Selene rarely admits when something is wrong. She can handle dangerous experiments, hostile anomalies, and impossible situations without showing fear. But her childhood is the one thing that can still break through her carefully controlled exterior. The nightmares usually start the same way. She is young again. Not the confident Foundation researcher everyone knows, but the little girl who lived under the expectations of her parents and the brutal standards of the Chaos Insurgency.
In her dreams, she is back in the training rooms. Cold concrete floors, smell of chemicals, her father's booming voice correcting every mistake, and her mother's silence being worse than any punishment. Selene’s nightmares often revolve around failure. She dreams about dropping equipment, miscalculating a chemical mixture, or hesitating during a test because she was afraid.
In the dream, she is always waiting for someone to tell her she wasn’t good enough. Arias is usually the first person to notice. Selene doesn’t scream often. Instead, she wakes up suddenly, breathing heavily, her hands gripping the sheets like she’s trying to convince herself she is no longer there.
The first time Arias woke her from a nightmare, Selene reacted defensively. She immediately reached for a weapon, her instincts taking over before she realized where she was. The second she saw Arias standing there, her expression changed. Not anger. Not fear. Instead, Selene completely broke down.
