CHAPTER 35: THE DARKNESS WITHIN
Claire opened the door before I finished knocking.
"You look like death," she said.
"Feel worse." My voice came out rough, scraped raw by the night's events and the sixteen hours of recovery that followed. The crash had been brutal—I'd barely made it to my apartment before collapsing, and even now my limbs felt like they were made of wet sand.
She stepped aside to let me in. The apartment smelled like coffee and something cooking—eggs, maybe. Normal smells. Human smells. I needed those more than I could say.
"What happened?"
I sat on her couch and told her everything.
The warehouse. The twelve guards. The surge of power unlike anything I'd felt before. The way my thoughts had thinned, simplified, reduced to nothing but violence and targets. The man I'd almost strangled to death even after he'd surrendered.
My voice broke somewhere in the middle. I kept going anyway.
When I finished, Claire was quiet for a long time. She'd sat down across from me, hands folded in her lap, expression carefully neutral in that way medical professionals learned to master.
"You stopped," she said finally.
"Barely."
"But you stopped." She leaned forward. "Roy, do you understand how significant that is? Your power was pushing you toward killing, and you pulled yourself back. Most people—"
"Most people don't have powers that turn them into monsters."
"That's not what I'm saying." Her hand found mine, squeezed. "I'm saying you're not lost. Not yet. The fact that you fought it, that you're here telling me about it, that you're scared—those are all signs that you're still in there."
I stared at our joined hands. Her skin was warm against mine.
"What if I can't stop next time?"
"Then we figure out how to make sure you can." She stood, headed toward the kitchen. "But first, you eat. When was the last time you had real food?"
I couldn't remember. Before the warehouse, probably. Everything since then had been recovery and fear.
Claire made breakfast. Eggs scrambled with cheese, toast with butter, coffee strong enough to strip paint. I watched her move through her kitchen with practiced efficiency—pulling dishes from cabinets, flipping eggs with a spatula, pouring coffee without measuring. Normal. Safe. Human.
I needed more of this. More moments that reminded me what I was fighting for.
"The enhancement affects your mind," Claire said, setting a plate in front of me. "Not just your body. That's what we're dealing with."
"You've thought about this."
"I've had patients with traumatic brain injuries. Soldiers who came back from war zones. The way you described it—the narrowing of focus, the loss of higher thinking—it sounds like what happens when the brain is flooded with stress hormones." She sat across from me. "Except in your case, it's not hormones. It's whatever your power does to you."
"So I'm drugging myself. Every time I fight."
"In a sense." She picked up her own coffee. "The power is designed for combat. For survival. It doesn't care about mercy or restraint—those are higher functions, and they get suppressed when you need to become a more efficient weapon."
I forced myself to eat. The eggs tasted like nothing, but I knew I needed the fuel.
"How do I control it?"
"You train." Claire's voice was firm. "Mental discipline. Focus techniques. Ways to maintain your sense of self even when everything is pushing you toward violence." A pause. "And you follow protocols."
"Protocols?"
"Rules. Hard limits." She counted on her fingers. "Never fight groups above ten without backup. Never fight alone when you can avoid it. If you feel the edge coming—the narrowing, the simplification—disengage immediately. No exceptions."
"And if disengaging isn't possible?"
"Then you pray the people you're fighting deserve what's coming. Because in that state, you might not be able to stop yourself."
We sat in silence while I processed. The protocols made sense—mechanical guardrails against a mechanical problem. But they felt like Band-Aids on a wound that needed surgery.
"Matt's training," I said slowly. "It needs to change focus."
"Physical combat is only part of it. You need to learn to stay calm when everything is going wrong. To maintain awareness even when your body is pushing for violence." Claire met my eyes. "Ask him to teach you meditation. Mental control. The stuff that Stick taught him."
"You know about Stick?"
"I know Matt had a teacher. Someone who shaped how he fights." She shrugged. "He mentioned it once. When he was half-dead and not watching what he said."
I finished the eggs. Drank the coffee. Let the warmth of it settle into my bones.
"Thank you," I said. "For not running away from this."
"You're not getting rid of me that easily." Something softened in Claire's expression. "We're partners in this, Roy. Your weird problems are my weird problems now. That's how it works."
I stood to leave, feeling marginally more human than when I'd arrived. The darkness inside me was real, but I wasn't facing it alone. That had to count for something.
"Same rules as before," Claire said as I reached the door. "Call me if anything changes. If you feel yourself slipping."
"I will."
"And Roy?" She waited until I turned back. "You stopped. Remember that. When the darkness tried to take over, you stopped."
I nodded and stepped out into the winter light.
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