I've been thinking about Megan painstakingly writing down the details of her powers in a battered notebook that she pilfered from a kitchen drawer.
It's been a few months since she escaped the facility.
She's doing her best to experiment and test what exactly her limit is. It isn't until she gasps awake after several hours on the cold concrete ground of an abandoned warehouse—her broken legs slowly snapping back in place— that she realizes she doesn't have a limit, and it sobers her up when she writes that detail down in blood. She's even taken to writing down tips on what to do after a death, how she stays cold for almost the whole day like she's a walking corpse, and how the sounds that come out of her mouth whenever she tries to speak sound more like a death rattle.
But still, she writes everything down. Every detail, every thought, every tip. And she brings it with her. Its edges are peeling, the pages are soft and wrinkled, but she keeps it under her mattress. A cold comfort. Like there's safety in knowing.
Some of the entries are written neatly, carefully dated and organized like she's trying to make sense of herself through sheer documentation alone. Others are messier, the handwriting shaky and uneven from freshly healed hands. There are entire sections dedicated to recovery times, notes scribbled into the margins about dizziness and numb fingers and how long it takes before food stops tasting like metal after certain deaths.
At some point the notebook stops reading like research and starts reading like instructions left behind for someone else inhabiting her body.
Warm your hands under the sink with warm running water before touching people.
Try not to look in mirrors immediately after waking up.
If breathing sounds wet after revival, stay sitting upright.
Don't panic when you can't see—Vision is the last sense to come back
And still she updates it. No matter how often she proves there is no limit, no ending waiting for her, she still reaches for it afterward like it can organize what she’s becoming.
Because after every death, she tries very carefully, deliberately to be human again. Almost because she stops seeing herself as one anymore but also because she hopes that if she acts like it well enough, long enough, she might still appear that way to someone else. Instead of them flinching away from her cold hands.
Maybe that's why her mother took a step back at the sight of her like she somehow knew that her baby is gone.
aw dude baby megpool (immediately post powers, pre katsvengers) having to catalog her own powers in some attempt to understand what's going on with her/keep herself 'safe'
the added element of her trying to keep track of what she can do not to freak other people out with her powers is so heartbreaking. and the mirrors one, that one really made my heart hurt. imagine sophia finding this notebook! she'd be so upset for meg
i can see her and lara bonding over this later on (maybe manon a little bit too). because everyone else would've had people monitoring them/their powers almost constantly. yoonchae knows a lot about how her powers work by the time she defects to hybe and learns more when they run tests on her there, and the same with dani. on the other hand, megan and lara both had the experience of having to diy their skillset a little more