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It happened so quietly.
That’s strange to say—it seemed just the opposite of quiet while it was happening. With Sycorax. With Liv. (With Hiro.) It felt sudden, and violent, and loud. There are still the remnants of a shriek caught in Karmi’s throat to remind her.
Yet… now, she taps a carefully trimmed nail against the case of her phone, in her bed far, far away from her dream school, and it all went so quietly.
Karmi is accustomed to monitoring gradual changes. When working on a microscopic level, every little thing matters; it's a necessity to see the world in small increments in her field. Studying viruses is not loud work.
It's wrong to say she's used to this. However… there is a pang of something too painful to be familiarity. Karmi chastises the writer part of her brain for being unable to produce a more appropriate synonym for how her chest squeezes. The closest she gets is a barbed sense of recognition.
She did not work this hard for this long to be sent home halfway through her second year of college. That was not in the equation. That was not in her meticulous five-year plan. Karmi did not deliberately, fastidiously construct her life around graduating high school early to attend San Fransokyo Institute of Technology to drop out as a sophomore.
She is back at home several states away. It is late at night, and she has no classes to wake up for. She would move to turn on her side but her legs are aching in the way she's learned means not to do that.
It's quiet. Her world has been turned on its head without her permission. Everything Karmi has dedicated herself to for her entire academic career has been stripped from her. Her accomplishments and ambitions are left stagnating in an abandoned, soon-to-be-reassigned lab. And it is so, so quiet.
It's not like Karmi to dwell nor is it like her to self-deprecate. She has always prided herself on being proactive, being headstrong, being a leader—she is capable of doing everything she thinks she can, and she thinks she is capable of doing anything. She has always been her own greatest strength.
What does it mean, then, when she's not strong enough to walk unaided from her bed to the kitchen in her own home, let alone across a campus as large as SFIT's? What does it mean when she's too fatigued to write sitting at her computer desk and has to resort to laying down on her phone instead, as she is now? What does it mean when she cannot concentrate on the writing she pursues for fun when she used to breeze through assignments a dozen times more technically difficult?
The time on her phone tells her it is an hour that is long past when she should have been fast asleep. Karmi stares blankly at her equally blank fanfiction document and then at the ceiling, discarding her phone. The ache in her calves chokes its way up to press dully behind her kneecap and lance through the deep muscles of her thighs. The smart thing to do would be to take another dose of painkillers, but Karmi is very tired of this being the only way she is allowed to be smart, now.
She can't sleep like this. She used to lose sleep over her work. She used to lose sleep over her hobbies. Now she loses sleep because refusing herself painkillers is still a choice that is in her hands and not well-meaning professors’ and doctors' and parents’ hands. If Karmi didn't choose to be in pain in the first place, then she can at least take petty, childish solace in the fact she is choosing, right now, not to stop it.
She didn't want to stop going to school. She didn't want to go home. She didn't want to leave San Fransokyo. Her fists bunch in her comforter for a moment before her fingers uncurl of their own accord—too weak to hold a proper grip. Her hands start to tremble in light, clammy shudders under the weight of bone-deep exhaustion. Karmi has steady hands. Undue vibrations can kill her cultures; she can't have shaky hands. Her fingers don't listen. They are too fragile to exert her anger. They are too fragile for her major.
It does not matter what she wants. Karmi—for the first time—can't.
And she knows. She knows why she's not at SFIT right now. She knows why she is back where she started. She knows why two years of effort are sucked down the drain. She just… can't, anymore.
Everyone was more hopeful in the beginning. That after a couple of days, which then became after a couple of weeks, her condition would improve and she could resume classes. After a couple of weeks… it was clear the projected trajectory of recovery was too optimistic. The estimate of when she was supposed to get better was postponed. And postponed. And postponed.
The details on how the other victims of Sycorax were faring detransformed were frustratingly opaque. The only one Karmi can remember gaining insight to was Orso Knox, whose circumstances were not… entirely comparable to Karmi's. Her transformation was rapid, unwilling, and agonizing. The doctors theorized that the acute nature of it combined with the immense stress put on her body contributed to the manifestation of chronic conditions in its aftermath.
