The exhaustion had finally caught up to her. Haddy would have been proud. She'd given in and gone to her actual room, which was so pristine and barely touched that there was dust on her pillow when she'd fallen onto it. She tossed and turned to try and find comfort on the softness of her bed, after getting used to sleeping on a lumpy couch, but it never quite came. Still, she fell asleep, because her body forced her down from sheer need.

And she remained there, even as the world shifted and broke, but only in their minds. She remained blissfully unaware of what was changing, and what she was losing.

But the one who woke inside of her mind, was perfectly aware of what was going on. She didn't need to be awake to have clarity. She didn't need sleep to function at maximum capacity. She was physically trapped in a body that kept her under, but mentally Riley had never felt more awake in her life.

And she could see, inside of her cage, everything that she was being forced to remember. A new life. Another life. She lived inside of her head now, this human, this pitiful and frail twig, squandering her body away as she toiled only on the intellectual front. As if there was no sense in honing every part of you, mind and body. As if mastering one was enough reason to neglect the other.

This insignificant worm.

She clawed her way back up from the lucid dreaming that kept her captive, trying to fight off the physical response to exhaustion that her body had given into. She screamed, but only in her own mind. She tossed and turned, but her eyes refused to open.

She was trapped. She was trapped because this host body of hers was too tired.

Yet, this was nothing against the comparison of being trapped in stone, never to breathe again. Never to feel. Never to kill.

This cage was nothing.

She did not give up. She clawed, she screamed, she tore her way past the needs of her own body and pushed past it until an agonizing scream finally escaped her underused throat, and her eyes pulsed open. She was blind, for a moment. The world flashed white, and then.

Deus.

She was a Hunter.

No. She was a killer.

Riley sat up in her bed, wiped the sweat off her disgustingly human brow, and gripped the bed with both hands as she let the pieces fall into place. Another life, trying to worm its way into her permanent conscious. Not this time. Not this time.

She rocked, back and forth, chanting the words to herself in a mixture of desperation and determination.

Not this time.

Eventually, when she got up and walked out of the room, she left her door wide open, and her nails raked against the wall. She could feel them breaking, weak and useless as they were. She let them break, and bleed, one by one. She ignored the pain, refusing to believe in the feel of it.

They were not her nails to feel, after all.