❂ = wiping blood off their face .
It’s as though her anger has been corked – like those insipid scientists had plunged their rapacious fingers into her very chest and strapped a muzzle on her heart.
She remembers when she had first made fire bloom out of thin air: she’d been furious, the throbbing ache of utter powerlessness making her buzz with simmering rage. Just a few weeks earlier (had it been days or months? time tended to blur under the hot sun and Sorka’s lash), her dearest friend, her first and only lover, had been sold away as though he were no more significant than a bag of flour. Just like that – with a stroke of a pen – Marius was gone.
Then, alone in the library in which she was not allowed, her anger had gloriously assembled itself, became hot – searing, suffocating – and then, it manifested.
Ah, if she concentrates, she can almost feel it. Yes, the boiling, burning in her chest, the--
“Ngh--”
A stab of pain and a blooming warmth as her tooth slices into the meat of her lip. Anger manifests in a decidedly different and utterly useless way, and proceeds to dribble onto her chin. She’s quick to blush and quick to raise a gloved hand to hide it, but quicker still is her companion’s. Calpernia freezes as GLaDOS presses her thumb to the split lip.
The ball of her finger is not skin, but some sort of synthetic material. It’s cold, and it soothes the fiery ache. Her face reddens.
Almost as swiftly as she’d placed the finger, the ‘android’ swipes it away, taking the bit of blood on Calpernia’s chin with her knuckles. The mage licks her lips, blushing, slightly baffled, as GLaDOS rubs the red between her fingers with a look of mild disgust.
“That was unsightly.”
