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Laurel can’t take this anymore. This thing she contributed to, transformed that sobbing girl into with her own hands, it follows her through the halls like a shadow, taunting her from the darkness. 

When Olivia and Yunan escape the castle, fleeing to join the rebellion, she does not follow. She stays, because no one else can convince the Core to provide even a tiny amount of care for its host. It’s the least she can do, trying to care for the thing controlling Marcy’s body.

-

Laurel still remembers the day Olivia and Yunan had approached her and asked her to help them save Marcy, so many weeks ago, now. It’d been shortly after the helmet’s completion, and, looking at Marcy’s sullen, slumbering face as she floated in the healing chamber, her body riddled with stitches, she realized she couldn’t go through with it. She stored it away, still wired to the Core in preparation for its usage. It sat in the shadows of the operating room attached to the Core’s main chamber, where it would be used. Even knowing that Marcy would be anesthetized for the procedure, she couldn’t leave her to the fate that she would be subjecting her to otherwise.

One night, she left the laboratory and begged Lady Olivia—a newt she’d known though Marcy’s neuroscience research, a project that she’d in fact been referencing throughout her creation of the helmet—for help, all it took was a moment to tell her of the horrors the girl was being put through, even if Marcy was not aware of them, before Olivia promised to help. Two days later, the official date of the download put off until Marcy’s wounds healed, Olivia told her that she’d gained the assistance of General Yunan and that the two of them were gathering supplies to attempt a rescue. And so, that night, they ventured into the catacombs to that twisted secret laboratory at the heart of the castle.

It did not go well, and they were left with Marcy as a prisoner in her own mind, although Laurel discovered through careful observation that Marcy was most likely completely unconscious and unaware of her predicament. When they are finally able to save her, it would be as if she’s merely been asleep since that moment she passed out during the torture Andrias had forced them to subject her to. And Laurel fears for that, because Marcy will know none of the comfort she’s tried to provide her broken, puppeted body during her time trapped in her mind. Rather, the last thing she recalls will be the instant that Laurel had placed a helmet on her head that caused her truly unimaginable agony, something she never should’ve been awake for. Those last moments of terror will not fade quickly from her already-fragmented mind.

-

The other newts return weeks later, arriving when a pair of resistance soldiers infiltrate the castle.

“This is Anne, and her friend Sasha,” Olivia introduces them, Yunan at her side to keep a watchful eye for robots or Andrias. Laurel nods, acknowledging their presence but not introducing herself. She doesn’t want to. Not after what she did.

“Laurel,” Yunan says. “We’re here to save Marcy.”

Oh.

Anne and Sasha, the two humans, track down the Core first. Long ago, when Marcy had been a bright, strange child, new to this world and fascinated to explore and study it, she’d talked Laurel’s ear off for hours with stories of her friends, the two of them looking over long rolls of brain readings and data from Marcy’s study. Now, these two girls have been turned into hardened warriors by the battles of this world, and Marcy herself? Laurel can only hope she hasn’t lost her forever.

Flashes of blue come from another wing of the castle, traveling in their glow like strikes of lightning.

Yunan looks into the distance. “We’ve given them long enough. We should follow now.”

They race through the corridors, and come upon a wing that was already cracked and damaged months before this day. “Oh…” Olivia gasps. “Not… here…” 

But the bloodstains splattered on the tiles, stained thick as spilled paint, are real, as is the broken throne before the shattered crystal window. 

Anne and Sasha kneel over Marcy next to a freshly broken column, the dark-haired girl lying quite still. The Core’s helmet, complete with the long cord that threads through that device that Laurel herself had constructed and into Marcy’s skull, still rests upon her head, but the screen of the visor is cracked so as to expose the right half of her face.

“We haven’t seen Andrias—Yunan, your diversion tactic must’ve worked, but we need to get out of here. He’ll realize it’s a trick as soon as he notices we aren’t there,” Anne says, pulling Marcy into her lap. The unconscious girl’s face shifts imperceptibly at the movement.

Laurel shuffles her feet. “We need to get into somewhere where we can barricade any attackers out.”

Olivia looks to a nearby room. “There’s a closet off of Andrias’s antechamber that could work. There’s a secret exit from it, too, if we need to make an escape.”

“Let’s go,” Laurel says, already following Olivia. Anne and Sasha carry the increasingly lucid girl behind her, Yunan picking up the back. And behind them, the wires in the helmet drag through debris, disappearing far in the distant halls to the Core’s own form.

