the cigarette, at the girl's profile, at those impossible golden eyes reflecting starlight.

"It's what feels right." She shrugged. "And honestly? Part of me still thinks this is complete bullshit. So I'm going to do the stupid thing. I'm not calling the cops. Not calling an ambulance. But I'm staying. Just for a bit. To see if..." She gestured vaguely. "If what you said is true."

She took a final drag, then met those golden eyes.

"Just don't die on me."

"I will not." The girl's expression didn't change. "I want to. But I will not. Because I have something important to do first."

"Revenge, huh?" Linda crushed the cigarette under her shoe. "Yeah. I can fuck with that."

She stood, brushed dirt off her pants, then looked down at the broken doll of a girl who claimed she could heal from injuries that should kill her.

"This is probably a terrible idea," Linda said slowly. "But do you want to come with me? To my house. While you heal. I'd feel like even more shit than I already do if I just left you here alone." She offered a weak smile. "At least this way we can be miserable together for a while. So what do you think?"

The girl was quiet for a long moment.

Then, finally, she spoke.

"Miserable together at least for a little while."

Something that might have been the ghost of a smile touched her lips. 

Linda ignored the team because had she be seen at the place of the girl, she thinks that it is what she would liked too.

"Yes. I think I would like that."