Camilla

05 OCT 34AE

10 days before Operation Cliffhanger

The days left before their plan was to go into effect were almost in the single digits, and Camilla was running out of time. She was so desperate, if fact, that she even reluctantly agreed to receive Hitomi's "help," if it could even be called that. Hitomi's assistance was closer to the merciless training sessions at the Academy, and even though Camilla knew it would only make her more frustrated, she had to try.

"This looks ridiculous," Camilla bitterly grumbled after her hundredth failed attempt to try and pop an inflated latex glove Bev had swiped for them from the infirmary. She threw the disfigured balloon to the side, only to get even more frustrated when the glove merely floated to the ground.

"You can go back to the ice cubes, if you prefer," Hitomi suggested in Japanese as she leaned against one of the walls to watch. "But we both know that's not going to work."

"You're not working," Camilla snapped back in English, lacking a better argument and the brainpower to respond in her non-native language.

Hitomi shrugged, then paused to think.

"Maybe I can't help you," she pondered aloud. "AJ came to help you out too, didn't she? What did she say?"

Hitomi's sudden change in topic caught Camilla off-guard, and she immediately averted her eyes from her cousin, looking to the pathetic balloon glove instead.

"She showed me some stuff," Camilla casually replied.

"You need to be a little more specific than that," Hitomi said unsympathetically.

"They were just... memories, okay?" Camilla insisted.

Hitomi simply stared at her, unimpressed.

"They were... memories I'd rather not remember," Camilla eventually admitted. But when Hitomi's expression didn't change, Camilla sighed. "There were just flashes. The attack on the Academy, the war, City Hall exploding. There was... Elsie screaming at one point, and... some stuff from Farallon."

Camilla still hadn't told her cousin the specifics of what happened at Farallon, and she worried Hitomi would take the opportunity to press Camilla for answers. Thankfully, Hitomi didn't begin interrogating Camilla as she had worried, and instead started thinking quietly to herself.

"Maybe you're scared," Hitomi suggested. "You said Fester had conditioned you to be scared of your abilities, right? And after what that Stain guy did to you, I wouldn't be surprised if you don't want to use your abilities again."

Camilla had heard Hitomi's nicknames for the two villainous doctors enough to not even bat an eye at them anymore.

"Let's say I am scared—but I'm not saying I am," Camilla proposed. "Wouldn't it make more sense for my abilities to stick around? Without them, I'm practically defenseless."

"But having abilities put you in those situations in the first place," Hitomi explained. "Maybe your subconscious just wants you to pretend to be normal so you can't put yourself in those situations anymore."

Hitomi's explanation made it sound simple, but thinking about it still made Camilla's head hurt.

"So... you're saying my subconscious doesn't want me to fight?" Camilla asked. "That's ridiculous. Even without my abilities, I'm still going to go with the rest of you. I just won't be able to protect myself anymore."

Hitomi shrugged. "Consider it a survival instinct. If you hold your breath for too long, your brain will eventually force you to pass out so it can make you breath. It won't care if you're underwater and you're just trying not to drown."

"Guess I'll just drown then," Camilla muttered bitterly.

"Or train yourself to breathe underwater," Hitomi added. "But I think that's where this metaphor ends. Basically, you need to find a way to get through your fears. You need a good enough motivator."

"I thought I was already pretty motivated with the idea of revenge, but whatever," Camilla said.

"Then you need something else," Hitomi said. "How about the time when you used your abilities against the Alliance when they first showed up? Try to think of that."

Camilla remembered being more angry than anything else. She remembered feeling all of her bottled-up rage all at once, furious after years of being someone else's pawn, only to have her experiences sugar-coated by Senior's half-hearted apologies. She picked up the balloon again and let the memories of her emotions fill her, then tried to pour that energy into the balloon.

But nothing happened.

So Camilla thought back even further. She remembered her time in Farallon, and how she managed to overcome her fear and Hester's conditioning on a few occasions. She added the memories of her stubborn resilience to her anger, and continued to focus on the balloon.

Still, nothing happened.

Camilla cursed, then ripped the glove apart the old-fashioned way. The sharp pop it made was only slightly rewarding, and it was far from enough to make Camilla feel any less frustrated. If it was anyone else in her shoes, they would've been back to their normal selves in no time at all. Even Ian was already tossing around little lightning bolts as if he hadn't been brainwashed for almost ten years. So why was Camilla so incompetent?

"Forget it," Camilla ranted. "I'll just do this shit without my abilities and hope I don't get killed in the process."

"Hang on a bit," Hitomi said, her voice much too calm for Camilla to put up with.

"For what?" Camilla argued. "For you to think of another trick that—spoiler alert!—definitely won't work? Can't you see it's no use already? My abilities are done for, they're not coming back, and we all just need to move on already."

"Maybe it's not because of your fear," Hitomi said, ignoring Camilla's tirade.

"How can it not be?" Camilla exclaimed. "Okay yeah, I admit it! I am scared! I'm terrified! I never wanted to see that island again, if I could help it, but I was the very one that suggested we go back! Every time I think of using my abilities, I expect that stupid collar to just fucking zap me! And all of the shit I've been through recently is, yeah, all because of my goddamn abilities, so I'd say your diagnosis was pretty spot on, Doctor Andou. Go give yourself a big round of applause."

"I'm not saying that you're not afraid," Hitomi continued as if Camilla hadn't said a damn thing. "I'm saying that maybe your fear isn't the emotion that's stopping you."

For a few seconds, Camilla could only stare at Hitomi in silence as she tried to comprehend her cousin's words.