As they settle into the cramped space, Marcy shifts again. “Sashy? Anne?” she mumbles, just as she had back at that initial rescue. This time, however, they’re able to respond that, yes, it’s us, we’re here, Marbles.

And then the part she’s been dreading, as she watches Marcy catch a glimpse of Olivia and Yunan taking her into their arms with her one exposed eye. 

“N-no! P-please, please, no,” she whines, trying to writhe free.

“Shhh, Marcy, my child,” Olivia attempts to soothe her. “We aren’t going to hurt you; I promise we won’t let you hurt ever again.”  It’s no use; the last Marcy saw of them was them holding her against a chrome table as Andrias ordered Laurel to go through with the Core’s download with the assigned host awake and terrified. An experience like that doesn’t fade quickly; it may well have been the most pain the poor girl had ever experienced, even including the incident during the experimentation that she’d undergone, recorded in Triturus’s lab reports; even including the night she’d died, so slowly and painfully as the other newts’ story goes (as well as quite horrifically, based on the records and photos of her injuries kept in the lab).

So Marcy panics, held in their arms tightly once again, despite being in her best friends’ company as well as the amphibians’. Comfort is something all too foreign to this child, Laurel thinks, her heart aching.

“Yunan, the tea,” Anne reminds, and Yunan suddenly pulls a thermos from a hidden pocket in her armor. An herbal scent fills the closet when it’s opened, and Laurel sighs in relief. She won’t have to put Marcy through something like this with her wide awake and terrified once again.

“Marmar, drink this,” Sasha says, holding the thermos to Marcy’s lips and letting her sip. She drinks deeply, the Core having let her body become badly dehydrated despite Laurel’s insistence. Quickly, Marcy’s eyelids begin to droop, and she falls forward into the others’ arms, gradually settling in a position she must find comfortable, even in her surely aching condition. It won’t fully knock her out, but it will dull the pain and keep her calm and drowsy. Laurel, meanwhile, has snapped on rubber gloves and is already examining the state of the helmet. It’s not vital that she takes this off cleanly, so she splits it along an existing crack. Marcy is left facedown with her eyes buried in Anne’s arms. Her hair spills around the metal-lined hole in the back of her skull, where those wires feed. This is the hard part.

From the pouch at her belt, she removes a few sterile-wrapped scalpels, and brushes Marcy’s hair to the side with her fingers. The rectangular patch of exposed implant is about three inches long and two tall, the scalp immediately surrounding it bare of hair and scarred.

Marcy flinches a bit when the blade goes through the skin at the surface of her scalp, and Laurel, too, winces. This will be the worst part for her, she knows. Even with her scalp scarred and numb, it will sting. Once she gets deeper, to start removing the implanted device, she shouldn’t feel anything. Marcy whimpers and whimpers, tears soaking into the layers of Olivia’s dress, but she stays quiet while Yunan urgently whispers for her to avoid making noise.

Laurel pauses to mop the blood from Marcy’s hair and neck before she continues. She knows precisely how this device was implanted; she can remove it as well. She’s made her way through the scalp, past the edges of the hole already cut in her skull. The hard, shiny metal of the plate covering the implant is slick with a sheen of blood. She fiddles with that outer piece until it comes away from the part inside her head that connects to her brain, sliding down the cable that threads through it. Now, the edges of where the implant burrows into the tissue to connect to her neurons are more obvious. She lines up the scalpel with precision, hoping to cause as little damage as possible.

This is where she warns the other children to look away. 

Anne still winces when she hears Laurel’s knife sink into tissue. It’s an awful sound, and she notices Marcy’s face twisted in worry, even in her drowsiness. Her fingers clench and twist into Olivia’s skirt when Anne gently pushes her arms down to keep her from trying to touch the wound.

Just before Laurel finishes, Marcy begins spasming uncontrollably, muscles rapidly tensing and untensing. Though Olivia begins to panic, Laurel reassures her that seizures are common during brain surgery. She’ll be fine, hopefully, though more of these may be likely.

-

All in all, it takes a bit more than half an hour for Laurel to remove the device. As soon as it’s out, she immediately drops it, where it clunks to the ground with the wires still attached, covered in blood and bits of brain. But the shouts of Andrias, discovering Marcy gone, and the clanking, metallic movement of robots fill the halls already. Laurel can install a plate over the hole in Marcy’s skull later; right now they need to go. Yunan wraps Marcy’s head in bandages, Laurel pulls off her gloves, drops them on the floor of the closet as Olivia pulls a hidden lever to open the passageway, and then they run.