Aside from that, it is unexplained. They don't know when, how, or if Karmi can go back to normal.
Knowing it's because of the mutation isn't enough for Karmi. Why? What exactly changed? How can she understand it? How can she solve it? She's a scientist. She's a biotech prodigy. Though she specializes in virology, how bodies work is her forté. There is always a reason and a process for why biological organisms grow ill. Nothing is without an explanation—she just has to find it.
She would be able to. If anyone could figure it out, Karmi believes she would be the one. The knowledge that she should be able to fix this plays second fiddle to the pain that shoots through her limbs even now.
The Karmi who would be able to fix this is the same Karmi who would never drop out of college in sophomore year. The Karmi who is here lying awake in bed is not that Karmi, and may never be again.
Oh, she hates to wallow. She hates to lie here with her thoughts. Whenever she'd get in a spiral before, she would get up and do something. Sitting in negativity is unproductive and wasteful. The best ideas and breakthroughs come from doing, so when Karmi feels bad, she pushes herself. She uses it to succeed.
She doesn't know what to do with a mindset that's become incompatible with her body. She's tried to power through it. She's tried to immerse herself in what she's good at. She's tried to act the way someone with her achievements is supposed to. Triumphing over adversity is at the heart of scientific progress—failure is to be learned from and worked with until it is no longer failure. Challenges are meant to be overcome.
The tenets she's followed for as long and as best as she knows how aren't working.
What did she do wrong?
She was wrong to trust Li— Di. She was stupid and naïve and an idiot for trusting Di, for inventing the very thing that made herself like this, for letting everything happen the awful way it did. It's her fault for ending up this way.
If there's anything the pain is good for, it's grounding. Her knees spike and bring her back down to earth.
So she shouldn't have trusted Di. That's true. Thinking of it makes Karmi's stomach twist, but she turns on the way she thinks when she's working—the analytical, focused part of herself, which is dredged down by that overwhelming tiredness she's grown to shoulder but is still there.
She can't do anything about her partnership with Di now. As much as she regrets it, there's no point in getting caught up on it tonight. Karmi has done everything she knows how to do to get better since the incident. She isn't one not to try.
It has done nothing.
That's the worst part, isn't it? However much she wracks her brain, this is a problem that cannot be fixed. This is a dead end. That's it.
That can't just be it. It can't all just end—it's too anticlimactic. Karmi's life can't be altered so irrevocably so quickly. So quietly. A subtle yet persistent degradation.
It feels like something adjacent to her heart was wrenched close to all the way out but whoever did it didn't bother to sever it fully. It's left dangling, cold and raw and vulnerable. Karmi thinks of pathogens in petri dishes that destabilize with no warning.
She misses her lab. She misses her school. She misses her city. She misses Big Hero 6 and Captain Cutie. She will let herself admit that she misses Hiro, even.
She misses who she used to be. She misses being capable, intelligent, promising. She misses who she could have been in the future. She misses her potential.
Can you miss the possibility of a person? The conditions that have to be maintained to support a pathogenic specimen are so numerous, so specific, so strict. If one factor is even slightly off, it ruins the entire study. The specimen will waste away. Karmi wonders if it's the same with people.
For as much as she misses who she was, she misses who she was going to be more.
The banal ache claiming her legs is growing unbearable. With a hushed noise somewhere between a hiss and a huff, Karmi moves enough to reach the painkillers she'd left pessimistically on her nightstand. She didn't want to take them, but there comes a point where it feels like the choice is no longer hers but her body's.
She takes the pills dry. They scrape past her throat like she's swallowing a scream.
Karmi lies back down in bed and waits for sleep to come for her, leaden flesh sinking further into her mattress. She blinks tiredly at the ceiling again and can tell it will be a while yet.
Her bedroom is quiet.