girl

In her mind she can only play out the same scene again and again: someone comes up to her in a bar, offers to drink something red and sugary. She's partying after saving the world for yet another time, the guy seemed cute... Now she can't remember his face, why? Then, in a haze, kissing, dancing, dancing naked, in a crowd that parts around her. She followed him to his car, there he offered another drink – golden. Gleaming, swirling... Darkness. She woke up strapped to a metal chair in a straitjacket. The loss of powers she noticed immediately: no more sounds raping her ears, no more smells from miles away she had to filter every second. Couldn't see through the tiled walls of the small room she was kept in, pipes and valves everywhere – imprisoned in a random basement? The oppressive surrounding green, and two thin Kevlar straps, across her thighs and stomach, so thin but she can't tear them, can't break the restraints, that must be, must be kryptonite. That means Lex, or Metallo, but the captor comes to feed her wearing a hood, face covered. Not their style to be inconspicuous. Brainiac – even less likely. Reactron? Destroyed, and she has no other enemies capable of... The tiles aren't kryptonite, there's no vertigo or nausea, only the color of her fear; she just feels weak, so very weak. Ordinary person weak, like years ago on Krypton while she still had a normal life – was a normal girl, not "Super". Wasn't this her dream once. Clark would’ve broken free, but she couldn't. The guy doesn't free her hands, doesn't let her get up. Instead he silently feeds her, puts a bedpan under the hole in the seat of her chair, and lowers her pants. Biology won over humiliation on the first day; she let it go, weeping quietly. Before no other foe degraded her so. But the worst – so far – came later. No way to tell how many days passed, but no one came to her rescue. Enabling him to proceed. Instead of the bland, tasteless TV dinner on the tray there were surgical tools and syringes with anesthetic. She shouted, of course, from terror, but her convulsions were useless; the needles found her legs, and there was no pain. Fearlessly punching Darkseid last month, with trembling lips, she's forced to watch the scalpel slice, the saw cut, meat and bones detach an inch below her kneecaps. He cauterizes the stumps, then bandages, the smell of burning flesh overwhelms her newly human senses. And after the continued silence, his first word is "Hello." It's surreal, she looks down, and there's nothing: her cute feet, graceful ankles, muscular calves just not there anymore. Only the white of the gauze of the dressing. He changes it regularly, at last adding a word or two, and these mundane "conversations" feel so refreshing, she even awaits them. Broken, deformed, somehow she's afraid of facing her former friends and allies now. They can't learn about her loss of autonomy, they mustn't see her like this. There's no tech anywhere, on Earth or in space, that could heal, regenerate, otherwise wouldn't Aquaman prefer to swim using both hands? And she doesn't have Babs's grit; her bubbly personality – former personality – wouldn't work in a wheelchair. And without powers. How did it turn out this way, she doesn't even want to be saved, it's just numbness alternating with panic.