Once they’ve made it out, through a series of secret passageways that deposit them on a balcony, Yunan whistles for Marcy’s old sparrow. He shows up as reliably as ever, and surely with little time to spare, the whole party piles on.

They change her out of the Core’s armor on the back of the bird, just beginning their flight away from the castle. The girl faintly protests their actions, but her speech is still slurred and failing her.

Anne gasps when she sees Marcy’s scars, no longer covered by that hideous, bloody bodysuit, the raised lines clean and clinical on her torso. They’re in layers, the deep, darkened mark where Andrias’s sword had plunged through her chest being the first laid down. Then there are the long, straight, pink marks of Triturus’s experimentations, along with scars from the many other surgeries she’d undergone during her time in that laboratory. Along her back, around the exposed metal of an artificial spine; down her side, the skin stretched and rippling; on her arms and legs, such long incisions for such small ports surely hiding something implanted deeper below her skin. Most obvious, of course, are those expansive sets of scars that cover her front; Laurel knows these are from the two occasions on which Triturus had laid open her body just to see what a human looked like on the inside. Anne only sees this as evidence of Marcy’s pain, and shakes with sorrow. 

Laurel carefully checks her body for any other wounds, finding circular cuts from the tubes they’d inserted latching onto her, as well as a few gashes from the battle that she’ll have to stitch closed if they’re still leaking blood by the time they reach their destination.

-

Marcy seizes again while on that flight through the morning sky. None of the newts can stand to hold her still this time, so Anne and Sasha have to make sure she doesn’t fall off Joe’s saddle as they fly. Once it’s passed, she sweats and shivers in their arms as Joe Sparrow soars away into the clouds.

-

Staying deep under Wartwood in the caverns of the Resistance, Marcy recovers, but slowly. Laurel is forced to use a plate of frobot scrap metal to fashion a plate for her head after a week goes by without a better option. She installs it over the hole in Marcy’s skull one night, without any more sedation than another round of that calming tea. Her choked screams will never leave Laurel’s mind, not after causing those to be torn from the girl’s throat herself one two many times. Marcy stays sick in bed the next two weeks, head throbbing with pain and body aching, though Sasha, Anne, Laurel, Olivia, and Yunan all stay by her side. She has mostly regained her normal speech by the end of the first month after her rescue.

Some pains remain, even months later. The scars that cover Marcy’s body sometimes ache, deep and precise in their strokes, each mark of pain made in the name of science. Her spine, severed when Andrias had dealt that fatal blow, had been repaired with an artificial replacement that stretches from between her shoulder blades to the small of her back, the black metal starkly contrasting the heavy scarring from where the sword had burned deep wounds across her back, but moving remains difficult, so she mostly stays in her bed, set up in a cave in the depths of the catacombs beneath the Plantar Farmhouse. Her head remains achingly sore, off and on. None of them can tell if this is a temporary consequence of her frantically rushed brain surgeries or something more permanent that will remain a chronic pain throughout her life, thanks to the forceful way her mind had been violated.

Even harder to heal are the mental scars.

She flinches away from the newts for months. It’s weeks before there’s even a single exception to this. They were afraid of this; they have been ever since the disastrous attempt to save Marcy from any more suffering. That glance they’d shared the moment before they’d chosen to hold Marcy still for the download rather than let Andrias do it had said everything. But one night, she wakes from a nightmare to Laurel’s cool, partially-webbed hands holding her shoulders, and she doesn’t push her touch away, despite the horrible familiarity of that touch. And so Laurel cries into her pillow once she has returned to the bed she shares with Olivia and Yunan, just at the hope that she’ll trust them again, despite what they were forced to do to her. 

They’re still in hiding, the long, seemingly endless war having reached a lull in the Amphibian winter. Marcy, perhaps the key to winning when the combat resumes, is healing from her injuries, able to help the resistance plan its attacks even from her bed when she’s able, and now she’s recovering mentally, as well. Soon, she can leave her bed, walk slowly through the halls on makeshift crutches, regaining the strength she’d lost. 

-

Laurel can’t wait to launch an attack that will destroy the flying castle where the salamander who’d killed Marcy and left her to a fate worse than death leads the war, and watch that laboratory shatter to pieces along with it.