"Wait, what?" Camilla finally managed. "Then what else could it be?"

"Well, when was the last time your abilities didn't work?" Hitomi asked.

Camilla scoffed. "You mean yesterday? Or the day before that?"

Hitomi gave Camilla a stern look. "I'm serious, Mitaka."

Camilla rolled her eyes with a long sigh. "I don't know, never? Maybe when I first started at the Academy, but that's it."

"Exactly," Hitomi said. "Maybe you're the same as you were back then."

"So you're saying I've regressed back to a teenager?" Camilla huffed irately. "Terrific. Tell me how you really feel."

At Hitomi's pointed look that followed, Camilla guiltily decided she would try to reign in her attitude a little, mainly to prove that she didn't share the personality of a moody teen.

"No," Hitomi said briskly. "I'm just saying that your feelings might be the same now as they were back then."

"And what exactly are my feelings, oh wise one?" Camilla replied before she could stop herself. Okay, maybe her sarcastic defense mechanism was more ingrained in her than she thought.

"Don't you remember?" Hitomi asked, unamused. "All those times you emailed me from the Academy, worried that maybe you weren't supposed to be there after all?" When Camilla didn't answer her—or rather, refused to answer her—Hitomi continued. "You think you're not good enough. You think you're not strong enough. You feel like a failure."

The silence that followed was deafening, but there was nothing Camilla could say to fill it. As much as she wanted to refute Hitomi's words, Camilla couldn't lie. And that's exactly what she would be doing if she insisted Hitomi was wrong.

In the memories AJ uncovered, Camilla had failed to save her classmates when they fought to protect her. At the Games, she may have saved Elsie from the fall, but in the end it was Elsie who sacrificed herself to protect Camilla. During the war, Camilla found herself constantly surrounded by bodies from both sides, markers of the people that she couldn't save. While she partially redeemed herself at City Hall, there were still a handful of civilians that she had gotten to too late. Then in Farallon, Camilla couldn't stop herself from using her abilities to steal the lives of innocent people, and in the end, she couldn't even save herself.

"Sure," Hitomi continued as Camilla was still pondering her earlier revelation. "Maybe you are afraid. But not of Hester, or your abilities, or what you went through. You're afraid of failure. You always have been. And unless you do something about it, right here, right now, you always will be."

As much as Camilla hated to admit it, Hitomi was right. While she couldn't deny being afraid of Hester and what she was capable of, along with everything else that happened at Farallon, that fear paled in comparison to how she felt knowing that she would always inevitably fail.

She feared having her abilities, but she was more scared about having them and still being powerless. She feared using her abilities to help people, but then hurting them—murdering them—instead. She feared being unbelievably powerful, but also being unable to control her own strength.

She feared having the mere potential for success, but only managing to fail instead.

"So what now?" Camilla finally managed to ask, unable to talk much louder than a whisper. "Do I need to find another bus of high school students that's falling off a bridge so I can activate my abilities to save it?"

Hitomi shrugged. "How you deal with it is up to you; I don't think anyone here can help you anymore. But, for your sake, try to at least avoid anything illegal."

Camilla sighed gruffly at Hitomi's non-solution before focusing on what she said. She had to overcome her fear of failure, her archnemesis for as long as she could remember.

Immediately, Camilla didn't think it was possible. As simple as her cousin made it sound, Camilla couldn't get rid of her learned emotion so easily, not when it was essentially ingrained into her soul. And she obviously hadn't been able to completely overcome it years ago, when her abilities first appeared on that fateful day of her high school field trip.

But on that day, even though she hadn't managed to win the war against her feelings, she had won the battle, and that had been enough. Maybe that's all she had to do this time: if she could win this one battle, it would at least be a step in the right direction. She didn't have to stop herself from worrying over her failures in one day, but maybe she could at least accept them.

She may have failed in the past, and she would probably keep failing in the future. But that didn't mean she should stop trying for success. She wanted to win this battle, and she owed it to herself to at least try.

So Camilla looked at both of her palms and tried to pour her energy into the air. Nothing happened; she would simply try again.

Camilla closed her eyes and tried to imagine their raid on Farallon if she had her abilities. Of course, her mind immediately jumped to all the things that could go wrong. But once she passed that, Camilla saw nothing but success.

She saw Hester and those behind her locked up for their crimes, and their victims getting the justice they deserve. She saw the Org restructured, where young people like Nakia and Finn weren't forced to risk their lives, and peacekeepers like Mack didn't have to watch people suffer. She saw a future where she and Elsie were able to live in peace without having to worry what dangers they would face the next day.

Camilla wanted that future. And even if it was unattainable, even if she would only end up failing miserably, she knew she at least wanted to try.

Suddenly, a surge of energy burst out of her in all directions, rapidly filling the room, then seeping through and past the walls. It quickly spread into the hallway outside, then each of the adjacent rooms, then all of the rooms past those. In seconds, Camilla could feel every inch of the complicated network of tunnels in the mountain, each of them now engulfed with a blanket of warmth from her energy. While Camilla couldn't bring herself to sense anything past the solids, liquids, and gases that made up the hideout, she was content with what she had accomplished. Because, for the first time in ages, she was proud of herself.

Camilla snapped her eyes open, and she couldn't hold back the tears that brimmed her eyes as she looked at Hitomi, her grin uncontrollably wide.

"I did it!" Camilla exclaimed. She knew she was being much too giddy for accomplishing something so small, but she was surprised to realize that she didn't care. It may have been nothing, but it was a big deal to her.

And judging by Hitomi's proud smile, she thought the same.

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